Why everything takes longer than we think it will

Think about the countless times that you've been wrong about estimating the length of time it would take to do something, to get somewhere, or complete some type of task or project.

Something always goes wrong along the way, some unforeseen circumstance puts you or the people and systems you are counting on behind schedule, or we simply, (and fairly consistently), are overconfident in our own ability to gets things done in a given amount of time.

Why is that the case so often, why do is seem like we are constantly explaining away missed deadlines, or alternatively, griping about the inconvenience that other people's missed deadlines have on us? Well, it turns out there might be a (sort of seems fake but I am going to pretend it is scientific), law that will help us to explain this all-too-frequent phenomenon.

It's a simple little observation that is called 'Hofstadter's Law', named after American professor and author Douglas Hofstadter and it reads as follows:

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

Even the more famous and fictional Hofstadter is in on the game:

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

— Leonard Hofstadter (@TheRealLeonardH) October 25, 2012

The 'law' tries to describe and help us understand just how difficult it is to accurately estimate the time it will take to complete tasks of any meaningful complexity. And the kicker is the law is recursive in nature - even taking the law into account doesn't prevent us from failing to underestimate the time needed to complete complex tasks.

It is a kind of cruel equation - we think task 'A' will take four hours - we take into account Hofstadter's Law and add a couple of hours to the estimate - but Hofstadter's Law itself kicks in AGAIN, to remind us it will STILL take longer than we estimate.

What can we do about this seemingly irrational but often true observation about our weakness in estimating the time required to complete tasks?

Maybe we should think first about the available time we have, and what realistically, and based on past experience we can reasonably expect to accomplish in that time. Rather than looking at a complex project, or even a series of tasks and trying to count up how much time they will take, (and inevitably underestimating), thinking about the available time first, will force us to think more critically and probably come up with more reasonable expectations of what can be accomplished. 'What can you get done in three hours?' is a much easier question to answer than 'How long will it take you to write this article?'

So the next time you are faced with the prospect of estimating how long it will take to complete a complex undertaking remember the wise words of our friend Hofstadter, and do your best to not fall into the trap of thinking 'This time it will be different', because it never is.

What's your day look like?

If it looks anything like the day awaiting our friend 'Karen' here in the image on the right hand side of this post, then I can state with near certainty, that your day is going to stink.

The image is from an Apple ad for the iPhone 4s and its virtual assistant Siri, that I noticed on the back cover of the April 2012 edition of Men's Journal magazine. Why the ad copy decided to show 'Karen's' day on the iPhone calendar app instead of someone more likely to be a Men's Journal reader, (Dave, Stan, LeRoy, maybe), is the obvious question that came to mind. But putting that minor detail aside, (I'm guessing the same ad probably ran in lots of publications, so trying to nail each outlet's demographic might not have been important), the other thing that jumped out at me when I saw the ad was how horrible Karen's day is shaping up to be, and how that many of the folks reading this post on a Monday morning are looking at similar, dispiriting kinds of schedules.

This is an Apple ad, the paragon of cool, the leader in the latest technology, the company that has defined innovation, engineering, and design for the last 5+ years, and what do we get from the ad touting the wondrous capabilities of the new iPhone and the magical Siri?

A rundown of the classically over scheduled, back-to-back set of meetings where people are talking about things that have already happened, and with little opportunity to actually spend some time thinking, kind of Monday that so many of the managers and leaders in organizations have in front of them today, and probably for most of the rest of the week.

Apple wants you to ask Siri 'What's my day look like?' Well the 'day' they offer up for our pal Karen, full of status meetings, project briefings, and production updates, and a I doubt it will really happen lunch with 'Emily', (I have $100 that says Karen eats at her desk 9 days out of 10), pretty much renders the wonder and potential of new tools like Siri pretty much moot.

In fact, if Karen realized she was staring down a Monday so uninspiring, maybe she would have asked Siri to phone in sick and tried again tomorrow.

So, what's your day look like? Full of updates, status, and briefings like Karen here? 

Or will you actually have time to do something cool?

Happy Monday!

The Six-Month Sprint

I am sure many of you, like me, have spent at least some time in your professional careers preparing long-range business forecasts of some kind. Whether they were for financial metrics like revenue, margins or cash flow; operational metrics like market share, customer count, or inventory; or even human capital measures like future headcount needs, impacts on profitablilty of future salary adjustments, or long-term benefits cost trends - it is safe to say that at lease some kind of future-focused planning is a long-accepted fact of business.

And while the necessity and value of planning, to be able to effectively assess current baseline data and results, fold in business objectives, sprinkle in competitive challenges, add a dash of environmental and cultural factors, and we typically realize that even our well-reasoned, clearly articulated, and thoroughly documented plans and forecasts often fail to accurately predict and ultimately reflect what actually happens.

It is the old line about military battle plans - 'No battle plan survives its first contact with the enemy'.

And so it is with most business plans and long-range forecasts as well. Your plans don't exist in a vacuum - the competition has its own plans, that big customer that counts for 32% of this year's revenue forecast may go belly up, or at least squeeze you on price, 'star' employees that you think are slated to move into really important roles may leave. As with most planning processes, the second you hit 'print', it is likely something or some assumption that underlies the plans themselves has changed.

The recommendation certainly is to not stop planning, to simply toss up your hands and give up, since the business and economy are moving so fast for anyone to really successfully plan for, but rather to be a little more reasonable about not only your ability to accurately (and reasonably) assess and predict the future. Spending too much time on 5-year plans of dubious merit is not normally a solid use of time.

I recently read an interesting piece on the Co.Design blog called, 'How Can You Strategize For the Future, When You Can't See Beyond 18-Months?',  that suggests for design firms, (and I am sort of extrapolating this to those of us that do Human Capital and workforce planning of any type), that it is really impossible to plan out a design strategy any farther out than 18 months. In fact, the author suggests - 'Beyond 18 Months, the future is anybody's guess'. The world, the markets, technology - these factors and others simply move too quickly today.

Not sure you agree with the '18 Months' figure? Let me ask you then, have you in your organization, or even in your personal and professional life spent time working out your iPad strategy? About how long has the iPad been out? And even just as it was coming out, did anyone, (besides Apple), have a clue about how transformative the device would be?

The last point I wanted to mention from the CoDesign piece was the idea of something called 'The Six-Month Sprint' - a process where development and design processes, (mindful of the long term planning horizon limitation of 18 months), are collapsed into six-month cycles. Sure, for typical firms and products this is a tight window, and mistakes and tradeoffs have to be made, but in the opinion of the author, these shorter planning and development cycles are simply the only sensible and practical reaction to a business climate that increasingly defies prediction.

So my question to you is - How far out into the future do you attempt to plan for things like headcount numbers, labor costs, workforce mix, organizational capability needs, hiring plans, etc.?

And, if your planning horizon is longer than say 18 months, how confident are you in the accuracy of those plans?

Is long-term planning really a thing of the past, a relic of a simpler, and lost forever age?

Trying to See the Future

We are always planning -  people, teams, organizations all spending lots of time looking ahead, trying to figure out what the future holds for themselves, their projects, and their enterprises.

I recently read an excellent list of the four different approaches that people and organizations take when it comes to assessing what the future may hold, the abridged version is something like this:

1. The future is pretty mysterious and kind of scary.  Let's just see what happens and hope things turn out all right. Besides, we have been pretty successful for a long time doing things the way we do them. We can react if things do really change.
2. We think about the future, sit down and to make some plans about what the future may hold, but conclude that the future (at least for us) looks mostly like the present, and our current strategies, plans, and processes should be just fine. We really don't seriously consider any alternatives to our 'tomorrow looks like today' conclusion.
3. We realize that the future will look quite a bit unlike the present, but what that actually means for us we are not sure.  So we create numerous different scenarios, and develop some strategies for managing for each scenario.  It would be great if we could know more precisely which scenarios are most likely to occur, but we really don't know.
4. We don't want to wait for the future to happen to us, we will design strategies and take actions to actively shape our future.  We will proactively create the environment that will give us the best chance for success.

The original list was written in the context of organizational innovation centered around actual product and service offerings, and how firms' approach to planning for the future affects their ability to innovate.

But I think these same 'future views' are also found in organizations approach to developing their workforce strategies as well.  Think about how these play out in a workforce or talent management context:

1. Future is scary, no real plan to change strategy

This will only work provided all of the following scenarios pan out:

There will be no material change in the competitive environment for the organization's talent.  The demand for and the supply of talent will be more or less constant.  No external factors (demographics, regulatory, new entrants to the market) will significantly alter the current state.  People will continue to be happy in their roles in the organization.

2. We are pretty sure the future looks like the present

This is mostly similar to option 1, but at least we have given some thought to the (unlikely) possibility that the environment will change in ways that will impact our workforce and our business.  So if for example, all of a sudden consumers tastes do change, or the passage of Universal Health Care frees up 25% of our high performers to seek new opportunities, we might, maybe, kind of have some idea of what to do.

3. We know we need to plan for variability in the future, so we develop multiple scenarios

Not a bad approach really, the organization can develop workforce contingency plans to account to rising demand, falling demand, increases in qualified candidates, or decreases in qualified candidates. But there is also the effects of the economy, national and local legislative changes, potential mergers and acquisitions, increases in external competition, etc.  Man, that is a lot of variables to plan for.  Hopefully these scenario and contingency plans can cover all the possible 'futures'.

4. The heck with it, we will make our own future

This approach is probably the hardest to pull off, but when you think about it the only one that makes sense.  There is no way that you can react fast enough for the inevitable changes without having some pre-planning done (Toyota), the future will almost certainly not look like the present (right MySpace?), and no matter how much scenario planning you do, you can never account for all the possibilities that will affect your workforce and your talent strategies.

Building a strategy and developing plans to proactively shape the future may seem risky, but in some ways it is the least variable approach.  If things do go not according to plan, (and they probably won't), the organization would have at least developed some contingencies and will have at least the chance to adapt quickly enough. 

Simply waiting, hoping, or reacting to what the future holds will only work for so long, and if you are going to flame out, better to do that on your own terms.

Secret Plans

Last night on the HR Happy Hour show it seemed like everyone had some Secret Plans that they alluded to, but for one reason or another were not comfortable or able to share.

That is entirely good. Flickr - Robin Gallagher

I like the sound of 'secret plans', to me it means initiative, industry, curiosity.  Folks not simply accepting the status quo, knuckling under to the crap economy, or spending every waking hour playing Rock Band or World of Warcraft.

Don't get me wrong, a little bit of Rock Band is fine, but please people - playing a video game is not the fast track to success and fame.

So I think we should call 2010 the year of Secret Plans.  Whether those plans are for new businesses, jobs, books, blogs, projects, or whatever - I hope that they all come to fruition this year.

And when you are ready to unveil your Secret Plans to the public, know that you will be welcome to come on the HR Happy Hour show to share with the community.

Let's all have a fantastic 2010!