What To Do Instead of Looking Busy

A CEO replied to one of my newsletters on the dangers of over-utilisation in slasher films, saying that I hadn’t given the reader any guidance on what to do instead of measuring activity. Actually I did, but I definitely buried the lede!

The key is visible experimentation, or in other words accountability. I said, in the penultimate paragraph:

…[Y]ou need to stay by the fire and send out speedy, small probes into the darkness to find out what’s out there, before you make a run for the door.”

In other words, you need to be trying different small tests, learning from them super fast, and radiating the results as far and wide as possible. (A lot of people forget the last part, about staying visible!)

I’m sure that CEO has a dashboard with key metrics from all over the business on it. What if there was a daily update there on how many experiments the engineers had tried that day, and what the results were? Wouldn’t that make it much easier to see what’s happening and how to steer the tech team toward valuable waters?

I teach people to do this all the time. Sadly, too many companies don’t seem to know it’s possible, and that their engineers already know how.