The Cost of Maybe

The Value of No | Essay 3

A project can pass through every review and still end up back where it started.

At one organization, I saw design work move from UX to creative, back to UX, and through marketing reviews. Sometimes it returned to people who had already reviewed it. Each handoff created another place for work to wait, without bringing it closer to completion.

The repeated handoffs raised a question: who could decide that the work had been reviewed enough?

In their 2006 Harvard Business Review article, Who Has the D?, Paul Rogers and Marcia Blenko describe an automobile manufacturer struggling to meet milestones for new models. Marketing and product development both believed they had authority over decisions about standard features and colors.

People were doing their jobs, but responsibility for the final decision wasn't clear. The resulting confusion contributed to delays.

It's a familiar organizational problem. People can spend considerable time reviewing, discussing, and refining work without establishing who has the authority to decide what happens next.

Of course, MAYBE is sometimes the responsible answer. A project may need additional research, a financial assessment, or a better understanding of the risks. But then we need to establish what information is missing, who will obtain it, and when the decision will be made.

Thomas H. Davenport explores this in When to Stop Deliberating and Just Make a Decision. He suggests considering the importance of the decision, whether additional information is worth obtaining, and when a deadline would help. Sometimes a smaller commitment can provide enough evidence to make the larger decision.

Another review may be useful when it resolves a specific uncertainty. Without that purpose, it can become another reason to postpone an uncomfortable choice.

We measure budgets, schedules, deliverables, and hours. Yet the time consumed by unresolved decisions is harder to account for. Every additional review uses resources that could have gone toward something else.

A clear NO allows a team to stop pursuing an opportunity the organization isn't prepared to support. A responsible MAYBE establishes what must happen before anyone can say YES or NO.

As Peter Drucker wrote in his 1963 Harvard Business Review article, “Managing for Business Effectiveness”:

“There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”