Time Horizon Friction
New year, same meeting bashing. You can cancel them all you want.
Time horizon friction is the cost of context switching and coordination of too much work in progress that are in different phases. And it's so bad that the cost increases with the square of the number of projects on the go and out of phase.
Why does this happen? It's subtle...
You typically have two types of people on your teams: the planners and the builders. In so many teams someone plans & specs a project, hands it over to the builders.
But it's a lot longer to build something, than to imagine it. So the building takes a lot longer than the planning.
But the planners have nothing to do but to plan more things. Naturally they start exploring new ideas. These are exciting, right?!
Part of that exploring requires meeting with the builders to get their feedback and understand what's possible. They usually can't read the code, so they book a meeting. Now imagine you have 50% of your team as builders and 50% of your team as planners. And every planner can have 2-3 projects in exploring, and each builder has 1 project in building.
Then each planner will add 2-3x meetings to your company schedule, that isn't helping ship.
Worse, now you're context switching your entire company all the time.
It sounds bad, but it's very hard to diagnose. Because everyone is busy. There's a lot of important projects on the go. You're killing it.... with meetings. You want to show the CEO that you're ambitious and can get a lot done. So you pop new projects like you popped new pills in Ibiza in your 20s.
Your developers are pissed because the’re always in meetings about future stuff.
How do you fix?
Some ideas:
- Maniacally control the ratio of planners and builders.
- Don't split planning and building, have the team start and ship together. No hand-offs.
- Limit explore projects to those where the team can be self-sufficient (eg, prototype, talk to customers, design)
There is zero cost in a company to start something. There is zero cost to ping someone and ask for their opinion on this newly started project. Everyone wants to be helpful.
So you can see how easily this can take over. It will spread faster than that fungus in Last of Us.
Cancel meetings all you want, but if you don't cancel projects and maniacally control your WIP, those meetings will just come back.