You're spot-on. The feeling is: urgency is bad and must be avoided, but any good system has no urgency built into it. So if you have a well-run process, there would be no urgency. Of course, this is not exactly practical, and that's the biggest source of disruption to regular processes - lack of elasticity to urgency.
Maybe I’m weird in this, but when I use WSJF or cost of delay, there is always a time criticality component. The question is how sophisticated it needs to be. Often it is sufficient to ask if there is a nonlinear element to the cost of delay over time - maybe a step function, maybe exponential - and then estimate the relative value of the nonlinearity compared to more tangible value. I think this is written about either by Reinertsen or Leffingwell.
I think people miss the meaning of planning, especially short term one. When you have plan to deliver certain things over the next day or week, that should not be urgent, but rather strategic and proactive. But when this day or week are about to pass with failure to deliver on the plan, this should be taken with some sense of urgency to succeed with bringing planning into reality.
This, compared to reactive urgency, when something has to be fixed, this way or another.
This really struck a chord. I think that we spend a huge amount of effort thinking about how to get out of a state of urgency. Maybe we should embrace the reality of reactive urgency and be explicit about the level of effort we will intentionally put into it.
What an amazing piece! The importance of time and sense of urgency (including when not to) for being strategic seems indeed be at best tacitly considered. We can benefit from making it more explicit!
You're spot-on. The feeling is: urgency is bad and must be avoided, but any good system has no urgency built into it. So if you have a well-run process, there would be no urgency. Of course, this is not exactly practical, and that's the biggest source of disruption to regular processes - lack of elasticity to urgency.
Maybe I’m weird in this, but when I use WSJF or cost of delay, there is always a time criticality component. The question is how sophisticated it needs to be. Often it is sufficient to ask if there is a nonlinear element to the cost of delay over time - maybe a step function, maybe exponential - and then estimate the relative value of the nonlinearity compared to more tangible value. I think this is written about either by Reinertsen or Leffingwell.
Nailed it.
I think people miss the meaning of planning, especially short term one. When you have plan to deliver certain things over the next day or week, that should not be urgent, but rather strategic and proactive. But when this day or week are about to pass with failure to deliver on the plan, this should be taken with some sense of urgency to succeed with bringing planning into reality.
This, compared to reactive urgency, when something has to be fixed, this way or another.
Good piece, thought provoking. Thanks!
This really struck a chord. I think that we spend a huge amount of effort thinking about how to get out of a state of urgency. Maybe we should embrace the reality of reactive urgency and be explicit about the level of effort we will intentionally put into it.
Built on this thought. What if the urgent need is the strategy? https://open.substack.com/pub/octoshark/p/the-urgency-industrial-complex?r=29etmk&utm_medium=ios
I found this read to be both strategic and urgent :)
Especially as decisions speed up and opportunity windows close earlier, we do need a clear and value-based way to talk about this.
Are you hip to Applied Information Economics? It's not quite what you're getting at either, but it's the closest framework I could think of.
What an amazing piece! The importance of time and sense of urgency (including when not to) for being strategic seems indeed be at best tacitly considered. We can benefit from making it more explicit!
These are particularly nuanced insights, John. Thank you.