Business Insight Zone

Let’s tell a story.

Here’s an old trick with a new twist: If you’re stuck for what to do next in your work, especially at those levels between “grand corporate strategy” and “which thing do I do in the next ten minutes?,” write a case study — starring you, doing the work you do now — that peeks into the future.

Give yourself an 18-month window for the actions involved, and assume that you’re writing the case study another six months later, so that the trend of (successful!) outcomes from your efforts will be clear. I pick 18 months because Peter Drucker, among others, suggested it as a good, workable timeframe for turning even big plans into reality. To put it another way, it’s a timeframe that bridges the quarter-to-quarter focus on earnings and the five-year windows that go along with many overarching corporate strategies.

At the top of a piece of paper, write “18 months.” Next to it, write the Big Outcome achieved by that point — “Breakeven” or “Patent Awarded” or “First Mentor Class Graduated” or “Sold the Company” or whatever. On a line under that, write “15 months” and list some things that led into the Big Outcome. Keep breaking it down by steps: “12 months” . . . “9 months” . . . et cetera. Chop the time smaller as you get closer to the start of the project, since (a) the tone of many projects is set in the early going, and (b) these are the steps you may be able to envision better from where you sit now.

Tweaking and Writing

Once you’ve done this all the way back to the present, you may realize that the timeline is wrong. Maybe you need less than a year to get your new product idea off the ground. (Heck, for some things you might need less than a month.) Maybe you need five years to write your multivolume history of the Internet. If you figure out that the timeline is askew, just fiddle with the durations until it makes sense.

Now for the kicker. Don’t just leave the steps listed in outline form: actually write the case study. No big whoop — 800 words could be plenty — but let your imagination soar. Make up ambitious-but-believable numbers for site traffic, revenues, users, donors, contracts, or what-have-you; fill in glowing quotes from you, your ecstatic customers, and suitably impressed industry watchers. Talk about how the model is being copied and adapted by other forward-thinking organizations.

Two Problem-Solving Approaches In One

What you’re doing with this exercise is:

1. Thinking like an engineer. After President Kennedy established the goal of reaching the moon before 1970, the space program’s engineers broke down the mission into its parts. Knowing that they had to end up with astronauts landing safely back on Earth, they could formulate both the components of a successful moon shot (achieving Earth escape velocity, accurately computing and following flight trajectories, adequate air supply, etc) and the sequence of the missions that would build up to a moon landing. You’re doing the same thing here, albeit at a smaller scale. (Then again, I don’t know the size of your ambitions!)
2. Using narrative. Humans are drawn to stories. We want to make sense of things, and our explanations become more powerful when they fit into a narrative flow: A happened; B happened because of it; to everyone’s surprise, C came along and threatened to ruin everything; but, thanks to D, they all lived happily ever after anyway. Writing out a story with yourself as the forward-thinking hero could be a good way not only to capture in words the engineering problem you face, but to convince yourself that it’s really possible for you to navigate your way through it.

Now that your engineering/narrative project is done, you need to run with it. What’s the first thing you can do to turn your case study into a reality? Make it happen this week!

And while you’re at it, why not leave a comment to share your own best tactics for breaking down big problems into manageable chunks?

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Photo by Marco Arment.

Category: Innovation & Entrepreneurship, Management