This week I’ve be re-listening to Annie Duke’s book Quit. https://www.linkedin.com/in/annie-duke/
We are getting towards the end of the business year. That means reviewing 2023 performance, and building plans for 2024. I know that I will do a better job if I quit more in ’24.
I learned many things from the book. There are two I’m building into my practise.
Setting better goals, with ‘Kill Criteria’
I need to remember that goals are often pass/fail which makes them inflexible in a very flexible world. In response to this I’m going to focus more on process goals than outcome goals, and I’m going to break them down so that I can check-in to measure progress along the way. This approach is common in sport, like running 🙂 . So, as an athlete, I can control my training and my diet, but I can’t control the weather on race day, or how well other athletes perform. I know that by setting process goals about the training I do, and the diet I have, I should get the best performance I can achieve on race day.
I’m also going to set kill criteria for my goals, to help me quit early. Kill criteria are objective measures which I will set, in advance, to help me to spot that I need to drop or re-adjust my goal. I know kill criteria will stop the escalation of commitment it so easy to spot in others and so hard to spot in ourselves! Those times where I can’t let go of all the effort I have put in, and I keep trying to stick to my original goal, rather than letting it go and re-adjusting.
What I learned from Quit is that waste is a forward-looking measure NOT a backward-looking measure. I can’t claim back the work, money or days of training I have already expended BUT I can stop myself from wasting further effort in the future. As a mining engineer you’d think I’d get the idea of sunk costs!
Focussing on the monkey
I’m going to do the hard things first, not get the easy stuff out of the way.
Stephen Covey (7 habits of highly effective people) called it first things first. What I like about Annie Duke’s analogy is that it is so relatable to the huge amount of wasted effort often found in big business. It goes like this:
When faced with a significantly challenging project/task, is it worth doing the easy tasks first to get some quick wins on the board, or should you tackle the hardest part of the project?
Imagine that your latest project is to get a monkey to juggle flaming torches whilst standing on a pedestal. There are two parts to succeeding at this project:
- Build a pedestal for the monkey to stand on
- Teach the monkey to juggle flaming torches
Now, obviously, one of those is comparatively simple to do.
There are plans and examples of how to successfully build a pedestal. It has been done before, even if the current team has never done it before.
But teaching the monkey? That could be tricky. Or put another way, nearly impossible!
Yet many teams will look at those two tasks and to make progress, choose to start with the “quick win”. They would begin to build the pedestal. Probably because if their manager asked for progress, they could at least show progress on the pedestal and not look like they were failing.
The issue is, teaching the monkey to juggle flaming torches might be impossible! And if it is impossible, then why waste time and resources on building the pedestal.
So, when I start out on a new project, or task I’m going to tackle the hardest part first. If I can’t make progress on the hardest part, there is no point in working on the easy stuff. I’m going to tackle the monkey first!
I’m going to #quitmorein_24 by setting better process goals, with kill criteria AND focus on tackling the monkey before I start on the pedestal.
What about you? Are you thinking of quitting more, or sticking with it? Please let me know by providing a comment.