The art of and / both
When it comes to complex and fast-paced world we live in (at work, too), things rarely work as true dichotomies – YMMV, but that has been both my first hand experience and second-hand observation. Two things can be true at the same time, and in fact sometimes you want o deliberately make them so.
The other day I wrote something that gist is this:
When we get new direction to prioritize one thing over the other (e.g., to focus now on short-term value, whatever it takes), this isn’t an excuse for not critical thinking and assess all the implications strategically.
And more importantly:
If we can figure out path forward that ensures short-term value WHILE not jeopardizing long-term sustainability, that’s absolutely what we should go for!
That’s why I love Andrew Grove’s (legendary CEO of Intel at its dominant period) story, as kind of ode to middle-managers, who step-by-step, only acting on their own agency, made it easier for Intel to pull out of the memory business when finally leadership got to grips with that being the new direction. A complacent set of middle-managers, should they be there, would have waited for the sort of “white smoke” to only then act upon – in other words, taking it as a sort of dichotomy (we either have a new strategy or we continue business as usual).
There will always be good enough excuses to not change something! And with that, help perpetuating the status quo, the realm of mediocrity (at best).
I can tell you from my experience, begrudgingly admitting had fallen into that pattern of “waiting and seeing” for far too long. I am happy to report I have learned from my mistakes, and that even as I write this I am going through a situation at work where we (myself and small group of “good rebels”) are pushing to do the right thing because we figured out a path for safeguarding the expected business value while taking the opportunity to (finally) pivot towards an envisioned new approach towards our data products design and scalability.
It’s interesting to observe that the risk of perpetuating the status quo might be coming fron a push for decision which is purely, and arguably shortsightedly, fact-based and data-driven. But surely it’s not a fair comparison to judge what took many yeards to build and make it work in a given context to be all of sudden replace by something new.
But that’s precisely that very art of product management, to take controlled risks to make that leap often out of principle (not necessarily the hard data we currently have which obviously tend to privilege the thing that’s already there, working).
For the issue at hand, we eventually made our choice clear. We could just blindly follow the current short-term and build the new use case in an existing, highly specialized solution. However, our product strategy is to develop products designed for global scalability with a better architecture, not limited by high specialization.
It turns out we found a way to take a well-sliced use case with clear business value associated to AND we figure out we could take the leap to do it in the realm of the new product direction and architecture. It actually gets better – and with not so much more effort we can have a “knock-on effect” that would allow us to fully replace the existing highly specialized solution.
Again, the cold facts, in the context of the short-term value focus, might actually corroborate the option to go with the existing solution… But what the heck would you not consider the better alternative if short-term value is assured AND we can build a kind of blueprint for the set future direction?!
Anyways, enough with my own gritty problems… Because the important thing here is for you to ask often yourself this fundamental question:
To what extent am I operating too much in a way that tends to privilege the status quo and the realm of mediocrity, instead of taking controlled risks, out of principle, to do the right thing… And that often will mean to figure out a path for AND / BOTH.
There are so many concrete cases we can think of where we kind of know this intuitively. Just to name a few:
A software engineering team that never takes the leap to improve its own processes is doomed to be caught in a downward spiral of only doing new things until doing anything may become very hard.
A sales team that only bothers about cutting new deals and not how to maintain existing clients, may have a good short-term run of revenue growth, but that is most likely not sustainable and can easily derail.
A manufacturing plant that never bothers about preventively maintaining its machines will too often be caught by surprise of having to stop production maybe until that might too much the norm (as opposed to the exceptional state).
The real key here is being thoughtful, intentional and strategic about how to go about those choices and the balancing art of taking controlled risks. It’s hard but surely worth the trouble.
By Rodrigo Sperb, feel free to connect, I'm happy to engage and interact. I’m passionate about leading to achieve better outcomes with better ways of working. How can I help you?