From Shane Parrish’s book “Clear Thinking”
You need to create fail-safes such as tripwires to overcome inertia and biases.
- “The Fail-Safe Principle: Implementing fail-safes will help ensure that your decision is executed according to plan.“
- Example: “Imagine standing on Mount Everest, just fifty meters from reaching the very top. Your entire body is aching. Your mind is numb. It feels like no matter how hard you breathe there’s just not enough oxygen. You’ve been training for years, spent $60,000 on guides and travel, sacrificing time with your family and friends in the process. You’ve told everyone today is the day you’ll make the attempt. Everything you’ve worked for is right in front of you. You can see your goal. You’re nearly there. But you’re thirty minutes behind schedule, and oxygen is running low. Do you turn around or push forward?”
The world’s best Sherpas know that the most dangerous part of summiting Mount Everest isn’t reaching the peak; it’s the descent. So much energy is spent getting to the top that even if climbers are running out of strength or oxygen, they keep pushing themselves to the summit. They spend so much of their resources getting there, they neglect to account for the ordeal of getting back. Lost in “summit fever” they forget that the most important thing isn’t making it to the top, but making it home. You can’t win, after all, if you don’t survive.” (p. 204) - “Climbing Everest is a dramatic example of why it’s important to implement execution fail-safes to ensure your decision gets executed as planned. Is it finally time to bail when you’re running out of oxygen? Should you stay the course even though your other equipment is on its last legs? Execution fail-safes leverage your thinking when you’re at your best to protect you against the defaults when you’re at your worst.” (p. 205)
“There are three kinds of execution fail-safes you should know: setting trip wires, empowering others to make decisions, and tying your hands.”
The first fail-safe is the trip wire.
- “Fail-Safe: Set up trip wires to determine in advance what you’ll do when you hit a specific quantifiable time, amount, or circumstance.”
- “Trip wires are forms of precommitment—you commit yourself in advance to a course of action when certain conditions arise.”
- “For example, a team climbing Everest might set up a trip wire by committing themselves to abort their summit attempt if they don’t reach a certain location by a certain time. If the team fails, they turn back! No argument. They don’t try to decide in the midst of fatigue and oxygen deprivation; they’ve already decided and are already committed to turning around.” (p. 206)
- “The path to success and failure is marked if you know where to look. The journey always contains the answers. Trip wires include both negative signs and the absence of positive signs. When the signs are positive, you know to stay the course. When things are murkier, however, that’s when it helps to set trip wires.” (p. 207)
- “Negative signs are red flags that something is going seriously off course. The sooner you catch yourself going the wrong way, the easier it is to turn back. The other day I ended up going east on the highway when I wanted to go west. Only when I noticed the wrong city was getting closer did I realize my mistake! But negative signs aren’t the only ones to take note of. Sometimes the absence of positive signs is itself a sign.”
- “When you don’t see the positive signs you expected, it doesn’t necessarily mean things have gone wrong. It does mean this is a moment worth paying attention to. Many projects fail, and many decisions get challenging right at this point—when people see neither negative signs nor the positive ones they expected. When that happens, it’s time to re-evaluate. Ask yourself, “Is the most important thing still the most important thing? Was I wrong? What will it take to reach my goals now that I’ve moved further in time but not in progress?”
- “By having clear trip wires in place before you start, you increase the odds of success. When the entire team understands clearly the markers of success and failure, they are empowered to act the minute things veer off course.” (p. 207)
Create Commander’s Intent
- “Giving a team enough structure to carry out a mission but enough flexibility to respond to changing circumstances is called commander’s intent—a military term first applied to the Germans who were trying to defeat Napoleon.”
- “If you’ve ever been on the inside of a business where employees can’t take action until everything is approved by their boss, you’re seeing what happens without commander’s intent. There’s a single point of failure. If something happens to the boss, the business and mission fail.”
- “Commander’s intent empowers each person on a team to initiate and improvise as they’re executing the plan. It stops you from being the bottleneck, and it enables the team to keep each other accountable to the goal without your presence.”
- “Commander’s intent has four components: formulate, communicate, interpret, and implement. The first two components—formulate and communicate—are the responsibility of the senior commander. You must communicate the strategy, the rationale, and the operational limits to the team. Tell them not just what to do, but why to do it, how you arrived at your decision, so they understand the context, as well as the boundaries for effective action—what is completely off the table. Subordinate commanders then have the tools for the last two components: interpreting the changing contexts and implementing the strategy in those contexts.” (p. 208)
- “Before you begin executing a decision, just so there’s no confusion as you move forward, ask yourself:
- Who needs to know my goals and the outcomes I’m working toward?
- Do they know what the most important objective is?
- Do they know the positive and negative signs to look for and what trip wires are attached to them?”
- “One sign that you’ve failed to empower your team is that you can’t be away from the office for a week without things falling apart.”
- “Some leaders think it makes them indispensable—that the team’s inability to function without them is a sign of how important they are. Don’t be fooled! This is the ego default at work. Effective leaders shouldn’t have to be available 24/7 for their team to make decisions and achieve objectives. If you can’t be away, it doesn’t mean that you’re indispensable or a supremely competent leader; it means that you’re an incompetent communicator.” (p. 209)
- “Another sign that you’re in the grips of the ego default is that you insist on controlling how everything happens. Good leaders determine what needs to get done and set the parameters for getting there. They don’t care whether something gets done differently from how they themselves would’ve done it. As long as it advances to the objective within the limits they’ve set, they’re satisfied. Poor leaders insist that everything must be done their way, which ultimately demoralizes their team and undermines both loyalty and creativity—exactly the opposite of commander’s intent.” (p. 209)
- “Whatever decision you’re facing, ask yourself, “Is there a way to make sure I will stick to the path I’ve decided is best?” By thinking through your options, and precommitting to courses of action, you free up space to tackle other problems. Even if we’re waiting as long as possible to decide, we now know exactly what to focus on and do when the time comes to make our decision. We’ve set our trip wires, we’ve empowered people to act on them, and we’ve tied our hands so that we can’t undo all our good work in a moment of stress.” (p. 210)