Get Everything Done

One of the promises of the "must do task when you write it down" is the idea of "emergent strategy".

I feel like I am getting something like that from my "brainstorm then do" no-list approach. I would characterize it as "going where the work takes me".

For example: I've been working on a public policy issue in our local community. In the past, I probably would have made notes with lots of action items and tasks, then work through those notes—generally with a feeling of overwhelm as the work mounts up and I see how much work there is to do. Now, I still have notes from meetings and discussions and so on—with actions and ideas—but I'm not working straight from that. Instead, each day, I work through the items that are on my mind. I brainstorm and think and write things on a dynamic list. It's usually quite clear what needs to be done next—no need to refer to the notes for that! As I work, I add more items to my dynamic list, simply based on where the work is taking me. I follow the things that are getting momentum and set aside the things that are blocked, to revisit later.

Every now and then, I may feel I am forgetting something, so I review my notes—and usually I find almost all of the tasks and actions are getting completed on their own. But not only completed—I am taking them further than what I may have originally conceived or intended. And that's because I am engaged with the work, rather than engaged with some old stale list.

I also find things that I had forgotten about—but when I run across these things in my notes, they jump out at me, so it's easy to get engaged and move them forward. If they DON'T jump out, then maybe they don't even need to be done at all!

I think the way this pertains to "emergent strategy" is as follows. When I craft an "objective", in many ways it's like writing down a catch-all list: it's some idea of where I want to go in the near future. But they have a tendency of becoming stale at best—artificial constraints and anxiety-creating debts at worst.

I still do write down objectives, and have them in my notes. I do refer to them sometimes, to see if we are still on track. But most of the time, I find that the "objective" was more of an artificial construct that didn't really capture the essence of what we are trying to do.

It's not always easy to articulate what we are trying to do. When you try to make it a "SMART" goal -- specific, measurable, etc., -- sometimes this isn't really appropriate! For example, you try to come up with something measurable just so you can measure it, report progress, define "done", etc. But how often are we really measuring the wrong thing? If we really stick to that, we can find ourselves tracking to the measure rather than to the ultimate vision that the measure is trying to represent. And sometimes (usually?) the measure is really just a poor approximation of what we are really trying to accomplish.

When I "follow the work", I find that I far exceed the stated objectives, and take the work much closer to the ultimate vision that is the real motivation for the work.

Thinking through the objectives is certainly useful -- but I've been finding it's MOST useful when, after I've done the thinking and writing of objectives, I just set them aside and get to work.

Maybe this just means I am not very good at writing objectives and goals. But based on my experience at work, I would guess this is a really widespread problem. Also, I am finding there is a lot of research in the Lean world that goes against (and specifically refutes) Peter Drucker's "Management By Objective" idea -- with a lot of the same conclusions that I am noticing here in this post. "Management By Objective" is just too removed from the actual work. If you want to know what you really should be doing, just get engaged with the work and see where it naturally takes you.

Funny -- this reminds me a lot of that old Eisenhower quote -- "I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."