Frode Odegard

So I am sitting at the Philadelphia airport on my way back from Oslo to San Diego, and I had this very unoriginal thought on the flight over here from Frankfurt.  I say unoriginal, because this has been written about and talked about for years, but it still warrants repeating.

A lot of organizations have a fairly high threshold for starting new projects, partially because a perceived failure could be career-damaging, but also because they operate almost without slack in terms of how they allocate resources.  New resources are not allocated very often, and high-level approvals may be required.  As a result, getting new initiatives off the ground can take a long, long time.  Meanwhile time, your competitors are out-innovating you.

Individuals also often hesitate to start new projects out of their comfort zone.  People are afraid of how they will feel about (and talk to) themselves if we they embark on something that very likely to result in failures big and small.  That’s classic perfectionism, of course, and it is an extremely effective barrier to growth and learning.

On the flight from Frankfurt, I spend 2-3 hours doing mind maps of everything I had observed and learned on my Norway trip.  There are a LOT of new projects emerging:  A short film project with my youngest sister, an Internet radio talk show, a potential new enterprise software startup for business process management involving an old friend who attended the Oslo GTD Tweetup, a joint venture with my dad’s company in Norway, etc.

With a conventional approach to launching new projects and ventures, these things wouldn’t see the light of day.  And most of them actually won’t, of course.  But the reason I have no hesitation in starting new projects is that I apply the same enthusiasm to killing bad ideas very quickly.  And no, that doesn’t make me a flake; I just recognize that as Linus Pauling so aptly put it, “The best way to have a good idea is to have many ideas”.

For me as an individual, my decision-making around killing off or suspending projects is part of my GTD Weekly Review. On an organizational level, it’s very similar – we can have clear agreements for how easy it should be to launch new projects, how much slack we need to set aside (e.g. 20% of people’s time) for experimental work and exploring new ideas, and we can be ruthless about killing off projects that won’t go anywhere, without any hard feelings.  There is always, always something valuable to learn, no matter the outcome.

Managing slack is a crucial aspect of being able to work this way.  You cannot, and you should not, allocate 100% of your time and money.  Unless you leave yourself plenty of maneuvering room, you simply cannot maneuver quickly enough to launch and kill new projects all the time. Right now my personal slack time is about 50% -- I always have lists of next actions to do, but my calendar leaves lots of maneuvering room for new opportunities that show up.   And the interesting thing is, because there IS room for them to show up, they DO.  When your head isn't full, there's more room for new stuff.  It's that simple.

Michael Bungay Stanier (@boxofcrayons) observes that to make room for more GREAT work, you have to make decisions about what GOOD work you will stop doing.  I think this is essential.  So if you feel you have no slack right now to take on new, fun, and potentially groundbreaking initiatives, take a hard look at ho-hum projects that you could scrap today.  You’ll be very glad you did.