To be confident about the success of a big project, throw out all the plans.
A priori planning followed by fast delivery is the folly of 92% of big projects.
It sounds counterintuitive, even reckless: abandon your carefully crafted plans to ensure success, but most successful big projects take an approach that is radically different from what you might expect.
Plans are merely security blankets.
Everyone likes a good plan. A plan is like a security blanket that we can wrap ourselves in and forget about reality.
When we make a plan for a project, the project is the simplest and most straightforward it will ever be. That is the appeal of planning.
The problem is that simplicity does not match reality.
The more complex and ambitious a project is, the more useless a priori plans become.
The 8% of big projects that are on time and under budget do not begin with a well-worked-out plan; they begin with a phase of adaptive development.
A great illustration of adaptive development.
On October 11th, 1975, the first episode of NBC’s Saturday Night, later to become Saturday Night Live, was broadcast, but it almost wasn’t.
At 10 p.m. that night, it was absolute chaos.
In the last hour before the show went live, the producer Lorne Michaels was not even able to say what the show was about.
Key stars like John Belushi had not signed their contracts; many scripts were not finished, there were too many skits, too many acts, there was a fire on stage, a fight, and the brick floor of the stage was still being laid.
Everything was on the line.
The show was greenlit only as part of a negotiating tactic with late-night icon, Johnny Carson. The NBC executives were there that night. They had the final say as to whether the show would go on.
Michaels runs around at first confidently, trying to solve all the problems. It seems to work, but the problems keep piling up.
Then frustration sets in; he nearly gives up. He assumes he is about to be fired.
Released from the controlling instinct to solve every problem, he begins to leave it up to the comedians to do what they want to do. He even hires a random joke writer from a bar next door.
The comedians respond.
Trained in improv, they take the nearly unbearable pressure and transform it into something magical.
In the film Saturday Night, which has been hailed as an accurate depiction of that night, you see a palpable rise in the energy in the group when the problems mount and Michaels is about to give up.
The creativity of the comedians explodes. They adapt sketches and there is even spontaneous operatic singing by Garrett Morris.
Even so, a top NBC executive tells Michaels that he is cancelling it.
Michaels pleads with him.
“You don’t even know what the show is? Tell me what it is.”
You can almost see Michaels’ thoughts coalesce.
He answers that it’s everything you expect when you come to New York: great music, comedy, and famous people.
They demonstrate a few of the sketches and wait for the executive’s response.
At the very last minute, he approves. Comedic history is made.
We all know that SNL has since defined the entire culture of humour in the US for five decades.
It’s not about what you plan. It’s about what you learn.
Putting a show like that together is a big project, and the SNL story exemplifies perhaps the most counterintuitive aspect of big projects – they thrive when an adaptive, iterative and improvisational approach is used.
Michaels’ transformation was a shift from traditional planning to an improvisational innovation mindset, from waterfall planning to agile project management.
It is not that meticulous planning does not work for big projects, it does, just not as well.
It can be easily argued that if they had stuck to the original plan mapped out by Michaels, SNL was likely to fail.
The reality is that you can’t anticipate all the challenges you will face in a complex and ambitious project. Trying to plan your way out of failure is almost a guarantee that you will fail.
What should you do instead?
Make haste slowly.
Start with a deliberate development phase.
This is what is described in How Big Things Get Done as a slow start and fast finish.
It is only big projects that follow the pattern of start slowly and end fast that are on time and under budget. This is what the authors call making haste slowly.
Why does “start slow, finish fast” work? Aren’t we supposed to move fast and break things?
From linear to exponential rates of achievement.
What I have seen in the big projects that I have helped design, develop and deliver is that in every project there is a linear phase and an exponential phase.
The linear phase is where progress is slow. I used to think it was just about getting people engaged; now I realise there is more to it than that.
In the linear phase of a big project, you are building relationships, processes, and assets. I like to think about all of these elements as systems that are going to be used repeatedly to speed up achievement.
For example, data from a clinical study. You could choose to move fast and not structure the data in a standard format, forgo checking the quality of the data and store it in Excel spreadsheets. Such a dataset could still be considered a system, but it would be a low-quality and highly inefficient system.
Each time someone wanted to analyse data, they would have to request access, clean up data quality issues and transform the data to make it comparable to other datasets. By doing all the work to structure the system ahead of time, what would otherwise take months each time someone re-uses the data is done in minutes.
When you have those systems in place, you can then deploy them to achieve an unprecedented pace.
In How Big Things Get Done, the authors describe how the rate of completing a floor of the Empire State Building exponentially increased as the system of building a floor was adapted each time and codified as a repeatable process. This is different from having an a priori plan and sticking to it.
A trust-based collaboration is a system.
A collaboration where people are brought together with a diverse range of expertise and between whom trust relationships have been established is a system for solving problems rapidly. The trick is to recognise it as a system and to make use of it in that way.
The default is to only bring finished or polished pieces of work to the group and to hide problems.
When there is a well-established trusting relationship across a diverse group, the interaction becomes more of a dialogue where the presentation of a problem is a signal for everyone to think together and build upon each other’s ideas.
In not taking the time to build up systems in the early phases of a project, you pass over the opportunity to achieve an exponential pace later on.
So, in reality, the start of any big project should include time to adapt and to build systems. Trying to shift immediately towards delivery is fraught with risk.
Early or fast delivery should be limited to the first iterations of systems you are developing to be deployed in the exponential phase of the project.
Moving away from micromanagement
The other thing the SNL story nicely illustrates is the importance of collaboration that is organised in such a way that those involved have a structure but also have a degree of autonomy. The comedians in the final hours before the first broadcast were given a licence to create, and that made a difference.
If micro-management is a poor strategy within a department, it is a disaster in big projects where the work is either inter-departmental or inter-organisational.
If you are working on your own, maybe you are best off having a detailed pre-made plan.
But if you do work on your own, limit your ambition. What is possible will be much less.
The same holds for the situation where you are working in collaboration but under the micromanagement of one person.
Here is where it gets tricky. You don’t want to micromanage, but you do need to give form to what you are doing, and that often comes in the shape of a proposal for what you plan to do.
It is not micromanaging if you propose a course of action but then open it up to a wider group for their feedback.
The key then is to listen to what they say. You don’t have to do what they say, but you do have to listen.
You can see Michaels’ evolution along this path in the two hours before the show goes live.
The evolution of his approach probably took longer and maybe it was something he learned over the course of his career that culminated in the excellence that is Saturday Night Live.
Detailed timelines make me cringe.
People who have worked with me know that I cringe when someone really presses for detailed timelines, milestones, and deliverables.
I always thought it was because I did not like making those timelines and then breaking them later.
I now think it is a deeper sense that detailed plans and strict milestones are not how big projects work. Detailed plans and strict milestones risk that a big project will not reach its maximum potential.
This is, of course, easier for me to think about. I have been involved in more than 60 big, complex projects. So, I am confident that with the right processes in place, you can get rid of the security blanket of a detailed plan.
For example, the best scientists are those who build up a set of techniques, systems, and a network of collaborators and then use the techniques and network to rapidly pursue unexpected findings. They adapt by deploying systems and their techniques in an iterative manner.
The tragedy is when those unexpected findings are not pursued in the name of sticking with an a priori plan or a simplistic plan.
Systems enable us to respond to the unexpected.
Systems empower us to work together to achieve the unexpected.
Delivering big projects
Here are six strategies for delivering big projects. Together they form a big project mindset.
1. Throw out the plans, at least mentally. In other words, seek and expect to adapt the plans as you progress.
2. Deliberately include a developmental phase of the project.
3. Provide a vision or strategy as guard rails and give those working on the project some autonomy to be creative in solving the problems that arise.
4. Invest time and energy in building up systems. Invest in relationships by helping each other solve problems. Build everything so that it is reusable during and after the project.
5. Actively seek new opportunities to deploy your systems. For example, offer your dataset to help validate others’ findings. Share your SOPs.
6. Above all else, don’t panic and wrap yourself in the security blanket of a Gantt chart. You will end up limiting what is possible.
Adaptation is our strength.
As humans, we are good at adapting.
By setting up a collection of aligned systems, you can be confident that your big project will be an adaptation machine and, thereby, achieve much more than you expect.
This is true for large-scale collaborations and personal big projects. Big projects are more meaningful, less risky and now what we need to focus on as humans.
Let computers handle the more rigid small projects.
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Great analogy between the beginning of Saturday Night Live and how their ability to improvise and adapt under pressure, is similar to the way scientists must improvise from their original plans to find success on big projects. On all big projects, you don't know what you don't know until you start. When you have an adaptive development phase, you can collaborate and pivot where and when needed to move the project on path to success.
Thanks Michael. I have always thought that producing a film would be similar to a big medical research project. The experience of watching Saturday Night confirmed it for me.