Timing is Key - If you wait until it's obvious, it's too late | Hacker News Reader

Timing is Key - If you wait until it's obvious, it's too late

standalone-sysadmin.com

27 pointsMPSimmons14 comments

Anyone can respond to emergencies in front of them. It's the great ones that can see ahead to upcoming challenges and take care of them proactively. Unfortunately, it's the emergency-du-jour people that always seem to be saving the day, while the proactive ones get less attention. Good managers need to see responding to constant emergencies as a sign of negligence, not heroism.

Well, despite the best of planning emergencies happen. Sometimes these are the best moments to talk about and learn what it means to be proactive and preventative. The question is (and maybe you have an answer to this is) how do you measure and acknowledge good planning, foresight? Hindsight is easy because you have an outcome you can analyze. But foresight, what could have should have or didn't, that's hard to make concrete. I guess if there are other patterns happening in the world (ex. Emergencies) that you could compare to that is a good opportunity to explicitly show workers the contrast between reaction and initiative, and a good example to use in justifying acknowledgement if good planning and preventative measures happened. I feel like some management practice, strategy exists here somewhere. Please enlighten.

I agree, it's very hard to measure good planning and foresight. I also definitely agree that emergencies happen, even to people that plan well. My main point was that there are some people who are constantly responding to emergencies, more than would happen by chance, and they're easy to recognize.

tjmaxal made a good point in another comment about specifically focusing on big picture for one month per year. I think it'd be useful to do that on different levels (one month per year, one week per month, etc). Managers could definitely measure time spent on big picture projects or automation versus handling crises. There are people I've worked with that spent 80% of their time handling crises. That should be a huge warning sign that aren't planning properly, or they're cleaning up somebody else's mess. Either way, that's a situation that'd be worth poking into.

We actually focus in on the big picture at a department level and look at how each of our departments are measuring up to our set global goals, mission, and vision. It can get a bit philosophical at times but it really helps in unifying our company.

At my company we have decided to implement a continuous quality improvement plan, which basically means every year for at least one month we focus on the big picture for each operational group we have. It's a bit like painting the golden gate bridge, by the time you have finished in one direction it's time to start over again in the other direction.

That's a cool idea. My company has significantly fewer groups, I suspect, but I like the idea of not just touching on a problem, but really being able to dig in and fix things.

Do you think you could flesh this out a little more or link to some good examples of what this looks like in practice?

Sure, basically c suite gets together with department heads once every two weeks with a focus on an individual departments current challenges,growth issues, long term issues, etc. The meeting at the first of the month is to outline and identify what needs to change. The second meeting of the month is to discuss how to implement/how implementation is going for the changes we outlined as necessary in the first meeting. In practice this means every department gets it's long term issues discussed at least once a quarter. This is in addition to weekly dept meetings that update c suite on current issues. We are a medium sized organization just on the cusp of being to big to handle this kind of structure with only a small group of people. I would imagine a lot of this kind of structured focus could be handled with a smaller number of people involved if your company was smaller. Also this seems to occur pretty naturally at many start ups which are very conscious of their planned growth.

If you'd like theoretical underpinnings for it in addition to the example, it sounds a lot like the "continual service improvement" step of the ITIL v3 framework--which is an open standard (http://www.itilversion3.com/final/itil_v3_continual_service_...).

I can't really say whether it's MBA wankery or useful business process, though.

As someone who has been trading stocks recently, this statement is quite accurate. There is the phenomenon that a positive momentum position suddenly becomes 'hot' and people want it; at that point, it's now obvious, and generally too late.

The NYC-area snowstorm is a timely reminder of solving problems proactively. Thanks for sharing MPSimmons.

...unless you're dealing with the government, banks, or car dealerships.

Its a key factor of mammalian brain power: preparing for the future.

See Boyd's work on OODA or ask a Go/Chess person about tempo.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com