Creative Destruction and Taking Steps

Two key concepts from my "10 Guiding Principles for Surviving Complex Projects" post:

• Taking steps
  
  • A step in wrong direction is better than no steps in the perfect direction. Progress is more valued than perfection.
    
• Decriminalizing change:
  
  • Embrace creative destruction. Learning quickly is better than planning perfectly.
    
    

I recently had the chance to speak to a project team on these related topics. Together, they encapsulate crucial expectations about the performance of all Knowledge Warriors. Faced with an unclear directive and lack of specific direction, you must take steps to further the task. This doesn't mean that you should not seek additional clarity. You should try and try again. If clarity is not forth-coming, you should use best judgment. Pick an approach or direction: test that approach. We will never punish someone for taking steps—we can explore and improve your judgments, we can decide to reverse or redirect, but we cannot criticize motion in the face of uncertainty. That is always praise-worthy.

Implicit in this contract between management and staff is the open acceptance of creative destruction. Creative destruction means that 'rework' is not indicative of failure. Rework is a natural result of our process that encourages experimentation, learning by doing, and forward momentum. From kindergarten to corporation, fear of failure has been instilled. The wrong answer is punished. Not here. Wrong answers are expected and encouraged in the spirit of inquiry and step taking. This is what makes us great. Explore and be wrong. Revise and get right. Test and share. Expect to have some of your best work 'thrown away'. Expect to learn from every step you take. Expect that your managers and your teammates will be disappointed only if you fail to take steps.

Why do we think this is so important? Because we deal in the reduction of uncertainty, the resolution of chaos. Building and preserving forward momentum for a project is critical to vanquishing entropy and injecting clarity. Momentum, forward progress, is always hard to achieve. To stand and await direction is to give hard-won ground to the enemy, chaos. I have seen many great pieces of software languish because a project simply lost momentum. Don't allow it.