Binoculars and Microscopes: How to Fix Broken Projects

Many projects struggle due to problems with vision, process or a dissonance between the two. Is it possible to diagnose these issues and potentially attempt to treat them?

Vision is a horribly wanko business term which is frequently deployed in the service of seeming insightful or profound - it's often associated with pompous "strategy sessions", "Start with Why" Napoleonic grandiosity or endlessly debated slogans rendered down to noise by means of repetition and reproduction.

Instead, let’s think about it as “actually bothering to look where you’re going“. Every project needs a sense of potential, as well as a horizon to walk towards. So, visions should be both big and specific. If the vision is too small, it’ll lack the power to inspire and come off as apologetic or trivial. If it’s too vague, it’ll become subject to a confused spectrum of interpretation and devolve into a watery whim.

How do you get to a viable vision in the first place? One direction - common in creative endeavours - involves playing around until a discovery is made. The brilliant electronic musician Mr Bill describes his process as "reactive": starting off with exploration, sound design and random fragments then building in a particular direction as he goes. This can work well in all fields, as long as a concrete vision eventually materialises.

Distinct, but not unrelated, is the “stumbling” method: a problem hits you personally, and a system is built to resolve it. Airbnb, Warby Parker, Spanx, Biro—there are countless stories like this. This isn’t exclusive to business: you can identify a “problem” with a particular genre or style that prevents it from resonating with you specifically (and, ideally, with a broader audience). Hearthstone’s simplification and streamlining of Magic: The Gathering is a strong example from games.

Another avenue is more abstract. “Providing this service for this audience at this scale” is a decent framing device. However, this kind of analytical vision often requires significant testing to establish whether it has any real connection to material reality.

Here’s a tricky thing about wielding the binoculars and taking the long view: it is often best done in a low-conscientiousness, unreasonable, wildly optimistic, potentially egocentric mode. There are ways to temper this—and those are important—but continually finding something worthwhile to aim at often boils down to big, unreasonable, hubristic ideas. As such, visions need to be protected from excessive pragmatism and “common sense.”

When vision is absent or occluded, a collection of symptoms tends to appear:

• Projects feel rudderless, ambiguous, or confused; pivots and distractions abound

• “Why are we putting in all this effort?” comes up far too often

• Excessive revisions or edits

• Lack of aggression: projects feel flimsy or unexciting; box-ticking and business-as-usual dominate

• Lack of resilience: crises loom larger because there is no clear course to stick to

• “Hyperoperation”: wheels spin, work is generated, but progress is questionable

Fading or absent vision is difficult to escape. It requires space and time for recalibration and a collective examination of purpose and incentives. This can be an opportunity for a reactive move: the project to date has generated information, resources, signals, or possibilities, and with a short period of introspection these can be used to establish a more solid direction. If there is nothing to work with at all, external testing with potential customers or audience members may be required.

Returning to the source can also help. Figuring out what got you started can provide clues as to where you should go next. In games consultancy, I sometimes ask teams what motivated them to begin development in the first place—what experiences as players they wanted to recreate. This often reignites something that has gone missing: a spark of emotional connection that restores the desire to act.

A change of environment, or the addition of new constraints—time, materials, resources—can also provide a much-needed kick up the arse to a faltering direction. Rick Rubin discusses this in The Creative Act; much of it comes down to forcing focus and excluding extraneous possibilities.

What about the other end of the magnification scale?

In business, operations has always been an awkward blend of the systemic and the tactical: building the machine, then oiling it in various places, hopefully noticing when parts fall off at inconvenient times.

A crucial part of managing process is mapping it against vision. Can we deliver what we need with the resources we have? Map-making must be grounded and realistic; it cannot become an elaborate performance in its own right. Priorities need to be set against both existential requirements and the functions critical to delivering the output.

There will be goals and objectives, but these should be treated as lagging indicators rather than dogma. Each period should have a small number of clear targets. A focus on standards and output can be a strong posture—The Score Takes Care of Itself is instructive here, if you have any tolerance for sports!

High conscientiousness, attention to detail, and a grounded humanistic perspective help, but so do systemic rigour and planning. I would not go so far as to recommend pessimism, but a large dose of scepticism is often appropriate. “This will probably go wrong at some point, and I should think about how” is a reasonable default stance. Periodic switching between top-down (“Are we doing this properly?”) and bottom-up (“What problems are the team having this week?”) views is necessary to form a comprehensive picture.

When the process of a project is out of kilter, the following issues can manifest:

• Responsibilities and deadlines are unclear; slippage and poor quality work follow

• Information is hard to find or ambiguous

• Tasks frequently fail to close, and when they are completed, recognition is scarce

• Stuff stops happening: invoices go unpaid, business is lost, insurance lapses, support tickets remain unresolved

Fixing these problems requires a dual-pronged attack of immediate urgency and strategic repositioning: stop the bleeding, look around, consult the vision, make a new plan and then rebuild the system.

A methodical approach looking at each operational area in turn and choosing one high priority issue to fix can be a great starting point. This will require investigation and consultation with team members, or simply a careful examination of what's actually happening in the case of very small teams or solo projects.

Simplifying and clarifying goals can also help. KPIs and similar measures are often adopted enthusiastically, then blitzed to the point of bewilderment. Keep them simple and review progress week by week. We live in a culture that is permanently afraid of pernicious "micromangement" - in reality, careful attention and direction is often a more helpful emphasis.

Don’t be afraid to just ask individual people - both customers and team members - what the problems are. You might feel that this risks producing a thousand different responses but in fact useful trends will emerge very quickly if you take the time to do this in a direct way.

We often expect leaders to excel at both vision and process. This is usually a fantasy. Even highly capable founders and creatives tend to skew one way or the other.

As a result, maintaining a strong dialogue between these poles is essential. Each must account for the other. Regular contact, active listening, and mutual respect matter because it is easy for operations to undermine strategy through nitpicking, or for visionaries to overshoot and pivot in ways that risk breaking the organisation’s surface tension.

On creative projects, we need to aim high and push for something impactful. Shy and retiring won’t cut it - we need to be emphasising the emotional payload for the audience. At the same time, we have to boil that ambition down into a day-to-day operational cadence that will let us get there in one piece. All of this requires balance and the flexibility to alter our focal length when needed.

If things are going wrong, take a look at the initial impetus first: what is the solution we are providing or the feeling we want to create? If this is unclear, give it space to breathe and take a look at the resources that are available right now: things might have changed since we started.

Once that’s established, zoom in and look at the details: who is unhappy and why? What is failing today and where can we apply pressure to the wound? What systems do we need in place to stop that happening in future and guide the process back towards the goal?

None of this is easy - in fact, it's the whole game. Instead of blaming bad leadership, disorganisation or lazy workers, we should be carefully examining the situation from a range of perspectives, then figuring out a clear line of action to follow.