Start Acting, Stop Planning: Breaking Through Design Phase Paralysis

At the start of any project, there’s an increased level of energy and optimism as stakeholders rally around the goal and prospect of progress. This energy is valuable to harness but often declines as the project continues.

The result is an oscillation in morale as stakeholders become fatigued by the current phase and invigorated when entering a new phase. This predictable pattern of enthusiasm and fatigue can derail even the most promising initiatives.

One of the ways to reduce the oscillation is to start acting and stop planning.

Let’s consider this with an example of a client team that is redesigning how technology supports an offline marketing program.

Two of the overarching goals of the program are:

1. Reducing the number of steps in the process
2. Reducing the amount of manual work done by the client’s staff

The start of the project involves many meetings to understand the current state and what constraints exist. Some of these constraints are artifacts of institutional knowledge from several years prior, which essentially means “we’re doing it because we’ve been doing it this way”.

There are many different ways to orchestrate the same business process that meets the overarching goals of the program. One way to reduce the number of ways is to look back at constraints.

However, if you don’t have a set of clear constraints, defined priorities, and know the overall value, it becomes harder to reduce the set of possible solutions.

So, what do we do?

Start acting. Stop planning.

Instead of mulling over all of the possible solutions, pick one that seems to fit and begin building.

It doesn’t need to be perfect. It will have a “talk track” about how it fits into the overall project or “vaporware” to facilitate something that a system would do if fully built.

Also, the act of building something does not mean you have finished your design phase. It simply means that you are prototyping a design to evaluate against requirements and stakeholder feedback to determine feasibility.

If your team has sufficient resources or is somehow stuck on which solution to pick, you can run to prototypes concurrently. There’s a good chance that elements from each will make it into the final design.

TLDR: When you’re at an impasse and feel stalled, it’s time to start acting and stop planning. Give yourself a cycle to experiment and prototype, then reflect on what went well.

P.S. Pick one initiative that you feel is stalled and reply with some details about what you’re trying to do and any solutions you’ve considered. I’ll reply back with a way you can start acting and stop planning in the spirit of this newsletter.