A shortage of ideas has never been the reason a growing company went out of business. In fact, it is much more common to hear stories of failure because focus was splintered or a team ran out of time.

So how can we protect our focus? and where does that time go?

The Last Responsible Moment

Wait to discuss a project until it becomes irresponsible to wait any longer

This concept comes from Lean Engineering. It encompasses two realities —

1. Declining returns of discussing something when you have no new information
2. Time lost from discussing a project that doesn't end up happening

Each is discussed in the following two scenarios

Scenario 1: Starting too early

Image 1: Waste 1 — Starting too early

In the example here, a project kicks off at t. Imagine that today is x days before t. A tiger team of top talent is gathered and has an initial, kick-off conversation. Lots of information is exchanged and the team feels very positive afterwards.

Some times passes (maybe a week) and the team has another meeting. The project still hasn’t started and not much has changed. Perhaps some research & discovery was conducted that results in some new topics to discuss. Value is generated from the discussion.

Again, time passes and the team meets again. A few more new discoveries are discussed, but not much new and consequently not much value is produced by meeting.

Assuming the team meets every week, this continues for x / 7 more meetings until the project finally starts. In the final weeks, essentially no value is created at all by meeting.

Scenario 1 Solution: Stop rehashing; shorten meetings

Image 2: Scenario 1 — solution

Mathematically, we have three ways to increase value (or reduce waste), which are to

(a) Reduce x by having the initial meeting as close as possible to t. (i.e. the last moment after which it would be irresponsible to wait any longer);

(b) Cancel recurring meetings until new information can be discussed (i.e. change the denominator)

(c) End meetings early! Human nature is to fill up the time they get. If you schedule a 30 minute meeting, rarely will it not use (at least) 30 minutes. Be ruthless about protecting everyone’s time.

Scenario 2: Project never happens

Image 3: Waste 2 — Project never happens

Similar to the first scenario, but in this case the project gets canceled! All that time was wasted. The only value is the act of planning; or possibly the project is resurfaced at some point in the future and the plans can be used as a reference for the new plans. Otherwise, significant time was invested and there is not return on investment.

Scenario 2 solution - Ask yourself: “Can this wait?”

Image 4: Scenario 2 — solution

Here, we expand on our solution from the first scenario. Not only do we wait for new information, we push the meeting back even further until we have a substantial enough amount of information to make a decision on moving forward with the project.

This feels like it would lead to a big pile up of meetings because we're waiting and waiting and waiting. In reality, the impact of that is minimal. It’s likely the project might need one extra meeting before kick off, but the big win is that if it doesn't kick off, then you've saved yourself that time.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we all have limited time each day and no shortage of work. It can feel productive to start thinking ahead and going all in on planning for that future project, but in reality the return on investment is higher if we wait for the last responsible moment.