the gift of scarcity
Abundance can make you sloppy. Scarcity can make you move. The teams I’ve enjoyed and admired most seem to zip around with some version of the belief that “there’s no [time] to waste!” You could replace “time” with any other resource.
The point is the team has decided, likely because a leader decided, that the scarcity of something critical is, in fact, a beautiful constraint. They embrace a specific and chosen form of scarcity. They believe in that scarcity, feel duty toward it, develop disciplines in service to it. It becomes a defining feature of the place, the work, and the beliefs that bind them.
A culture builds up around that constraint. The tendrils of the jasmine wend around the chain links. Come springtime, there’s a blossoming wall of perfume instead of a mass of weeds on the ground.
This can happen at the fundamental level of organizational mission and code. You can also experiment with it at the level of a project.
What if we were approaching this problem with even fewer resources than I have now? What if I had a team half the size or a budget 80% smaller or the deadline were Monday instead of next quarter or next year?
You may find that the moves you make in a position of scarcity, even a manufactured one, are even more useful to you in your moment of abundance. The quick and dirty solution may actually be quite clean - it turns out to be uncluttered with features and customizations that distract from its central purpose.
If the creativity and speed you discover playing the game of scarcity gather the force of an ethos, you witness lovely knock-on effects. You trust your people to build and ship stuff. They trust you and each other to deliver feedback that makes that stuff better. Slow, expensive, “premium” solutions give way to rapid learning and trust built through reps instead of semi-annual retreats.
A few examples:
I’ve seen large per capita professional development budgets dissipate in irrelevant conference passes and wellness retreats and consultant chasing. I’ve seen book clubs with $10 paperbacks and an expectation that you bring your own dang snacks transform organizations.
Someone, somewhere, has created a pricey multi-layered enterprise software tool to do that thing that needs doing (and nine other things beside). And you know what? The checklist is a hell of a technology. A checklist on a big piece of paper everyone can see? Even better. Beware overtooling.
Deep desk research, dozens of hours of convenings or consultant-led “stakeholder engagement”, elaborate third-party-facilitated strategic stepbacks: this is one approach to idea generation. For certain kinds of efforts, it’s sound. Don’t forget, though: you could tell your people they have an hour to prepare a 5-min pitch, everyone critiques the pitches and upvotes their favorites, then you test the most popular ideas with real people. You can find real people by knocking on their doors. (When I say this people think I am trying to be cute. According to my seven-year-old nephew, I have “the biggest forehead in the world” and “mulch-y” skin. I know better than to try to be cute. I mean it - go knock on doors and ask strangers your questions.)
-Eric
