Winston Churchill once said, “Perfection is the enemy of progress.” People who take their time to weigh their options are said to have “analysis paralysis.” “Perfect is the enemy of good,” according to Voltaire. Of course there are a number of axioms that urge caution such as, “Fools rush in,” “Prudence is the better part of valor,” and “Measure twice, cut once.”
Recently, I had a conversation with a colleague and posed what we call the “$1,000,000 Question” which is, “What do you know now that you wished you had known when you got started?” The question was specifically aimed at what we had learned about leadership development. As I reflected on my experience as a head coach for 18 years and an Athletic Director for the past 8 years, I finally came to the conclusion that the philosophy of “Ready, fire, aim,” may be the most important conclusion I have come to on the topic.
For many of us, we think of an initiative or project that addresses a need for our program or school and rather than taking action, we wait for everything to be right before taking action. While prudence dictates to comprehensively assess the potential pitfalls, snares and dangers that lie ahead, too often, we postpone initiatives not because we lack capacity or that we are embarking on a major change in an organization, but because we don’t have an idea of how every little detail will look along the way. So we default to “Ready, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim. . .”
In the book, The Lean Startup, Eric Reis (@theleanstartup) details a methodology for, “creating and managing startups and how to get a desired product to customers’ hands faster.”
Reis writes, “Too many startups begin with an idea for a product that they think people want. They then spend months, sometimes years, perfecting that product without ever showing the product, even in a very rudimentary form, to the prospective customer. When they fail to reach broad uptake from customers, it is often because they never spoke to prospective customers and determined whether or not the product was interesting. When customers ultimately communicate, through their indifference, that they don’t care about the idea, the startup fails.”
The Lean Startup methodology consists of three steps in a recurring cycle: “Build, Measure, Learn.” The idea is to create a product/project/initiative, get it to your customer to elicit feedback and finally analyze that feedback so that you can refine the product/project/initiative into its next iteration.
This doesn’t mean that one just launches new initiatives willy nilly without giving thought to a number of factors such as timing (do I have enough time to implement this and see it through to fruition), culture/climate (are there unrelated factors that may hamper or distract from the proper implementation of the initiative) and capacity (we have have the time/resources to implement this properly). In his book The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, dedicates a whole chapter to what he refers to “The Law of Timing.”
In that chapter Maxwell says, “The wrong action at the wrong time leads to disaster; the right action at the wrong time leads to resistance; the wrong action at the right time is a mistake but the right action at the right time leads to success.” This may seem to stand as a counterargument to the main thesis for this blog post but I don’t think that the two are mutually exclusive. I believe you can take action and be mindful of timing.
An example from this year is that I moved schools late last summer. One of the initiatives that I wanted to get up and running was to start working with the Student Athletic Leadership Team (SALT) at my new school. However, due to the late transition I felt a little overwhelmed at the start of the school year and once I did have the capacity to take on the SALT, I was hesitant to do so both because I wasn’t sure I wanted it to continue in the way they had run it in the past and that the start of winter sports was an odd time to begin the work.
The truth is I was uncertain exactly what I wanted to do with the group and what I wanted the purpose of the group to be. Because of that I was afraid to get started and learn from the interactions and experiences generated from the group. Reflecting on the past 8 months, I feel that I missed an opportunity to intentionally invest in our student-athletes and assist our coaches by working on leadership development with our team leaders. Had August, September and maybe even October were awful times for me to try and get started with that initiative. However, waiting for the end of the year or even the start of year two has resulted in the loss of time that I won’t get back.
I’m currently in the process of identifying our SALT members and plan to have several meetings before we finish the year. After all, while the best time to plant a tree may be 20 years ago, the second best time is today.
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