This is a Big Problem
I said back in October that shedding some light on succession planning would “be a focus of our content efforts here at Permanent Equity now through the end of the year.” Well, it’s nearly December and absent a few stray thoughts in this forum, we haven’t published much of anything on the topic. You might be wondering what happened to doing what we say we are going to do when we say we are going to do it?
Well, our silence on the matter has not been due to lack of effort. I know that because in our content team meeting the other day we reviewed a heavily-sourced, 23-page Google doc that linked to 30 other Google docs each exploring a key question associated with succession planning. That’s a lot!
When we kicked off this project, we were aware that there was some “boil the ocean” risk here. After all, succession planning is a big topic with lots of nuance and no definitive answers. And in reviewing a heavily-sourced, 23-page Google doc that linked to 30 other Google docs it became clear that some of that had become manifest. So what do?
The impact effort matrix is a well-known project management tool that mostly works great when it comes to prioritizing things. For example, it’s easy to see that high impact/low effort items are quick wins that should be done now while low impact/high effort items are morasses that should be put off or outsourced. And usually low impact/low effort items are tasks that can be knocked out along the way. Where the framework breaks down, however, is when it comes to high impact/high effort opportunities, which is precisely where creating a definitive guide to succession planning finds itself in that matrix.
A danger of the impact effort matrix is consistently optimizing for quick wins and deferring big ones. Because big things are worth doing and big problems are worth solving. That’s what makes them big!
Yet if something seems so big that’s unachievable, that’s also a problem, so when there is something in the high impact/high effort quadrant, try to do two things:
Break it into a larger number of high impact/lower effort items.
Start shipping those sooner rather than later.
The reason this works is because feedback is an accelerant to progress, but you only get feedback if you do something and show it to others. And so rather than publish a definitive guide to succession planning, we are going to publish short takes on some of those key questions associated with succession planning (beginning in December). Then maybe just maybe a definitive guide to succession planning will come out of it.
Hey, it worked with the white paper…
– Tim
