Nobody Checked Who Set The Date

Chris Sims: Multiple times when I've been brought into organizations, and they're like, "Oh my goodness, we have these teams, and they're behind. I find out that the problem was, well, like somebody set them up to fail. Somebody set them up with a completely unrealistic, you know, goal or set of expectation. Devon Morris: Somebody set them up to fail, not a person being cruel. Somebody at some point picked a date, and then everybody downstream of that date spent months failing at that particular date. And every single conversation was about the team. Here's what I want you to sit with: that date actually has an author, a human being that's actually close to that, and on that, most teams are behind right now. Nobody in the room could tell you who that person is, or why they're solving a problem, or even why they pick that particular date. Look, here's the deal. Somewhere on this planet, there's a team that's behind, and somebody's meeting about it. They're always meeting about it, and it's a recovery meeting more than anything else. Like, what's the plan to get back on track? Can we work in multiple streams to get back on track? Do we actually cut scope? Do we need more people? And maybe, maybe, maybe there's the conversation about what the new date is, and are we confident if we can make that date, somebody's looking at a burn down. Somebody's looking at some report that's forecasting. Somebody says we need to pick up the pace. We need to get faster at doing whatever it is that we're doing. Somebody gently is asking where the team is right now. Be careful here, right? That is a completely reasonable meeting, and you have to run it. When you're behind, making a plan to not be behind is the most obvious thing to do, but watch what every question in that room has in common, and every one of them treats the date as a fixed thing, and the team as the actual variable that can shift. Nobody ever turns it around, and this is where you have to be really careful. This is the lagging team, and falling behind is a position, not a verdict. I'm Dr. Devon Morris, and this right here is a sidebar. See, on Tuesdays I sit down with somebody and we talk about something. Thursdays I take one thing that they said and go all the way, all the way in on it. And today, it's four words from Tuesday that took the whole show apart from the Inside, look. Here's the deal. One before, one thing before we go any place, right? Tuesday's episode was going to be called "AI Ate the Playbook. That was my title. That was my working title, and I seem to be getting this thing wrong week after week after week because the conversations don't seem to go to that exact place where I'm dreaming of them going, and I prefer to be in the moment of the conversation. Yeah, that's the title I had. I agree. I had it before I sat down, and I really liked that conversation. Then, then I sat with Chris, I did this exact thing, you know, 11 weeks ago. I titled the episode "Stop Blaming the Team, and the guest spent an hour defending leaders, and I stood right here and I changed it. I told you that I actually learned something. Then I did it again, and you know what? I'm gonna tell the truth. I'm probably gonna do it again, right? I'm not perfect by no stretch of the imagination. I am here to have conversations, and I want those conversations to go where they decide to go naturally, not where I deem that they go. Yeah, I have questions, and a lot of times I got to throw those questions out the window just because on an episode about setting a standard before you actually check the territory, it's really hard for me to check the territory about a person's experience before I get in the room with them. Look, I'm not going to. Make a joke of that at all, right? I set a bar for a conversation before I had it, and the conversation came back and told me the bar was wrong. That's what it is, right? And that's the whole subject of our next what 14, maybe 15 minutes together, right? And so it's just different. It's different than what I would have ever expected, and so the problem. Well, here's my problem with the recovery conversation. It's the wrong argument. It just really is, and I have to admit that to myself. And I don't mean the people having it are wrong. I mean it's the argument the situation was built to start, and it's the loudest thing in the room, and it's standing directly in front of the most important thing in the room. See, the second you accept that you're behind, the whole conversation becomes about closing the actual gap that exists, and closing the gap means one or two things: go faster or do less. That's all it really means. It doesn't go any further than that. You have a sprint, you cut scope, you add people, which you know can have its other things that go along with it. You find something to deal with in a triple constraint: scope, time, cost, something like that, and you keep moving, which, as Chris pointed out on Tuesday, usually makes it slower because now there's more people. Those expectations have an impact, and all of it is aimed at a number that somebody picked out the air that somebody just made up, and maybe with good reason, maybe with good intentions, maybe with real constraints, and I'm not denying those real constraints whatsoever. Maybe it was on a slide a quarter or two ago, and it's just gone. But but here's the expensive part. A recovery plan produces the evidence. Six months of missing a date is six months of documentation that this team can't hit those dates. That follows a person. That follows a team into reviews, into what's going to happen next, into how a person talks about themselves in the moment. If the date was never real, then you're just you just spent six months generating a permanent record of a team failing to test, but nobody ever validated in the first place. The tale is this, and it's why we spend time on this: a team that's genuinely slow, and a team that's measured against a fantasy, produces the same exact status report. Red, behind, slipping. They look identical, but the question you got to ask yourself is: Are the fixes the same, Chris Sims has been working with companies for 20 years before me, right? Like a lot of places I've been to. Chris Sims: I often describe this this situation. I've written about it a few times. I call it everyone is busy, but delivery is slow, right? And the situation is like we look around this place and everybody's working really hard. They're you know staying late. You know all right. Everybody's like super busy, and yet it's taking longer and longer and longer to get anything done. Yeah. And so the leaders definitely saw the symptoms, right? Because they remember like, hey, it wasn't that long ago when we were doing all the hands-on work, we got stuff. We got stuff done really quickly. Devon Morris: Everybody is really working hard, and it's taking longer. You got to hold on to that because those two facts are sitting right next to each other that entire episode. And here's the deal. Here's the part I actually want to give you. We use two words like they mean the same thing, and they don't. Slow and behind. See, slow is a fact about a team. It's about pace. How long it takes you to get a thing from an idea to someone utilizing it in some kind of way, turning it from a thought into something that's real. You can measure it without knowing anything about anybody's plan. Behind. Behind is not a fact about the team at all. Behind is actually a comparison. You got to recognize it as that. It's the distance between where you are and a date. And a date is not a measurement. It's a decision that somebody made. Period. Two different words. Two different jobs, and your status report only knows how to say anything at all about the second one. See, when you start really sitting back on it, right? And if I really just take my researcher hat and really put that into play, a team's performance isn't a property that team actually has. It's a relationship between the team and what they can do, and what the team has been asked to do. Those are two different things. Change either side, and the reading changes dramatically, and only one of those sides ever truly gets examined. Think about what behind requires to be in a real true statement. It requires a date, some position. The date requires the team, the person had a reason, a commitment, right? Maybe a customer commitment, right? A board meeting, a conference, a competitor, a guest, right? It had something that was the meat behind that statement. Every one of those reasons can actually be checked. Almost none of them are truly ever checked. See, the date gets a score at the very beginning, but somebody with the least amount of information will ever have to do the work that it takes to get to that date, because it happens at the beginning when we know the least amount of information, and then it hardens based on all the other things that touch it to some degree that the people that's doing the work may not have any control over whatsoever? It stops being about a decision, and it becomes a fact about that particular team. See, a date starts to have its own life as somebody's best guess, and quietly becomes a description of the people that actually is doing the work. See, that's different, and that's something that we have to deal with. So, you find the person. That's the move. Who sets the actual date? Great, right? And what I found over and over again is that you usually can't really get there. You ask the question, and it's going to boil down to some of the things we talked about earlier, right? It goes to something that someone inherited. You ask them, and it goes into a deck. You open up the deck, and it's been there for a quarter. Nobody lied. Nobody was being careless. It's just got accredited to some place, and every time it gets more accreditation, it becomes more of a statement of fact, and your team has been failing against it for two quarters, for three quarters, for whatever that time is. But again, where did that truly come from? See, it brings me to a different place-a second pair of words-and this one is why nobody catches it. Busy and moving. See, I go back to what Chris said. Everybody's working really hard, staying late. It's taking longer and longer to get anything done. Now, ask what that actually looks like from one level above. You know, from those people that's not a part of the team, it does look like effort. It looks like a team that cares. Busy is extremely visible. the The calendars that exist that that you can't get somebody's time on, right? The slack timestamps, right? The they they they're online until seven 8o'clock at night when they come in the office at 8o'clock in the morning. See, moving is almost invisible by comparison because moving is a direction over time, and you only see it if you look at the same thing. Twice, with some time that has lapsed in between them, so the room reads busy and calls it moving because they're not in the weeds of it. And here's the trap: if everybody is visibly busy and the work is still late. There's only one explanation left that fits it: the people, the team. They're not good enough. Something's wrong with them in some kind of way. That's how a date problem becomes a performance conversation, and the thing that you have to understand is that it's not through malice. It's not through malice. It's through math. It's through arithmetic. Effort high, output late. Therefore, capability is the gap. The only variable anybody's left with on the table is that. See, busy is a feeling. Moving is a direction. A team can be at maximum busy and 00, moving for the entire quarter, while every signal a leader sees is opposite of that. Okay, one more right because this is what should bother you. Busy is what a team does when it doesn't know which things matter, when priority is clear, people do the thing to get to home plate. People do the thing to get moving, and when it isn't, everybody is working on everything because working on everything is the only real safe move to actually make. See, Chris was being coached years ago, and Chris Sims: I remember I said, "I don't know. The harder I work, the behinder I get. And and for those leaders, it was really true, right? The harder they worked at this, the more they were holding the company back. Devon Morris: You hear that? The harder they worked, the more they held it back. Read that again. Understand that. Right. Listen to that. Right. And do it slowly, because it's the opposite of everything that you've been told about in terms of what to do when you're behind. It's the it's counterintuitive at the very least. Last pair, and we we will take this thing home. Right. So last pair. It's the one that actually explains why this happens to good leaders specifically, and it's strength and reflex. Right? See, Chris described the light bulb moment when a leader realizes that the exact thing that got them right here to the successful place is the thing that's holding them back, right? And here's why: a strength is something that works, right? You did it; it works for you time and time again, and it's gonna work for you again. Yes, 20 years of evidence seeing that. A reflex, right, is the same behavior after you stop checking. Same move, same confidence, and nobody has tested it against the current situation in years. They feel identical inside. That's the actual problem. There's no Sensation, right? That distinguishes this works from this used to work. Let me repeat that because I want you to really understand that there is nothing that distinguishes that thing that you feel about this works from this used to work, and when you're behind, you reach for the strongest move that's available to you, which is by definition the one you've stopped examining. Pressure doesn't make you check your assumptions. Pressure makes you reach for the things that are familiar to deal with the things that have gotten harder. So, all right, here's what I need you to do. Come Monday, right? None of these things are going to cost you any money whatsoever. None of them you need permission to actually utilize, right? Not why we are behind. Ask yourself this: Who set this date, and what were they solving for? Then follow that thread. Whoever you ask, ask them the same question. Keep going until you hit the name and a reason, or you run out of people. Right? I mean, you can't go forever on it. Right? You know, it's almost like using utilizing the five whys. Right? Just get to that place where you get some solid answer. Write that down because the trail ends at that particular point. That's your finding. It's five to 10 minutes with someone, right? By the time you get down that first or second ask, that second or third ask, you'll have it. You will really have it. Here's the three things that can happen, and all three of them are useful. A person, right, and a real constraint comes up. A person, and they don't know. They give you a shrug, right? Or you have a place where there's no author. You'll get usually one of those things. If you don't get one of those things, you know, reach out to me. Let's talk about it, right? Then it becomes about you really having two columns, right? On that left column is everything the team spent time on last month, and that right column only the things measurable, closer to being done for the past four weeks. That's it. I want you to understand that gap between those two columns because that's not a performance problem. That is likely, more than likely, a priority problem, and it's yours. It's yours to deal with, right? Because that left column, if that left column is full, and that right column is thin, your team isn't slow. Your team doesn't know which things matter the most, and they're protecting themselves by doing everything that they can to touch every single thing in some kind of way. So maybe you don't complain about it, okay? And that's really that column thing is the second thing I want you to do. Do the first one, right? Or go and ask the question. But that second thing, I want you to do that, right? Because the third thing is going to ask you, right? Slow one thing down on purpose. That's what the third thing is going to do, because it's counterintuitive, right? And and Chris prescribed it. They really did. When you're behind the instinct to work later, to work harder, they really said that's exactly backwards. They talked about sharpening your saw, and that you don't have time to sharpen your saw, even though you need to continually still cut wood. You can't work your way out of a shift, right? You can slow down and look around, maybe experiment, right? Get yourself in a direction that you need to go in. Get yourself moving, you know, because I want you to pick the thing you cancel because you're behind, right? The retro, the the pairing time, the whatever that thing is that you cancel because you're behind, and it might just be the thing that you need. Pull it back for two weeks. If it feels irresistible, the feeling is the point, right? It's the reflex talking, and you're testing it is the point, and I want you really, truly to test it out. Okay, now here's what would make me wrong about this because I want to be able to. I want you to actually be able to check this instead of just taking my words, right? I want you to go trace that date, right? Think about those three things and come back right. The name, the reason, right? A person, a constraint that genuinely exists that that they're solving for, right? A customer contract, right? Could be it, right? A regulatory window, a real thing with the real edge, right? Then the data is real. If you have that, it's real. You you know you got something that you really truly does tested. It's not something that people grabbed out the air. Now maybe the regulatory department grabbed it out the air, but that's a different thing, right? That could mean you're actually behind, right? And this episode is not about you at that point. It really isn't. Go have the pace conversation. Clean up everything that you need to clean up, and go from there. A name and no reason-that's a little bit different. Okay, this is somebody picked it, and you can't reconstruct why. The common one, the easy one-it's the single honest conversation with one person who will probably be relieved you actually asked. Right, that right there is different. Right, if there's no name at all associated with it, I mean, no name at all associated with this, then it came from somebody's imagination. They don't want to admit to it, right? It came from a deck. It came from a hallway conversation. It happened a long time ago, and people don't know where to attribute it, right? Your team is following something that nobody signed up for. I guess it was signed up for, but nobody knows who to really take that back to to make an adjustment to it, even if it's real, right? Those are three possible answers, three possible findings. The point isn't that the date is the date is always fake. I'm I'm not by any stretch of the imagination saying that because I definitely have been associated with dates that that cannot change, right? There's a reason behind it, and we normally can see that reason. We can name that reason, and it's there. But those other two situations, the point that you never once checked, and it's costing you only 15 minutes to find out what's the real answer. Okay, check that. Now here's the deal: falling behind is a position, not a verdict. I will always say that in the show because that is what we are really here to talk about. And a lot of what puts a team in that position isn't their pace at all. It just isn't. It's a comparison, and you got to remember that a comparison to a date that a person chose on a particular day when they knew less than what they know now, and that nobody has maybe looked at since that particular time, see your team is not slow because the status report turned red. They're behind. Well, those are different words, and only one of them is about them. So before you build a recovery plan. Go out and find out who set the date. Get an understanding of the reason behind why that date was set. It, and if you can't find a person, you may not have a problem-a team problem at the very least. If you can't find a reason, you may not have a problem at all. You have a number with no author, no reason that your team is falling behind in this public space, and that's something that you need to go deal with. Look, if you want to talk about what it looks like on your team. Go to thelaggingteam.com/start. That's thelaggingteam.com/start. This is a sidebar. Now you know where to look. Oh yeah, one more thing. Before Tuesday, one job. Right. Find out the date on your team. You know that that is behind. Trace it to a particular person. Ask the who said it. Understand what they were solving for. Follow that to the end of the thread. Then come tell me where the trail actually ended. Was it with a name and a reason? Was it with a name and no reason at all, or you couldn't find anything whatsoever. Look, put this in the comments, right? Wherever you're listening, find me on LinkedIn. I want to know. I'm gonna read the comments, right? I want to see if I'm right or if I'm wrong. You're gonna genuinely let me know. So, so next Tuesday, we get into what it cost a person, right, to carry that change, right, and what they didn't. But I want to have that conversation with you. I truly want to have that conversation with you. So on that note, enjoy yourselves and have a good one. I look forward to seeing you in the comments.