"How Hard Can It Be?": Musings of Underestimation

Progressing through life look so easy when observed from afar When viewed from a distance from the vantage point of outer space, the Earth looks like a smooth round orb. Getting from one point to another seems like it shouldn't be the that complicated. A person's life cycle progresses through predictable phases of conception, pre-birth, birth, infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, mid-life, mature adulthood, and death.

It's all so predictably smooth and uncomplicated. Right?

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So, What's the Problem?

In that line of thinking, ​"How hard can it be?", is a phrase often mused by product managers and organizational leaders who drive solution design on an accelerated timetable. This opinion assumes line-of-sight progress and overlooks the practical challenges of quickly developing a vision for the future that can generate real impact. Designing a future state that drives value rapidly is an ambitious aim that risks underestimating the complexities involved.

Experts such as designers, architects, and team facilitators would dispute this claim. Professionals with real-world experience enabling innovation and progress understand the flaws in this perspective. They recognize the complex interplay of forces that must be navigated to drive meaningful change. Simply proposing an ideal end state without acknowledging practical constraints leads seasoned leaders in these fields to dismiss such assertions as unrealistic.

Experienced business analysts will attest that underestimating complex initiatives is an extremely common occurrence in organizations of all sizes. The realities of project management frequently defy even the best-laid plans. Unforeseen interdependencies, resources constraints, and technical hurdles confront teams on a daily basis. Seasoned analysts anticipate these complications emerging early and often based on hard-won experience. Grand visions crumble when abstract ideas collide with concrete deadlines, budgets, and capabilities. Veterans of the implementation battlefield know that launching transformational change requires addressing nitty-gritty operational concerns - not just lofty aspirations. Any practitioner versed in organizational dynamics can confirm the regularity with which ambitious blueprints fail to grasp this fundamental lesson.

The reality is that life, at the ground-level of personal experience, is fraught with challenges and problems even in the absence of a deadline. The institutional problem space is likewise compounded by the complexities of politics, operational climate and culture.

"The demand for accelerated change is pervasive. Responding to it requires an effective, efficient means of defining the problem space so that solution designers can create a future state solution that delivers value by actually solving the problems people are experiencing.

This is the context in which the spirit of agile design thrives."

​When organizational leadership mandates transformational change from on high at an accelerated pace, it often does so without respecting the complexities required to describe the problem space and design the solution. The resulting underestimation of effort creates a pressure cooker atmosphere for those tasked with designing and creating the future state in a hurry.

The resulting solution design efforts are staffed and funded with fewer resources with a shorter window of opportunity to define and describe the ideal future-state process design.

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What's In Your Agile Designer Toolkit?

As business analysts and solutions designers and marketers, we aspire to rise above the tangled realities of trying to enact change. We do this in a context where the realities are complex and interdependent and where tolerance for taking a lot of time to figure things out is in short supply.

So, what's it like in your world? ​What's in your agile designer toolbox? How do you approach this?

The demand for accelerated change is pervasive. Responding to it requires an effective, efficient means of defining the problem space so that solution designers can create a future state solution that delivers value by actually solving the problems people are experiencing. 

​This is the context in which the spirit of agile design thrives.

As a business analyst or solutions designer operating in this space, it requires an approach where defining the problem and designing the solution need to be done with a minimalist's acumen.

Developing an agile design perspective and related set of techniques, rituals and practices really helps in this future-state design wheelhouse.

So, I'm reaching out to my fellow practitioners. What's it like in your world? ​What's in your agile designer toolbox? How's it working for you? 

​I look forward to hearing from you.

- Chuck

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