The Dirty Little Secret of Project Management

Why don't more project managers sound an alarm when they're going to blow past their deadlines? Because most of them have no earthly idea when they'll finish the job. They don't even think it's possible to know. Too many variables. Too much that's out of their control.

That's the dirty little secret of project management. As the lead developer on one big software project put it: "Everybody knows the schedule is a joke, and we pay no attention to it. It will be done when it's done."

It's funny, though. Big, successful companies that manage huge projects like highways and dams and office parks have to deal with many more variables than a software development team. Yet they usually know how far along they are at any given time, and they keep their customers in the loop. That's how they get to be big, successful companies.

Granted, they have fancy project management software to help them stay on top of the schedule. But a good project management system — one that can tell you exactly where you are in the project, when it's likely to be done, and by how much you will overshoot or undershoot your budget — doesn't need expensive software. At Setpoint, which builds roller coasters and factory automation systems, we used to manage multimillion-dollar projects with a whiteboard and a calculator.

The fact is, your system can be very simple as long as it helps you do the following:

Track key variables. Keep a close eye not just on milestones but also on factors that have an impact on profitability. The biggest variable to watch? Labor hours compared with budget, which gives you a pretty good idea of your percent complete at any given time. You'll also want to track materials costs, change orders, and your subcontractors' progress. Trouble in any of those areas can throw a project out of whack quickly, so it's important to track them on a weekly basis.

Keep your team informed. We recommend regular weekly meetings, with the key numbers posted on a whiteboard or computer desktops so that everybody can see them. With the numbers up there, potential trouble spots surface quickly. A few years ago, we learned that one of our project managers started surreptitiously building extra time into the schedule. If we had let that continue, it would have messed up our profit projections for his projects. Team members brought the issue to our attention after the first weekly meeting — they could see that the numbers on the board didn't square with the agreed-upon timetable.

Update your stakeholders and customers. All customers want their jobs finished on time and on budget — or preferably faster and cheaper. But if they can't have that, and sometimes they can't, what they really want is to be kept informed along the way. (Ditto for senior managers — they don't like surprises, either.) Share bad news as well as good so they're never outraged by enormous last-minute changes.

Here's an example: Setpoint was building a small coaster for a major amusement park company. This was just one piece of a major park upgrade with a very aggressive schedule and dozens of contractors in the mix. As we got deep into our project, we ran into several issues — big (and unanticipated) coordination snags on the jobsite, changes in the specs for riders per hour, and others. We knew these issues would delay the final product by six weeks. So we immediately notified the customer and adjusted our delivery dates months ahead of time.

By the end of the project, we were behind by those six weeks. But because we had kept the customer in the loop every step of the way, we were on time as far as he was concerned. We even got an award at the end for on-time performance. The moral we took away from this? If your customer doesn't think you're late, then you're not late. If you need to change the schedule, do it as early as possible and give your customer an immediate heads-up so he can adjust his expectations.

We're not saying project management is easy. But if you have a good system, you can keep track of the difficulties and keep your customer informed and happy — even if you're six weeks late.

The Dirty Little Secret of Project Management 

Joe Knight, Roger Thomas, and Brad Angus 

The Value of a Good Visual: Immediacy

Our brains are meant to see in pictures. Grids and columns of data, while ubiquitous, make it very difficult to see trends or patterns. Additionally, a lot of the new data sources available today, such as genetic data or social network data, don't lend themselves to traditional spreadsheets and graphs. These data types require a different way of displaying them to allow us to see the underlying patterns and stories in the data.

I'd like to walk you through an exercise to illustrate how effective visualizations allow you to immediately comprehend a complex set of relationships. Consider a standard map, such as the map of the United States below. If I show you the map and ask you to describe how a few states are related to one another, you can immediately visualize and verbalize an answer. New York is up and to the right of Virginia while Texas is down and to the left. There are several states in between the two and Texas borders fewer states than Virginia does. Simple, right?

Next, I take away the map and give you a set of data that gives relative location, size, spatial border details, and other information about the states. Could you describe the same relationships in just a few seconds based on the data alone? I'll bet you'd throw your hands up in the air — just like me. I have never been able to find a remotely reasonable way to explain the information immediately visible to me in a map without making use of a map.

You might not immediately grasp the importance of the above example because it seems self-evident that maps are important. I'd like to suggest to you that the reason for that is that you are aware that maps exist in the first place. Had you never seen a map, you'd be struggling to explain the information that a map conveys in some other way.

This is the key to the value proposition of data visualization. It could be that you are struggling to convey information without being aware that there is a visual that can have the same type of impact as a map. Or there may be connections among all that data that you'd never make without a visualization. Until you see the visual for the first time, however, you won't appreciate the value it offers. Take a look at the social network graph below: it shows is that there are several distinct groups of people who interact a lot among their own group and they don't really interact outside of their group. However, there is a single person who has contact with each group and connects them. That person would be the critical one to reach if you want to influence those groups easily. See how easy it is to understand the connections between people and groups?

As the map example illustrates, data visualizations can make it easy to rapidly understand relationships, patterns, and stories that are contained within a complex data set. This is the reason they are so powerful. There is a reason for the saying "a picture is worth 1000 words." It also holds for data points.

One of the best features of modern visualization tools is that they permit interactivity with the underlying data. In other words, a visual isn't static. You can click on various parts of a visual to drill into different views of your data on the fly. While many business intelligence tools have enabled drill down reports for years, they typically contain only common visuals and also typically constrain users to predetermined paths. Visualization tools today don't apply many limits on what users can do, which opens up a lot more options for analyzing data.

A few years ago, we put a popular visualization tool on my team's laptops. It was a huge hit. Over time, several members of my team stopped using traditional spreadsheet and presentation tools altogether in favor of the visualization tool. Even if all they need to show a client are some fairly standard bar and pie charts, the interactivity of the tool is a huge plus. When the chart is up on the screen and a client asks a question that requires a different view of the data, it is easy to drill into that view on the fly. No more sending an email later in the day with another chart. The data in the charts can also be automatically updated with the latest data. That adds a lot of value on top of the visualizations themselves.

Don't underestimate how much an appropriate visual can help you get your point across. You have to see the power of high-impact visualizations in order to fully grasp what is possible. The good news is that modern visualization tools can help users at any skill level do a better job of analyzing, comprehending, and presenting information. Give it a shot.

The Value of a Good Visual: Immediacy
Bill Franks

Have the Courage to Be Direct

There are many situations where nuance, subtlety, and carefully crafted diplomacy in communications are critical. But most of the time, plain directness can go a long way.

Tsun-yan Hsieh, a long-time counselor to corporate leaders and one of my co-authors on the book Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck, once surveyed a group of global CEOs and senior executives about whether they thought their meetings met the intended objectives. Only about 40% of the meetings did. How can this be? The answer lies at least in part in the human tendency to avoid or massage the delivery of difficult or conflict-causing topics. Unfortunately, these are precisely the moments where directness is most needed.

Being self aware about the types of conversations and meetings that demand increased frankness is a starting point for more efficient and effective communications — and, most importantly, mutual respect. Here are some principles to aid in this quest:

1. Know the why. Are you clear on the reason for the conversation or meeting? Have you made that objective immediately and absolutely clear to your meeting counterpart? I vividly remember the first time this lesson struck me in the face. I was meeting with a senior executive from IBM some years ago when I was running an Internet advisory and services firm. Within the first two minutes, just after the requisite pleasantries, he asked: "What do you hope to accomplish with this meeting, and how much time do we have?" I was at first taken aback as I realized I was not clear on my own objectives. I had thought more about how to run the meeting than the "why" of the meeting. When I thought about it, I realized I had simply wanted to use the time to get to know each other in the hopes of discovering possibilities for collaboration. But I could have made it more concrete by saying, for example, that my end goal was to see if there is a partner deal opportunity between our firms. The executive's simple question created permission for positive assertiveness. Try asking at the beginning of more of your meetings some variant of the question, "What do we hope to accomplish here?" Another helpful tip is to recognize that almost all meetings fit into one of three buckets — gaining input, informing (e.g. "level-setting"), or requesting approval. Always be clear which sort of meeting you're calling.

2. Don't sandwich bad news. When you are delivering feedback (which happens in a meeting or conversation that fits in the "informing" bucket), avoid the too-common practice of mixing good news with bad news. This can often send a mixed message. The classic feedback "sandwich" goes like this: good news, followed by bad news, ending with good news. Eating a sandwich with good bread, but bad meat in the middle, isn't too enjoyable. And while giving someone feedback in a considerate, contextualized, and balanced manner is of course good practice, you need to be very clear and direct on the poor performance part. It is often the most important aspect of a feedback session, and sadly tends to get muddled.

3. Go ahead and ask. My venture-capitalist colleagues and I are accustomed to receiving pitches. But we are surprised by the number of times the ask is not clear or is made as a thinly veiled subterfuge towards a different ask. For example, when an entrepreneur says, "I would love for you to just give feedback on our business plan," but the real ask is "I would love for you to write a check for our business." When you have an ask, it is best for all parties that it be clear and transparent. It is much better just to say: "I would love to see if you might be interested in investing in our concept, but even if you're not, I really want your feedback." The takeaway: when you have an ask, just ask.

When we avoid conflict or try to skirt directness, it does a disservice to all involved, and often just plain wastes time. Consider the potential outcomes if you avoid directness:

• People leave the meeting thinking it was a good session, but they are not actually aligned, or

• People leave a little foggy as to the purpose and next steps.

Both outcomes lead to confusion, and often passive-aggressiveness ensues. And things often only get worse people then seek resolution through email and texts — such communication methods with have a tendency to spiral in the wrong direction.

Being assertive and direct does not need to mean being cold and hard. The tone you use and the words you choose (e.g. in the "investment ask" example above) matter a lot. But you will likely get more respect from being direct than by overthinking the positioning of a message or meeting.

Diplomacy is a great virtue but so is clarity, and diplomacy without our clarity is just undiplomatic B.S. Have the courage to be direct.

Have the Courate to be Direct

Anthony K. Tjan

What Type of Thinker Are You?

“Convergent” and “divergent” thinking represent two different ways of looking at the world. A convergent thinker sees a limited, predetermined number of options. By contrast, a divergent thinker is always looking for more options. Many of us get stuck in convergent thinking and, as a result, don’t see the many possibilities available to us. Let’s have a look at both types of thinking.

Convergent Thinking. Convergent is a form of the word “converging” and so it means “coming together.” Convergent thinking is what you engage in when you answer a multiple choice question (although, in real life, we often only see two choices). In convergent thinking, you begin by focusing on a limited number of choices as possibilities. Then you choose the “right” answer or course of action from among those choices. The figure on the left side of the diagram illustrates convergent thinking.

Here’s an example: “People are sick or people are healthy.” For many years after becoming chronically ill, those were the only two possibilities I saw: I was sick or I was healthy. Each night I’d go to bed, hoping to wake up healthy. When I didn’t, I considered myself to be sick. It was one or the other.

Along with that, I thought I only had two possible courses of action: I could be a law professor or I could do nothing with my life. That may sound extreme, but that’s how I saw it at the time. Not wanting to do the latter, I forced myself to keep working, even though I was too sick to do so. It didn’t occur to me that I could be in poor health and lead a productive life.

Here’s another example of convergent thinking. When I considered how friends responded to me when I became chronically ill, I saw only two possibilities: those who stuck around cared about me and those who didn’t stick around didn’t care about me. I wasn’t able to see that people could drop out of my life and still care about me.

I’m not dismissing the value of convergent thinking. It’s an importantcognitive tool, particularly in math and science. Unless I’m missing something, it would be silly to be open to other options than “4” when asked, “What’s 2+2?”. But convergent thinking has at times been a great source of suffering for me during my illness, because it’s kept me from seeing beyond my limited vision of what is possible in this new and unexpected life.

You need not have health difficulties to see how convergent thinking—because it leads you to take a narrow view of your life—can be unskillful. For example: “It’s aerobics or no exercise at all.” With this type of thinking, if you have an injury that prevents you from doing aerobics, you’ll opt for no exercise at all rather than considering other options, such as doing something less strenuous but still valuable.

Another example: “This new job is going to be great or it’s going to be terrible.” If these are the only two possibilities you see, then if you decide it’s terrible, you won’t be able to enjoy a pleasant experience at work when it comes along. “He either loves me or he doesn’t care about me at all.” Well, you get the idea: limited options; only one “right” answer or course of action.

Divergent Thinking. By contrast, divergent means “developing in different directions” and so divergent thinking opens your mind in all directions. This opens possibilities in your life because it leads you to look for options that aren’t necessarily apparent at first. The figure on the right side of the above diagram illustrates divergent thinking.

A divergent thinker is looking for options as opposed to choosing among predetermined ones. So instead of deciding that the two choices for me are “sick” or “healthy,” I would ask myself if there are other options, like the possibility that I could be sick and healthy at the same time. It took me many years to see that this was indeed an option (and it became the major theme of my book, How to Be Sick).

When I became chronically ill, I was mostly a convergent thinker. As a result, for many years after I could no longer work, I felt useless, as if my life had no meaning. I slowly emerged from this dark place by becoming more of a divergent thinker, but I still have to work at it by reminding myself: “Look for options you haven’t considered.”

Here’s an example of how switching from convergent to divergent thinking can make our lives easier and lead to fruitful results. When How to Be Sick was published in 2010, I began to get requests for me to read it as an audiobook. I decided I could do it if I just bought a good microphone and some computer software. I announced on Facebook that there would soon be an audiobook, and I responded to the many email requests I’d received by telling people that an audiobook was in the works.

But when I undertook the project, it proved to be much more difficult than I’d anticipated. Without going into details, suffice it to say that there’s a reason that most book narrators are professionally trained (or, at least, not limited in their energetic resources!). As I faltered, I saw only two options: Push forward, at great expense to my health; or not do it at all. I did the latter—not without having had to endure self-recrimination over letting people down.

It took me over 2 1/2  years to put on my divergent thinking cap. I thought: “Maybe there are more options than just “audiobook read by me” or “no audiobook.” I began to do some online research and found a website that matches books with narrators. (It’s a spin-off from Amazon and audible.com.) From my laptop, I signed up, submitted a short excerpt from the book, and “auditioned” narrators. They would record the excerpt, upload the audio file to the website, and I’d get an email notifying me there was a new audition.

I listened to over a dozen auditions (it was fun!) and then one day, I heard the voice that was perfect for the book. Deon reads How to Be Sick as if she wrote it; she seems to understand the intention behind every word I wrote. And so, we’re on our way to producing an audiobook. That’s an example of the value of divergent thinking—thinking in terms of possibilities instead of in terms of limited choices.

As for friends, I began to think that there might be more than the two options I’d settled on (that those who stuck around cared about me and those who didn’t stick around didn’t care about me). When I opened my mind to other possibilities, I discovered that some friends who haven't stuck around do indeed still care about how I'm doing. They aren’t in contact for other reasons. One of them is too uncomfortable around illness because of her experience with her own parents suddenly taking ill and dying within a few months. Another person, unbeknownst to me, developed serious health problems of her own.

Consider whether you tend to be a convergent thinker or a divergent one. If you’re the former, you’re likely to see limited choices instead of being open to possibilities. If you’d like to work on becoming more of a divergent thinker, I have two suggestions.

First, whenever you’re considering a course of action or forming an opinion about something or someone (including yourself), pay attention to whether you’re assuming you have limited choices—it’s this or it’s that; she’s like this or she’s like that; I’m like this or I’m like that. 

Second, use the Thich Nhat Hanh practice I’ve written about before: Am I Sure? Ask yourself, “Am I Sure?” before you assume you’ve considered all the alternatives available to you or before you make a judgment about something or someone. Having tried these two suggestion, then start looking for more possibilities.

Open your mind and see where it takes you!

What Type of Thinker Are You?
Toni Bernhard, J.D.

The Ideal Praise-to-Criticism Ratio

Which is more effective in improving team performance: using positive feedback to let people know when they're doing well, or offering constructive comments to help them when they're off track?

New research suggests that this is a trick question. The answer, as one might intuitively expect, is that both are important. But the real question is — in what proportion?

The research, conducted by academic Emily Heaphy and consultant Marcial Losada, examined the effectiveness of 60 strategic-business-unit leadership teams at a large information-processing company. "Effectiveness" was measured according to financial performance, customer satisfaction ratings, and 360-degree feedback ratings of the team members. The factor that made the greatest difference between the most and least successful teams, Heaphy and Losada found, was the ratio of positive comments ("I agree with that," for instance, or "That's a terrific idea") to negative comments ("I don't agree with you" "We shouldn't even consider doing that") that the participants made to one another. (Negative comments, we should point out, could go as far as sarcastic or disparaging remarks.) The average ratio for the highest-performing teams was 5.6 (that is, nearly six positive comments for every negative one). The medium-performance teams averaged 1.9 (almost twice as many positive comments than negative ones.) But the average for the low-performing teams, at 0.36 to 1, was almost three negative comments for every positive one.

So, while a little negative feedback apparently goes a long way, it is an essential part of the mix. Why is that? First, because of its ability to grab someone's attention. Think of it as a whack on the side of the head. Second, certainly, negative feedback guards against complacency and groupthink.

And third, our own research shows, it helps leaders overcome serious weaknesses. The key word here is serious. Our firm provides 360-degree feedback to leaders. We have observed among the 50,000 or so leaders we have in our database that those who've received the most negative comments were the ones who, in absolute terms, improved the most. Specifically, our aggregate data show that three-fourths of those receiving the lowest leadership effectiveness scores who made an effort to improve, rose on average 33 percentile points in their rankings after a year. That is, they were able to move from the 23rd percentile (the middle of the worst) to the 56th percentile (or square in the middle of the pack).

A few colleagues have raised their eyebrows when we've noted this because we're strongly in the camp that proposes that leaders work on their strengths. How do we reconcile these seemingly contrary perspectives? Simple: the people who get the most negative feedback have the most room to grow. It's far harder for someone at the 90th percentile already to improve so much.

But clearly those benefits come with serious costs or the amount of negative feedback that leads to high performance would be higher. Negative feedback is important when we're heading over a cliff to warn us that we'd really better stop doing something horrible or start doing something we're not doing right away. But even the most well-intentioned criticism can rupture relationships and undermine self-confidence and initiative. It can change behavior, certainly, but it doesn't cause people to put forth their best efforts.

Only positive feedback can motivate people to continue doing what they're doing well, and do it with more vigor, determination, and creativity. Perhaps that's why we have found with the vast majority of the leaders in our database, who have no outstanding weaknesses, that positive feedback is what motivates them to continue improvement. In fact, for those in our database who started above average already (but are still below the 80th percentile), positive feedback works like negative feedback did for the bottom group. Focusing on their strengths enabled 62% of this group to improve a full 24 percentage points (to move from the 55th to the 79th percentile). The absolute gains are not as great as they are for the most-at-risk leaders, since they started so much further ahead. But the benefits to the organization of making average leaders into good ones is far greater, because it puts them on the road to becoming the exceptional leaders that every organization desperately needs.

As an interesting aside, we find it noteworthy that Heaply and Losada's research is echoed in an uncanny way by John Gottman's analysis of wedded couples' likelihood of getting divorced or remaining married Once again, the single biggest determinant is the ratio of positive to negative comments the partners make to one another. And the optimal ratio is amazingly similar — five positive comments for every negative one. (For those who ended up divorced, the ratio was 0.77 to 1 — or something like three positive comments for every four negative ones.)

Clearly in work and life, both negative and positive feedback have their place and their time. If some inappropriate behavior needs to be stopped, or if someone is failing to do something they should be doing, that's a good time for negative feedback. And certainly contrarian positions are useful in leadership team discussions, especially when it seems only one side of the argument has been heard. But the key even here is to keep the opposing viewpoint rational, objective, and calm — and above all not to engage in any personal attack (under the disingenuous guise of being "constructive").

We submit that all leaders should be aware of the ratio of positive and negative comments made by their colleagues in leadership team meetings, and endeavor to move the proportion closer to the ideal of 5.6 to 1 — by their own example.

The Ideal Praise-to-Criticism Ratio
Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman

How WordPress Thrives with a 100% Remote Workforce

WordPress.com is the 15th most trafficked website in the world. It is run by Automattic Inc, a company that is 100% distributed. That means everyone works from home, or more precisely, from wherever in the world they wish. They've been amazingly successful with this strategy, but I was skeptical about how a distributed company really works. Being curious, I decided to do the obvious: Work there for a year as a team leader and find out for myself.

Here's what I learned:

Creativity thrives online. Recently James Surowicki at The New Yorker claimed remote work inhibits creativity. This is absurd in the age of the web, where thousands work on brilliant projects, collaborating with people around the world. It's true that in a distributed company you can't just walk down the hall to find serendipity, but chat rooms, social media, and blogs provide many chance encounters and serendipitous ideas. Dozens of times a day, WordPress.com releases new features and updates, and they collaborate intensely around them on internal blogs and in chat rooms. Remote work certainly changes the nature of interaction, but to assume this inhibits creativity is ridiculous.

Not all remote work is the same. To evaluate remote work as a singular idea is a paper tiger. There are many policies to choose from and those choices matter. Managers of remote workers at older companies need to make adjustments to enable remote workers to thrive, especially during a trial period when everyone is experimenting and learning what will work for them. But to try remote work without making any allowances or adjustments is foolish. Any progressive idea can be made to fail if the people in charge don't support it.

Culture is critical. Automattic has many policies designed to empower employees and remote work is just one of them. They believe individual workers know best how to be productive and that management's job is to provide choices and get out of the way. If employees are self-motivated and empowered, remote work can accelerate productivity. However in autocratic or bureaucratic organizations the freedom of remote work runs against the culture. Of course remote workers will be less productive if they're in environments that depend on centralized, rule-oriented, or committee heavy processes. But even then it can work if managers care more about results than pretense.

It should be up to the employee. Workplaces often treat employees like children. Any wise manager evaluates employees on their results, not superficially, and physical location might just be one of them. If a worker proves they can perform as well, or better, from home there's little reason to complain. Even at a bureaucratic company, a motivated worker may be able to find ways to do their job productively in a remote environment. Why not let them try? If they're right everyone wins. The mistake Yahoo's Marissa Mayer made was to focus on the means, rather than the ends: The problem she's facing is abuse of remote work, not remote work itself. Automattic has found they can hire better people, since they do not need to relocate -- an advantage more than worth the challenges, if any, that enabling remote work has cost them.

Tools make a difference. Automattic employees rarely use email. Instead they use internal blogs, chat rooms, and Skype. A special kind of blog, called a P2, solves many of the annoyances of email, and simultaneously facilitates remote work. Conversations on P2s can be easily linked to via URL, are searchable and are visible to all, making it easy to catch up on what you've missed. At Automattic, even when employees meet in person they use the same tools as when working apart. This helps ensure no one feels left out or misses conversations, regardless of their time zone.

There are many 100% distributed companies. Dozens of real business thrive with remote workers. Before abandoning the idea managers should study how so many successful companies not only allow remote workers, but also make it an advantage.

How WordPress Thrives with a 100% Remote Workforce
Scott Berkun

Ready to Innovate? Get a Lawyer.

As disruptive innovations enter the market with faster velocity and increased firepower, entrepreneurs are finding themselves dealing sooner and more intimately with the law. Sometimes, the innovation is just too new, creeping out consumers and lawmakers who hurriedly work to ban it. Few people remember, for example, that the day after Scottish scientists announced in 1996 the successful clone of a sheep named Dolly, President Bill Clinton issued an executive order banning the use of federal funds for cloning in the U.S and urged Congress to outlaw the technology. (Before that, it had been a subject only for science fiction novels.)

But more often the imposition of legal constraints comes indirectly, the maneuverings of incumbents caught off-guard by something dramatically better and often cheaper than their core products and services. Performing a bit of regulatory judo, they often respond to such threats by pressuring regulators who oversee their own activities to declare the innovator illegal or otherwise in violation of rules that were never designed to cover it. Internet-dispatched limousines and ride-sharing services such as Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar, for example, are dealing with such challenges on a daily basis, as trade groups press local taxicab commissions to prohibit the new services.

Incumbents also run to the courts, filing sometimes-dubious infringement lawsuits based on a yellowing sheaf of patents, copyrights, or trademarks. Implicitly, these lawsuits are often aimed not at stopping the new entrant so much as to slow it down, wasting its precious time and limited funds.

Here, think of the response of the music, film, and other mass media to the advent of digital distribution of content. Much of it, at least in the early days, might in fact have been illegal. But incumbents who continue to rely exclusively on the courts are only putting off the inevitable. The same year the music industry successfully shut down Napster, Apple launched iTunes.

One result of the uncomfortable and increasingly frequent collisions of once-separate worlds of innovation and law is that entrepreneurs now engage with lawyers much sooner in their lives. They must, if only to secure their own patents and copyright or fight off life-threatening lawsuits.

Now, more startups are even opening their own policy offices in Washington, Brussels, and other lawmaking capitals. Only four years into its existence, for example, Twitter opened a D.C. office headed up by a former senior Congressional and FCC staffer. Facebook's D.C. office has almost 30 employees. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and other Silicon Valley brand names all have their own, often extensive, government operations. For the new breed of disruptive innovators, it's a necessary evil.

Beyond being used both offensively and defensively with lawmakers, regulators, and litigants, legal constraints on innovation are increasingly finding their way directly into product design. In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission has been using its general consumer protection powers to shape how Internet service providers do and do not make use of user-generated information and other content. (In the E.U., regulators are likewise groping to find ways to enforce more specific, but still undefined, privacy directives.) The buzzword for social media these days is "privacy by design," a concept that unfortunately hasn't advanced much beyond the purely rhetorical.

At the extreme are start-ups created specifically to satisfy legal loopholes, and perhaps to push them open just a little further. Think of these as "barely legal by design." For this category, I've collected several recent examples of companies whose major innovation is to creatively adapt new technologies to old laws.

Perhaps the most interesting is Aereo TV, a start-up launched last year and backed by investors including former Fox Chairman and CEO Barry Diller. For as little as $8 a month or $80 a year, Aereo lets users watch and record TV programs offered by local over-the-air broadcasters and play it whenever they like over the Internet—including on their smartphones, tablets, and home computers. The service is currently available to 19 million residents in the New York metropolitan area, though the company declines to say how many it has actually signed up.

In essence, Aereo offers its customers a virtual DVR for over-the-air channels, and uses the public Internet to replay live or recorded programs on any connected device. But here's the catch: unlike cable and satellite providers, who are required by law to pay broadcast stations for the right to retransmit their programming, Aereo is paying the stations absolutely nothing. And, the company has maintained in several preliminary courtroom appearances, it is not violating any law or FCC regulation.

How's that? The company is delicately threading the needle — successfully so far—of several important court decisions involving copyright law. Indeed, it is little stretch to say that the company's entire business is engineered around those decisions. To make a long story short, it does so by maintaining a tiny antenna (about the size of a dime) for each of its customers — completely unnecessary to accomplish the technical feat but a handy way to fall within the "fair use" doctrine established back when Betamax and Cablevision first posed their technology-based threats to broadcasters.

Aereo is arguing that it is no different than having your own antenna and a VCR at home. Now those are simply located remotely, and you control them through the Internet and not your television.

Not surprisingly, Aereo has been fighting legal challenges. At a recent oral argument, Judge John Gleeson, appeared skeptical of Aereo's business model. He characterized the individual antennas as a technical "fiction" designed solely to shoehorn the Aereo service comfortably between the Betamax and Cablevision cases. "You don't have all these little antennas because it makes any sense," he said. "It's a belt-and-suspenders approach to the Copyright Act."

That's clearly the case. But does that make it illegal? As innovation and law bump up against each other more frequently and in more awkward positions, entrepreneurs might actually be well-advised to wear both belts and suspenders, if not a few dozen other technical and legal forms of support. When a single case can make or break your business, there's no such thing as too much innovation — or too much lawyering.

Ready to Innovate? Get a Lawyer.
Larry Downes

Know the Difference Between Your Data and Your Metrics

How many views make a YouTube video a success? How about 1.5 million? That's how many views a video our organization, DoSomething.org, posted in 2011 got. It featured some well-known YouTube celebrities, who asked young people to donate their used sports equipment to youth in need. It was twice as popular as any video Dosomething.org had posted to date. Success! Then came the data report: only eight viewers had signed up to donate equipment, and zero actually donated.

Zero donations. From 1.5 million views. Suddenly, it was clear that for DoSomething.org, views did not equal success. In terms of donations, the video was a complete failure.

What happened? We were concerned with the wrong metric. A metric contains a single type of data, e.g., video views or equipment donations. A successful organization can only measure so many things well and what it measures ties to its definition of success. For DoSomething.org, that's social change. In the case above, success meant donations, not video views. As we learned, there is a difference between numbers and numbers that matter. This is what separates data from metrics.

You can't pick your data, but you must pick your metrics.

Take baseball. Every team has the same definition of success — winning the World Series. This requires one main asset: good players. But what makes a player good? In baseball, teams used to answer this question with a handful of simple metrics like batting average and runs batted in (RBIs). Then came the statisticians (remember Moneyball?). New metrics provided teams with the ability to slice their data in new ways, find better ways of defining good players, and thus win more games.

Keep in mind that all metrics are proxies for what ultimately matters (in the case of baseball, a combination of championships and profitability), but some are better than others. The data of the game has never changed — there are still RBIs and batting averages; what has changed is how we look at the data. And those teams that slice the data in smarter ways are able to find good players that have been traditionally undervalued.

Organizations become their metrics.

Metrics are what you measure. And what you measure is what you manage to. In baseball, a critical question is how effective is a player when he steps up to the plate? One measure is hits. A better measure turns out to be the sabermetric "OPS" — a combination of on-base percentage (which includes hits and walks) and total bases (slugging). Teams that look only at hitting suffer. Players on these teams walk less, with no offsetting gains in hits. In short, players play to the metrics their management values, even at the cost of the team.

The same happens in workplaces. Measure YouTube views? Your employees will strive for more and more views. Measure downloads of a product? You'll get more of that. But if your actual goal is to boost sales or acquire members, better measures might be return-on-investment (ROI), on-site conversion, or retention. Do people who download the product keep using it, or share it with others? If not, all the downloads in the world won't help your business.

In the business world, we talk about the difference between vanity metrics and meaningful metrics. Vanity metrics are like dandelions - they might look pretty, but to most of us, they're weeds, using up resources, and doing nothing for your property value. Vanity metrics for your organization might include website visitors per month, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and media impressions. Here's the thing: if these numbers go up, it might drive up sales of your product. But can you prove it? If yes, great. Measure away. But if you can't, they aren't valuable.

Metrics are only valuable if you can manage to them.

Good metrics have three key attributes: their data are consistent, cheap, and quick to collect. A simple rule of thumb: if you can't measure results within a week for free (and if you can't replicate the process), then you're prioritizing the wrong ones. There are exceptions, but they are rare. In baseball, the metrics an organization uses to measure a successful plate appearance will impact player strategy in the short term (do they draw more walks, prioritize home runs, etc.?) and personnel strategy in the mid and long terms. The data to make these decisions is readily available and continuously updated.

Organizations can't control their data, but they do control what they care about. If our metric on the YouTube video had been views, we would have called it a huge success. In fact, we wrote it off as a massive failure. Does that mean no more videos? Not necessarily, but for now, we'll be spending our resources elsewhere, collecting data on metrics that matter. Good data scientists know that analyzing the data is the easy part. The hard part is deciding what data matters.

Know the Difference Between Your Data and Your Metrics
Jeff Bladt and Bob Filbin

How to Find and Amplify Creativity

In 2010, IBM ran a survey of 1,500 CEOs and found that the most valuable management skill was no longer "operations" or "marketing" but "creativity." Since then BCG, Accenture and other consultancies have confirmed the global skill shift. Yet, only 9% of all public and private corporations in the US do any product or service innovation, according to the NSF's Business R&D and Innovation Surveys of 2010 and 2011. CEOs say that creativity is a crucial leadership skill, but few apparently have it.

And no wonder. Managers are trained in the values of efficiency and the skills of quantitative analytics. That's what most Americans believe in and what most business schools teach. So we now face a difficult transition. After decades of managing to squeeze out profits, how can executives quickly shift to amplifying the creative capacities of their people?

First, map your circles of creativity. Businesses are pyramids built to promote efficiency. But creativity is generated within circles — playgrounds — where a small number of highly talented people, usually in twos, threes or small teams, work. Many of these are formal — labs, product development, design. These are where "creatives" are supposed to work. But there are many more circles that are invisible. Most big corporations have hundreds of people who are sharing ideas, trying things out, connecting existing domains of knowledge in new ways, below the radar of supervision. This can happen as often on the assembly line as it does in a chemistry lab. But it's not always viewed as "creativity", and many people don't see themselves as "creative," even if they are. When you map your creativity circles, they almost always surprise.

But generating new ideas, even if they're original, is not enough. Creativity needs to scale in order to generate economic value. So you also need to identify your creativity brokers — people with good judgement and access to resources. Experienced executives are the ones who can better predict when new concepts have real potential; they're the "wise eyes" to complement the "fresh eyes" on a task. They're also the ones who can connect your creativity circles to the financial, prototyping, marketing they need. Finding these brokers can also lead to surprises. They have many official titles, from general manager to vice president to assistant to the CEO.

At the top, it's also important to move toward multi-generational leadership teams. In a period of cascading change, we are all immigrants to new technologies and new shifts in culture. As hard as we try to immerse ourselves, we simply cannot know as much as someone who embodies these changes. The young founders of Google and Facebook were wise enough to bring in more experienced talent as they scaled their start-ups. Older managers of established corporations should be wise enough to do the reverse: bringing in young talent to expand their capabilities.

You should also be ready to change your consumer frame. User experience (UX) was a bold concept in its day and moved us away from merely meeting "needs". But it is obsolete. People today participate with companies in the design and purchase of products. "Experience" is too passive a term to describe the relationship. User engagement (UE) is the new creative competence for the future. Think about aura — the things that beckon you and keep you interested &#8212 and design it into your products and services as Apple and Nike have done.

Most corporations with decades of building a culture of efficiency can't organically transform themselves into a den of creativity. They shouldn't try. The odds of success are pretty low. IBM did it. P&G is still trying. GE may make it. But most others won't. Established companies can, however, be a platform for creativity. They can learn to go outside their own walls to identify creativity they can leverage, buy and then scale.

Creative competence is like a sport. You can train for it and increase the capacities of yourself and your organization. If you get good at it, you can also transform it into real economic value on a massive scale.

How to Find and Amplify Creativity
Bruce Nussbaum

Go Ahead and Gossip

We're all taught that gossip — talking about someone when he or she isn't there — is not only rude but also possibly hurtful to feelings or damaging to reputations. And yet everyone does it. It would be difficult to find an office where there wasn't some sort of chatter about people who aren't present. Should you be polite and stay above it all? Or does it make sense to get involved in this information sharing?

What the Experts Say
Gossip is an important part of life, not just office culture. "We learn who we are through what people say to us and about us," says Kathleen Reardon, a professor of management at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business and author of Comebacks at Work: Using Conversation to Master Confrontation. Because we're social beings, we want to connect to people and talking about others is one way to do that. It's particularly difficult to avoid in an office setting. "Gossip happens all the time so you're going to hear it," says Linda Hill, the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and coauthor of Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader. And chances are that you sometimes perpetuate it too. "Research shows that everyone participates in all kinds of gossip: positive, neutral, and negative," says Joe LaBianca, a Gatton Endowed Associate Professor of Management at the University of Kentucky's LINKS Center for Research on Social Networks in Business. Is that wise? Or should you try harder to refrain? Here are several principles to help you decide when to stay above the fray and when to get involved.

Know the benefits
If you have a blanket rule of staying out of discussions about other people, you may be missing out. "You're going to dismiss all kinds of information that could be useful to you, your career, and your work," says LaBianca. Hill points out that listening to office banter is a great way to learn what's going on at your company — what group recently landed a big deal, why the CFO was out of the office for a week, or what initiatives the CEO is likely to approve. Informal exchanges of information can be just as useful as formal ones and they help you connect with colleagues. "It builds a bond because people think you trust them to share sensitive information," says Hill. "Information is power."

Differentiate between useful and negative
Not all gossip is created equal however, and some chatter does have negative implications. "Once you find yourself listening to comments about someone's family or personal life, you've crossed the line," Reardon says. It's also a problem if people are talking about others so often that everyone's afraid of being gossiped about. However, negative gossip is far more rare than we think. "Most of what we call gossip is usually positive or neutral," says LaBianca, and that kind can be quite useful to listen to and pass on.

Remember that it reflects on you
Before you feed information into the grapevine, make sure to consider how you'll be perceived as a result. Listeners might wonder if they can trust you with their information. Negative gossip especially can affect how others think of you. "You want to think about what you're passing on. The person receiving that information is going to use it to evaluate your character," says Hill.

Trust your fellow gossipers
In addition to tainting your own reputation, there is another risk to gossiping: That the subject will find out you talked about him behind his back. Talk only to colleagues you trust not to reveal your actions. If you're unsure about someone's reliability or if you are trying to build a new relationship with someone you don't know well, take it slowly. Trade small, harmless pieces of information at first. Then evaluate your colleague's trustworthiness before moving on to more important topics.

Don't do it openly
Because others are likely to make judgments, be careful about where and how you share information. LaBianca advises against doing it in front of your boss who may look down on such behavior. "Gossiping makes you more influential amongst your peers but it can also get you more negative performance ratings from managers if you're seen as threatening," he says. Do it behind closed doors, and definitely never use email. "You should assume all emails could be made public," says Hill. If others are gossiping in a place you feel is inappropriate, you don't have to chime in. LaBianca points out that you can listen without necessarily contributing. Nodding your head and giving simple responses such as "I didn't know that" allow you to hear information without actively participating.

Intercept negative gossip when you can
If you partake in discussions about others, and you hear something that could harm another person's feelings or reputation, you should speak up. "It takes courage to say, 'That's hurtful to her' or 'I don't see why any of us here needs to know that' but that's what is needed," Reardon says. You can even go a step further, says LaBianca, and neutralize what's been said by adding your own information. For example, if someone speaks poorly of a colleague's performance, you can mention a time you were impressed with her work.

Principles to Remember

Do:

• Use your informal relationships to gather information about what's happening at your company
• Choose your medium wisely — gossiping over email can be particularly precarious
• Think about how your words will reflect back on you

Don't:

• Dismiss gossip as useless or petty — it can be a good way to connect with others
• Gossip in front of your superiors who may frown upon such behavior
• Turn a blind eye to negative comments about a colleague, especially if they're unfounded

Case Study #1: Use it to test the waters
Carl Kerrigan,* a director of operations at a large pharmaceutical company, sees office gossip as an important communication tool. He admits that he has both listened and fed news into gossip channels. "Those who were the most active gossipers were the gatekeepers of company information. It's useful to take advantage of these people and put your own information in the flow, even adding some positive company spin." When his firm was negotiating a move from its current premises to another site five miles away, Carl mentioned to a few of the gossipers the possibility of relocation and the likelihood that staff would receive a bonus if it all went well. He wanted to gauge reaction. When he heard positive feedback, he gradually fed more information about the move and its benefits. "It proved successful — by the time we publicized the move, most people were accustomed to it and we averted the need for a long consultation process."

He strongly believes that this sort of communication is critical. "Ignoring it or treating it as nonsense without hearing what's being said is negligent in my view," he says.

Case Study #2: Be honest and fair
Sherry Ellner,* a professor at an Ivy League college knows how gossip can make you feel torn. A few years ago she received a call from a colleague, Lauren, who wanted to ask her a confidential question about another colleague, Randall.

Randall and Lauren had been working on a project together that had gone poorly. Randall wasn't pulling his weight and they were going to miss their deadline. Lauren wanted to know if Sherry had experienced similar difficulties with Randall in their years of working together. "When I heard the story, I didn't think it was out of the realm of possibility so I felt quite torn in my loyalties," she says. On the one hand, she respected Randall and didn't want to damage his reputation. She also worried that whatever she said would become part of the rumor mill. On the other, she wanted to help Lauren understand what was going on so she could solve her problem. "When people share gossip with you, there's supposed to be some reciprocity," she says.

After thinking it through, she told Lauren that she had heard stories from other people that were consistent with what she described, but Sherry hadn't personally experienced those difficulties. To her, this felt like a good compromise. "It was gossiping, yes," she says, "but I knew I was being honest and fair." By listening to Lauren, she also gained new insight. "As a consequence of this conversation, I won't recommend Randall again," she says.

*names and other details have been changed

Go Ahead and Gossip
Amy Gallo

Compromise Is Not a Dirty Word

You're successful, ambitious, and full of big plans. You're on a quest for greatness. But could dreaming smaller help you reach your goals?

My friend Whitney Johnson's popular pieces on these pages encourage us to dream, to disrupt our thinking, to dare to do great things. But what I take from Whitney's writing is truly a practical nudge: "Inside of the something you can't have, there is often the makings of something you can achieve."

Necessity really is the mother of invention; like many, I took an involuntary course in compromise at work when I found myself with two toddlers, a husband with three jobs, and a small business that would not, no matter how hard I wished it, grow magically by itself. Over the past couple years I've observed several brilliant women and men manage both life's demands and the big dreams they have as entrepreneurs or corporate players. You know, the kind of people who are very successful but still manage to meet the school bus most days (yes, they do exist). I've been inspired by people who consciously live what they call a "Third Path," where men and women prioritize work and home time equally, even if that means both mom and dad work four days a week. These leaders have figured out to maximize their time, their social networks, and their skills, but they may not do it from 9 to 6. They have found what Cali Yost calls their "work-life fit," often because they simply had no other choice.

You think compromise is a negative word, but life demands adaptation: a toddler needs you at home, or you're in grad school while working full time, or you have a sick parent, or you need to keep your day job even though you don't like it. Compromise connotes less than the best, and indeed when you're compromising you may not be achieving your full potential. But you will get things done, and in doing so you will learn skills and tactics that prepare you for success.

Compromise, like negotiation, is an art, and an important one. It's not something they often teach in business school, and it's never going to be on the cover of Forbes. Instead we read of great leaders' relentless drive for perfection. Never stop; never settle.

I'm very lucky, because I truly have my dream job. I'm very proud of what I've built, but I recognize that I built it out of compromise. A freelance project as a digital consultant turned into my life's work mobilizing women online. Once the work started to gain traction, I dreamed of making it big, of creating an empire in women's new media. Still, mine is a small business, and it probably will remain so — because I make many trade offs in order to run it. That's not to say we don't have an impact, but small isn't sexy in the entrepreneurial world. Women in fact are often dismissed as entrepreneurs because our businesses are "small": from banks and credit card companies who won't extend credit to women-owned businesses to those who exhort us to think bigger so we can get more venture capital, you'll hear time and time again that while women start small businesses at a very high rate, these businesses remain small. As if that's always a bad thing.

In year three of my company, I've accepted there is simply no way for me to be the hands-on mother I want to be, and to build a company that scales quickly. What I can say is that I'm fortunate enough to be able to pay the bills, work with incredible clients and grow the company — slowly. I do miss high-level meetings and important industry networking events, and sometimes, clients need me and I can't be there. I also miss my children's milestones. But the truth is, I don't miss either that often. My mentors have taught me to judge keenly which events are worth the price of childcare, so to speak. I can only travel in limited doses, so I've learned how to plan my trips to exact the most value from my time. I've learned from my friend Christine the "no fester" rule: don't churn your time with unnecessary meetings or emails, and minimize drama, because drama is very time consuming.

The bloggers and social media influencers I work with have shown that you can carry great influence and credibility no matter where you are. Friends at big companies like Deloitte and IBM work from home full time, and while they may not make partner this year, they are still on the track, if that's what they want. It will take longer to achieve. Sheryl Sandberg famously said, "If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat. Just get on." But it's also possible to cruise for a while until you're ready to accelerate.

I'm not glossing over the issues. Highly skilled women have a net eight percent reduction in pay during the first five years after giving birth. Women who step back from promotion in their thirties and forties may sacrifice the leaps in pay and status they've worked so hard to achieve. But by making certain trade-offs, you can stay in the game, and if you're in the game it's a lot easier to win it — eventually.

And yet we live in such an extreme culture. Arguments about feminism portray a world of binary choices, where working mothers either work overtime or quit to stay home full time- when many choose to work somewhere in between. Our very image of an entrepreneur is someone who works 24-7. 71% of workers — of both genders — report feeling disengaged from their jobs and 60% of full-time working mothers would prefer to be part time. Most dreamers who take the small business leap compromise financial security and a big paycheck; the average small business owner takes home $34,392 to $75,076 a year in her first ten years in business.

Compromise has its limits, and we all have our own set of "non-negotiables." Consider my friend Naama's story: "About 3 years ago my husband and I jointly decided that he was going to start a tech business and I would be responsible for keeping the lights on, the family intact, and our benefits." Naama is now about to launch her business as well, despite making big sacrifices. She says, "I have come to realize that there are things you should and shouldn't compromise. For me, staying in a big corporate job just because it was responsible was more than I could deal with and I realized I'd rather compromise on savings, exercise and a social life."

Spending more time with my kids right now is worth the corresponding diminution of my dream to become a media mogul. That's my choice.

The rigor lies in creating a compromised vision of your dream, knowing that compromise is often necessary to accommodate competing needs in life. But it's OK to sometimes make your dreams and your career a little smaller in order to have the whole, long life you want and need.

And my business may be small now, but in ten years, maybe it won't be.

Compromise Is Not a Dirty Word
Morra Aarons-Mele

The Off Switch

It's Friday evening. The smells of rosemary chicken and freshly-baked challah fill the house. My daughters, 3 and 9, sigh as I gently detach the iPads from their laps. One by one, our screens are powered down. My husband, Ken, is usually the last holdout, in his office, madly scrambling to send out just one last email before the sun sets. Then he unplugs too. We light the candles, and sit down to a sumptuous meal.

I'm prepared. I've printed out the next day's schedule, along with maps and phone numbers that live on my cell phone. Most people in our lives know they will not be able to text, tweet, email, Facebook, chat, or Skype with us for 24 hours. If they want to reach us, they call our landline. Or they come over.

And so it has gone, every week for three years. Our "tech Shabbat" lasts from sunset on Friday until sunset on Saturday.

I first became aware of the importance of disconnecting in 2008, when my father, Leonard Shlain, was diagnosed with brain cancer. Some days he would have only one good hour, and I didn't want to be distracted when I was with him, so I'd turn off my cell phone.

Soon after, inspired by a National Day of Unplugging (which commences this year at sundown on March 1st), Ken and I decided to institute something we had tried in fits and starts since we met: unplugging for one full day every week. What we call our "technology shabbats."

Albert Einstein said that "time is relative to your state of motion." With all this texting, tweeting, posting, and emailing, we're making our minds move faster, which accelerates our perception of time. It seems there isn't a day that goes by when I don't end up thinking, "How did it get to be 5 p.m.?"

And what is the one day I want to feel extra long? Saturday. During our Tech Shabbats, time slows to a beautiful, preindustrial pace. We are able to engage in all those activities that seem to get pushed aside by the lure of the network. We're Jewish but not orthodox. We drive our car, turn the lights on and answer our landline in emergencies, so ours is a modern interpretation of a very old idea of the Sabbath. Our Saturdays now feel like mini-vacations — slow living that we savor like fine wine. We garden with our kids, play board games, ride our bikes and cook and I write in my journal. I can have a thought without being able to immediately start implementing it. I feel more grounded and balanced. We try to be as unavailable as possible, except to each other and our children. I feel like a better mother, wife and person.

Every week, it's like a valve of pressure releases from the daily bombardment of interesting facts, articles, and tidbits I consume daily as I travel on this info-rocket of discovery, procrastination, productivity and then, eventually overload.

Wrestling with the good, the bad, and the potential of technology is my constant state of existence. The technology we've created — that now dominates our work and home lives — gives us a plethora of new possibilities: the ability to experience more emotions, share knowledge, and take in diverse ideas from across global borders. Neuroeconomist Paul Zak has found that social networking produces a burst of oxytocin, the hormone responsible for bonding, empathy, trust, and generosity. I sometimes imagine that every post, tweet, and text is flooding the planet with oxytocin, making us more empathetic and more inclined to share and collaborate. Maybe this is why collaboration is on the rise.

But the technology we've created also takes something away from us: being present, focused, and in the moment. Have you ever faked a need to use the restroom to check email? I have. More than once. Researchers at the National Institute on Drug Abuse have compared the sense of technological dependency — the feeling that we must be accessible and responsive at any time and in any place — to that of drugs and alcohol.

Another hormone, dopamine, provides insight on the lure of digital stimulation.

Neuroscientists have studied dopamine since 1958, when Arvid Carlsson and Nils-Ake Hillarp, at the National Heart Institute of Sweden, first examined how the chemical functions in the brain. Dopamine plays an influential role in mood, attention, memory, understanding, learning, and reward-seeking behavior. Dopamine is what makes us seek pleasure and knowledge. It's what makes us search, whether it's for food, sex, or information.

When we're rewarded with a response or with more information, dopamine is what makes us want more. When we're up late at night linking from website to website, or compulsively texting or emailing, those are dopamine-induced loops. For each new piece of information or for each new response, our brain rewards us with a dopamine surge so we click again, and again, and again until we're overloaded and over stimulated.

Just as we discover — the hard way — what constitutes too much sugar or too much alcohol, I believe we are only beginning to truly understand the effects of too much technological stimulation on the brain. As we rush into this era of hyperconnected human evolution, we need to evolve and adapt to be mindful of what we are doing online and when we should go off.

There is one other benefit to unplugging each week: By sundown on Saturday, we can't wait to get back online. We're hungry for connection. We appreciate technology all over again. We marvel anew at our ability to put every thought and emotion into action by clicking, calling, and linking.

Still, every week we remember the most important thing about technology: It has an off switch.

Tech's Best Feature: The Off Switch
Tiffany Shlain

Are “Gatekeeper” Tasks Stalling Your Projects?

Picture this scenario: When you started your project about renewing your business website, you were full of enthusiasm. Things were looking good and you were making a good progress on every front. However, now your sky has been crowded by dark clouds. What happened was that the one crucial element of your site—the opt-in box for the site—is missing; it was supposed to be developed and installed by the web design company that has been redesigning your site.

The delay was because you forgot to mention about the opt-in functionality in the first place. Since the web design firm got the information too late, they are now unable to get the work done before your set deadline. Needless to say, you have lost your night’s sleep,and the longer the delay of your project is, the more you are going to lose customers and profits. You are disappointed and you blame yourself for the situation.

You forgot the gatekeeper

In this scenario, our character is facing a very common obstacle: he is facing a “gatekeeper” task in his project. These gatekeepers aren’t just limited to business projects, however—they can happen in your everyday life as well.

The “gatekeeper” is a task which is blocking other tasks that need to be done. In order to get other work done, you have to clear out this blocker first (for instance, you have to fix your car before you can go to the grocery store, then to the post office, and then to take your kids to football practice). Many times these gatekeepers exist because of a lack of planning and understanding of what is ahead of you. When you fail in these two elements, this may stall your progress completely.

Additionally, a gatekeeper task can be something that has to completed by someone else before you can start your work. If the delegation process is weak and the deadlines are not clearly defined, they can turn a gatekeeper into a nasty companion until it’s taken care of.

 

Assuming is the mother of all mistakes

Years ago, my former boss told me and my colleagues that “assuming is prohibited”. The advice made sense and I still find it valuable. By default, a gatekeeper task is not necessarily harder than any other task, but when it’s not handled properly or early enough, it can show its ugly face and turn into a nightmare.

The problem is that you assume that you can handle the task with ease and that it requires much less effort than what it really does. You also assume that you can handle the task at the last minute, but you’re wrong.

You should know the tasks that you’re facing—whether in a business project or in your personal life—thoroughly, so you can take proactive action. Otherwise you’ll face a gatekeeper task which will drive you insane. If a task is supposed to be handled by others, it’s essential that you ensure they complete the task in time so that you can take off from there.

 

Good preparation goes a long way

No matter how many times you have heard this advice, the fact is that this still holds true: take proactive action and prepare properly instead of jumping into something head first without proper planning. The planning part ensures that you understand your tasks and take appropriate action to complete them. It doesn’t matter if you think that you are wasting your time with the planning part; it could save you many hours in the long run.

If you see that a task requires someone else’s input before you can continue, make sure that this task is prioritized first and that they have a clearly-defined deadline. The same principle can be applied to a situation in which you have to take care of the gatekeeper task yourself: make sure that task is on top of your task list and that it’s taken care of first.

Finally, break the task into manageable pieces. This way it’s easier for you to see which tasks could be potentially blocking others, or if a task requires someone’s input before it can be completed.

 

How to manage the gatekeepers effortlessly

To tackle the gatekeeper tasks with ease, follow these simple steps:

1. Don’t assume. First and foremost, don’t assume anything when it comes to taking care of your tasks. If you assume that you know your tasks and how much effort is required to complete them—instead of truly knowing— you are giving a task the opportunity to turn into something that stalls your progress (whether in a business project or in your personal life).

2. Be proactive. Learn what’s ahead of you and identify the tasks that could be potential gatekeepers, or the tasks that require another’s input first. When you do this, you are also mentally prepared to what is coming (the fewer surprises, the better).

3. Break up the task.  Avoid having tasks that are too big on your list— it increases the likelihood that one could turn out to be a gatekeeper task that you notice too late. Once the task is broken into smaller parts, it’s much easier to see which should be dealt with first and if any job will potentially block another.

4. Prioritize. Once you have broken the tasks into small pieces, it’s time to prioritize them. Make sure that gatekeepers get your primary attention, and that they get handled first.

5. Set deadlines. If a task is done by someone else, make sure you set the clear deadlines so that they know when you want the work completed. If you are doing the job yourself, you can set the deadlines for yourself as well. This way those blocker tasks get done in a timely manner, without any nasty surprises.

 

Conclusion

As you can see, gatekeeper tasks can drive you crazy if you are not proactive and don’t plan ahead. However, with some preparation and planning, you can prevent the nasty surprises from happening.

Over to you:  How do you handle gatekeeper tasks?

Take Away: It does not matter how slow you go so long as you do not stop.

Are “Gatekeeper” Tasks Stalling Your Projects?
Timo Kiander