Lions and Tigers and...Opossums? Oh My.
Lions and Tigers and...Opossums? Oh My.
How Removing Pests Taught Me Predictability
Hey, my name is Tristan Hood and I love helping leaders and teams find new and better ways of managing work. I believe continual, organic change is far superior to large transformation, unless absolutely necessary of course. As such, I created this blog with the intent to share my experiences, wins, and losses. One of the things I help teams accomplish is becoming sustainably predictable. With that in mind, I wanted to share a quick Tidbit and a tool for helping you on your predictability journey.
A Hired Killer
One of my first real jobs was, as my father-in-law likes to phrase it, a hired killer. Before you unsubscribe, let me tell you I was just a pest control technician. I got rid of pesky pests like snakes, rodents, and hornets. If you've ever been face to face with a hissing opossum in the two-foot crawl space under a house, you know it's not a job for the faint of heart. That's a story for another day, but let me just say the opossum was successfully relocated with zero injury.
One of the most critical aspects of that job was scheduling each of the recurring monthly customers. Of all the pest control technicians I worked with, Rob Thomas, had this aspect of the job mastered. Each month, when everyone one else was spending their first few days frantically calling all their customers to schedule appointments (or maybe this was just me) Rob would simply grab his gear and set out for his first appointment. After all, it was the first of the month and he knew exactly which customers, to the day, he would need to visit. The reason he was so excellent at what he did was because he was able to, over time, achieve predictability with his customers. In fact, and this is the point I want highlight, his customers could bank on the fact that he would show up on the same day, at the same time, every month. And he routinely serviced all his accounts with time to spare. While the rest of us were working until the last day of the month, he had the ability to either find more business or spend some time sipping lattes on his front porch. Sigh...why not me?
Your Gut Can Be Influenced…Negatively
In most of the knowledge working industry, sustainable predictability is one of the key aspects of what it means to truly be nimble. When the way you work is well understood, the conversations around value can become your top priority. In the case of Rob, he was much better suited to adapt to changes in his schedule or the opportunity of new business because his workflow was so predictable.
Let me give you one more example.
I was working with a marketing team that had about six or seven blogs to write as part of an objective they were completing. I was observing one of their planning meetings where they were asked, "How long do you think it will take to finish all seven blogs." I don't know about you, but my Spider-Senses immediately tingled as I sensed the people in the room preparing the default answer we humans love to give. You know the one I mean..."About a week." My Spider-Agility took over and, without thinking, I uttered, "Let's look at the metrics and see what they have to say." Any thoughts on what the metrics indicated as to how long it would take for this team to finish seven blogs?
Three months.
Based on the way they previously finished blogs, the metrics showed the team that all seven blogs would be finished, with a 90% probability, in three months. Someone from the team quickly blurted out, "There's no way our stakeholders will agree to three months!"
That single thought is probably the number one influence for any of the situations where I have given the “done in a week” estimate. But that’s just bad behavior.
In this situation, however, I challenged the team with, "Just have the conversation and see what happens." They did, and something magical happened. The stakeholders didn't wail and gnash their teeth. They instead asked if brining in some extra writing help could improve that estimate. And they did bring in extra help, and it did improve the timeline. They finished the blogs in three weeks instead of three months.
Landing the Plane
That brings us to another value of a predictable workflow. You can have better conversations with your stakeholders that will give them the information they need to help get you the tools you need to better serve your customers.
If you are asking, "Tristan, how do we create a sustainably predictable workflow," you’re in luck. I want to share the tool that helped me coach teams to better predictability. I would normally start by coaching teams to simply start visualizing their work. However, I have found that before you can improve you may need to know where you are in your journey.
With that, I will leave you with a simple scale for understanding where you are in your journey. Thanks to Sonja at Nave for her help clarifying this. Everyone loves a good Maturity Model (shout out Hunter Yeagley) so I thought I would share one with you for predictability. I encourage you to, when you have time, look at the article and decide where you are in the Predictability Maturity model. Once you finish that, you can jump to this article for some steps to start improving predictability.
As always, if you have questions, feel free to leave a comment or reach out to me directly.
Until next week,
Keep on learning. Keep on growing.