Effortless Impact vs. Impactless Effort

I have been thinking about this topic in my notes for a while, but due to various reasons, I never got the time to write it down until today. The thoughts from this note is inspired by the book Effortless by Greg McKeown, the same author that wrote Essentialism. The two books discussed how to identify the most essential things to do, then how to most effectively achieve them. This topic is quite relevant under the context of the more intense environment and that our company will be focusing a lot more on efficiency in the foreseeable future.

There isn't a silver-bullet to the question of how to be more efficient, but here are a few points that I had reflected on, and I felt they might be useful to share. Again, I'm partitioning the space into 4 quadrants using the "Teasing apart tool"

"Waste of time"

This is the quadrant of Low-Effort and Low-Impact, it seems obvious that anyone would avoid doing work in this quadrant. But actually, you'll be surprised how many times that I've seen people and teams operating in this quadrant. The Streetlight Effect note that Boz wrote a while ago describes exactly this quadrant.

We have an outcome in mind that would be great for us. But we don’t know how to do what it takes to get there. In the meantime, there is another thing we do know how to do, so we do that instead.

When the goal is clear, it's not that people don't want to do the right thing, it's that sometimes we don't know how to do the right thing, or the right thing is too hard. So we pick a low-effort easy thing that we do know how to do, and we do story telling to retrofit how this alternative easy activity contributes to the goal.

It's very easy to spot the symptom, you see people or yourself working very "productively" all the time, lots of artifacts being generated (code or document, etc.) but in the end, none of the artifacts moves the needle. So all the "productivity" ultimately means nothing.

"Only pain No gain"

This is the High-Effort, Low-Impact quadrant. The old motto was "No pain, No gain", but too many times when we are crunching, pushing extra hard, we don't realize that it can be only pain and no gain. Again, I had observed many times teams or individuals work extra hard, burn themselves out, yet still miss the goals. There are 2 typical anti-patterns in this quadrant:

• Pushing without clarity: This is when a team or a leader set up an ambiguous goal, then a clear deadline for deliverable. If the team fail to identify the ambiguity of the goal before committing, it's a recipe for failure. Under the goal ambiguity, the team will not be able to prioritize the right thing, very likely they will not be able to identify the right dependency till very late (if at all). There is nothing worse than a group of very capable, hard working people burnt a whole period of time only to find out that they are aiming for the wrong goal.
• Pushing without expertise: This is when the goal is clear, but the team who are tasked to achieve the goal doesn't have the required expertise. Sometimes this could be caused by the unknown: since the team doesn't have the expert to begin with, therefore they can't anticipate the future risks, and when risks do appear, they find that they don't have the knowledge to address the risk. The other, even worse scenario is that the team does know that they don't have the expertise, but they are not rejecting the goal since they don't want to be seen as incompetent. So they work extra hard, learn on the job, and hope to be able to deliver. Sometimes miracles do happen, people learn faster than one can imagine, but more often, failure is the outcome.

"The healthy stretch"

This is the High-Impact, High-Effort quadrant, operating in this quadrant does need people to spend extra effort, push harder and work longer. This is the time when the goal is clear and the team has the right expertise, it's time to press the gas pedal to push for the last mile. There are 2 things are useful to remember:

• Don't do this too often, as impactful as this push can be, it can also burn people out.
• Crunch with your “system two” for the first time, then reflect on what had been done through retrospective. Bake more knowledge into your “system one” such that the next time, a similar task will become effortless.

"Low hanging fruit"

This is the High-Impact, Low-Effort quadrant, the "Effortless Impact" that everyone wants to achieve. There are a few subtle that I had reflected on:

• The low hanging fruit is relative to one's own height. Height generally means someone's capabilities here, so obviously, the more capable and experienced one is, the more low hanging fruit they will be able to see and pick. So if a senior individual is put to work within their comfort zone, the expectation should be that they produce a lot of impact.
• The low hanging fruit usually doesn't stretch people, as the previous section, so people staying in this quadrant for longer, might not grow as much as the ones constantly stretching, but if this is their personal goal, then it's a win-win situation for the team. Who doesn't want a rock-solid IC working in their comfort zone delivering big impact constantly?
• Some big impact might seem effortless, but under the surface, it might have been created via a lot of thinking, but very little action, the Simple Ideas are the hardest to come up with but leads to the biggest impact.
• Smartly using partnership and collaboration can also lead to major impact with less effort (from yourself or your team), but forming partnership and collaboration usually costs someone's own leadership capital. To make this sustainable, make sure you get the capital regained after the investment. Concretely, this would mean growing the pie together with the partner, celebrating joint success, giving credit where credit is due and never burning bridges for the sake of impact.