AUA: How To Make the Hard Call and Shut Something Down

Rodney Evans (0:02)

Hey, y'all, welcome back to At Work with The Ready. I'm Rodney Evans, and that guy is my friend, Sam Spurlin.

Sam Spurlin (0:08)

Hello, everyone, and hello, especially to you, Rodney.

Rodney Evans (0:11)

Thanks, Sam. Every other week, we tackle one tough, thought-provoking listener question and give you a few ideas that we hope are helpful.

So let's dive in. Sam, what do you have for us this week?

Sam Spurlin (0:22)

This week's question is, how can orgs get better at ripping proverbial Bandaids off?

What necessary pain is being delayed to the detriment of the org? What short-term fixes are you hanging on to, pretending they're still doing something when, in fact, it's more a sense of comfort?

Rodney Evans (0:43)

Yeah.

I mean, there's just like enough pain in this life, don't we all want to delay it a little bit? I have a weird answer to this, and I'm actually really curious of your take on my answer, Sam. Yeah. Something that has happened at The Ready, there were some big and fairly hard decisions to make for a variety of reasons that are not important to this conversation. And we, obviously we're small, but I think you can do this at scale too. We really put a clock on when we were going to make the decision, and then we really didn't talk about it a lot in between.

And I actually found that very helpful, because when you have to make a difficult change of some kind, or when something isn't working, or when you're asking someone to step out of a role, or something like that, for me at least, it can be very easy for that to like take up a lot of psychological space and just like burn a lot of fucking calories in my brain of like, should I or shouldn't I? And how will I know? And what will I do? And when should I do it? And what should I look for? And what data do I need and who should I talk to? And like just sort of saying like, we know that we're gonna have to make a change. We wanna see how this month goes or this quarter goes or this person does in this project or whatever the thing is, specifically not as a delaying tactic, but truly like we are not ready to make this call right now. And then being like, but on June 1st, we're gonna. Right. And then I am a person, because I can be prone to anxiety, who will like bring it up and be like, what do we think about this? And having people around me be like, but babe, no, we're not, it's not June 1st. We're not doing this right now, is actually a very helpful way, I think, to neither just procrastinate, nor continually ruminate, nor avoid the Bandaid all together. Because it's like, we all know when it's happening, what we're not gonna do is spend a lot of cycles worrying about it before it's ripoff time.

Sam Spurlin (3:03)

Right. Yeah, you're talking about like a pre-commitment, basically.

And deciding ahead of time, like, okay, these are kind of the metrics that we're gonna look at. These are the things that we are going to consider, and we're gonna let it run until this time, and we know we'll come back to it. I think that makes a lot of sense. What I was jotting down here is that, I think even Bandaid moments benefit from experimentation, but the anti-pattern to get away from is basically convincing yourself to do experiments forever, to try to get away, to try to avoid. Yeah, like, we'll eventually find our way out of this. I think this is just another version of what you were talking about with pre-commitment. One other thought is that I think there's something about being good at minimizing the surface area of what we have to rip. I think sometimes when things feel really bad and it feels like, okay, we need to make a major decision, I wonder if sometimes we over-correct and that Bandaid that we're ripping off is like a huge one, when really a more direct, maybe a little bit more painful, Bandaid in a smaller area will have a better effect.

Rodney Evans (4:14)

I really like that. You reminded me, the other part of this question that I thought was interesting was they said, what short-term fixes are you hanging on to pretending they're still doing something when in fact it's comfort? I also think this is a really hard thing, but your experimentation comment reminded me of this.

This is where disciplined experimentation looks like really not ignoring fucking ROI.