Whether your next big initiative delivers value quickly or becomes a million-dollar lesson in what not to do comes down to one decision: what you do first. How you start with your idea—whether a work initiative or a personal project—shapes the whole thing.
Ideally, early work does 5 things:
- Early value — We want to start getting the benefits of our new thing as quickly as possible so we’re not just spending time and money for a potential future return. At its best, this means an initiative pays for itself almost from the beginning.
- Risk-mitigation — Whatever we build first should make the overall initiative more likely to succeed. We should have reduced some significant risk, not just pushed it down the road.
- Learning — Many details about the problem and the solution don’t emerge until we actually start trying to solve the problem. We want to learn if we’re doing the right thing, if our solution is going to work, and how long it’s actually going to take.
- Motivation — Making progress is motivating, as Teresa Amabile’s The Progress Principle showed nicely. Early work should give us a sense that we’re getting momentum on the initiative.
- Credibility — Finally, early work should make our stakeholders more confident in our ability to deliver and more willing to fund and support our ongoing work.
Here’s the problem: The way most people start big things fails at the first three goals and only gets the last two in a fleeting way.
Let’s look at two common approaches and our favorite alternative approach. We’ll consider how each one does on these 5 goals.
The first common approach is Comprehensive Analysis. It’s researching and planning everything you can before actually building anything.
The second common approach is the Quick Wins approach. It’s about just getting something done as quickly as possible.
And our favorite alternative approach is what we’ve named Active Planning in CAPED. Find the core complexity of your big idea, identify a narrow probe through that core complexity, and run the probe.
| Comprehensive Analysis | Quick Wins | Active Planning | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Early Value | No actual value delivered | Usually avoids complex areas that correlated with the real value of the initiative and focuses on intermediate steps | Because complexity and value tend to correlate, early work is usually the most valuable |
| Risk-mitigation | Some risk-mitigation if you can identify and avoid common mistakes | Limited because the focus on just getting something done leads to doing the least risky work | Reduces risk by tackling the most complex part of the initiative early |
| Learning | Some learning but not on complex areas | Avoids both analytical and experimental learning by starting with the familiar | Learning on the more complex part of the initiative |
| Motivation | It can be motivating to study something you’re curious about, but there’s no progress-related motivation | Some motivation from progress but it quickly drops when focus shifts to more challenging work | Progress motivation is strongest when you’re making progress on work that matters |
| Credibility | Documents produced from analysis can produce some credibility but it’s fleeting because they tend to go out of date quickly | Some credibility from early progress, but it’s fleeting when the focus shifts to more challenging work and velocity slows | Showing progress on the core value of an initiative maximizes credibility |
You can see why we like Active Planning so much! It’s the best way to achieve the 5 goals for early work on a big, meaningful initiative.
There are two key, not-so-intuitive moves to make Active Planning work: identifying the core complexity and shaping a narrow probe through that complexity. These aren’t skills most of us learned in school or on the job, but they’re learnable.
We help our clients master these key skills as part of our CSPO, Advanced CSPO, and CAPED training.
Register for an upcoming public workshop or schedule a free consultation to discuss how this approach can get your next initiative started right!
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