Work they did not expect they’d need to do

Large organizations don’t have a monopoly on molasses.

Most groups of human beings move exceptionally slowly.

Sure, the smothering bureaucracy and its mountains of red tape is frustrating and exhausting. But even people who work at small organizations struggle to move forward. Why?

The natural human tendency toward underestimation. People are notoriously bad at accurately assessing the time it will take to complete tasks. Especially tasks that have substantial complexity.

We eat like elephants and shit like birds, as my dad used to say. Our eyes are bigger than our stomachs.

Sydney’s opera house is my favorite example of underestimation. An innovative architectural venture for its time, the building was originally forecast in the late fifties to be completed by the early sixties.

The cost estimate to build it was seven million.

Fifteen years later, the total expenditure surpassed a hundred million and it had to be largely paid for by the state lottery.

Talk about molasses.

And this underestimation doesn’t only impact large scale projects. Each of us encounters this fallacy on a day to day basis.

Imagine you hire a sleazy carpenter to repair your hardwood floors. When you ask how long it’s going to take, he smirks and says, oh just two weeks.

Eleven months and your entire life savings later, there’s still a giant hole in your living room floor.

Same principle. It’s allegory for any endeavor.

The speed with which people seize opportunities, act against external threats, fail and learn quickly, it’s almost certainly going to be underestimated. Period.

Computer engineers call this gap latency, which is the time delay between the cause and the effect of a physical change in the system being observed. Sadly, there’s no single cause.

There are hundreds of factors that contribute to how long things take.

*Managers can asphyxiate production velocity with over involvement and controlling personalities.

*Inexperienced workers will increase the average time needed to get things to an acceptable minimum.

*The internet can go out in the entire building for a day and cancel conference calls and presentations.

*What about the startup founder who spends his holiday break doing ayahuasca rituals, and then he bounds back into the office on the first of the year with completely new strategy of dominating the mobile social space?

Anyway, there’s no shortage of distractions, delays and derailments. And while there are endless strategies and tactics for moving faster, everything from shot gunning projects to parallel processing to input embargos to keeping teams under the two pizza rule, the smartest practice we can do for our own sanities is:

Trade expectation for acceptance.

I am willing to trade the expectation of perfection for the acceptance of reality. I am happy to be part of a team that moves like molasses.

Take a chance on me, and I commit to showing up every day, and executing the best I can.

Have you accepted the natural human tendency towards underestimation?