when the goal is crucial, “overdo it”

This sounds obvious. Younger me would have scoffed at this title.

Yet.

One of the most badass leaders I ever got to work for and learn from made me realize I had a bad habit. I didn’t realize I was doing it but I was doing it all the time: I was hoping and believing that my team and I could do “just enough” to hit a goal. I’d risk not achieving a goal (and very often would not achieve the goal) because I was afraid of “overdoing” something. Often this something wasn’t even very well defined. I just carried this vague tepid belief that we’d catch up or things would work out in the end and we shouldn’t act all crazy if things weren’t going well early. 

This leader and I were working in a series of sprints - there was little margin for error in the 30 and 60-day chunks of time we had to make improbable things happen. 

One move she had that I would have previously seen as “overdoing it” - in the early going in these sprints, she would treat one instance of a threat to our success as a harbinger and act decisively to mitigate the threat. In her view, an instance was already a pattern. It presaged our failure.

My earlier, not-hitting-the-goal self took pride in a certain intellectual remove. I could explain away bad early results or maintain a cool agnosticism while waiting for more data.

In sprints, that cool patience spelled doom. I’ve since realized it isn’t that helpful in less urgent contexts either. I was expecting patterns to change without serious, deliberate interventions.Year over year, I find new cases where that expectation seems empirically weak and practically dubious.

If your goal is crucial, not just nice to have, pause your judicious calculations. Consider what it would take to “overdo” it - to surpass the goal with a generous margin. Then do that. You can come back later, victorious, and get smart about efficiencies, optimization, cost-benefit. Having smashed a goal, your team, even your very worn out team, will have more energy for that streamlined, optimized next go than the crew that didn’t quite get there. 

-Eric