POV

Imagine going to IKEA and buying two identical boxes of shelves that you’ll need to assemble once you get home. After you open the box and read the instructions, you begin assembling the first shelf. The first shelf takes some de-assembling along the way, some restarts; it takes an hour or two, maybe more. But then you begin to assemble the second one, which is exactly like the first. How long do you imagine this one will take to put together?

If you’re like me, it will probably take half the time that it took to build the first one—or if you’re having a really good day, even less. Why? Because the second time, you don’t have to read the instructions again; you don’t have to find out what tools to use or where to put all the parts before assembling them. When you made mistakes and corrected them the first time, you learned. Now you understand how to build the shelves the way you’re supposed to.

That’s how knowledge work works. When building the first shelf, you did both physical and knowledge work, but building the second shelf requires physical work only. If you wanted to, you could sit on your living room floor and make IKEA shelves all day long; it would simply be physical work, like the work that the professional assemblers do.

The more unpredictable your work is, the more knowledge work dominates over other kinds of work. Once you achieve success in an unpredictable situation, repeating that success takes much less effort than you originally put in. However, knowledge work has one big disadvantage—it’s invisible. Its results are in our brains.

So how do you manage a project when you know there may be surprises that will emerge only once you’ve finished the work? You finish a small part of it as early as you can, see what emerges, and repeat.

You may find yourself managing an unpredictable situation well every day—behind the wheel of a car. No matter how many years of driving experience you have, you can never predict what lane of the highway you’ll be driving in or at what speed. You can never predict what other drivers will do or if there will be a traffic jam, an accident, or construction on the road. You often can’t even predict whether it will rain, causing the roads to be slick and dangerous. You never really know.

The three ingredients for managing unpredictability, which you use intuitively when you drive a car, are transparency, inspection, and adaptation.

Transparency

A car is optimized for transparency. With a windshield, windows, and mirrors, drivers can view what’s behind and on both sides of them at a glance, without needing to turn around. In addition, dashboards relay a car’s condition. In organizations, transparency refers to the visibility of a project’s overall progress, which can be achieved via feedback loops and built-in checks on vertical slices of a project. Without such transparency, it would be difficult to notice the project going off track.

Inspection

Transparency enables the second ingredient: inspection. Inspection means investing time and resources in continuously checking a situation. While driving, we need to take the time to look at the road, to see what’s in front of us, and to discern what challenges we might face. In organizations, we need to set aside time and resources to check projects’ overall progress.

Adaptation

When they work properly, both transparency and inspection show us when something is going wrong. And when something is wrong, we need the third ingredient: adaptation. This simply means that we have the means to adapt, that adjustments can be made to achieve overall success. When driving, if an animal suddenly appears in our way, we may need to react and change course. Fortunately, we have the means to adapt. We can steer ourselves out of harm’s way. Use the horn. When managing work, adaptation means adjusting what you plan to work on in the future. Adding new items to your plan, removing obsolete ones, or changing how you thought something should be done.

Unpredictability is inevitable, yet it often causes anxiety. When surprises pop up, it may look like you don’t have your process or your teams under control, and you don’t want to look incompetent. Clients don’t want to hear about any issues either, for fear of their requests becoming more expensive. Unpredictability plays right into our insecurities, but it doesn’t have to. It’s all in how the message is delivered.

There are several ways to talk about unpredictability without even mentioning the word. The key to keeping resistance low and constructiveness high is focusing on the impact of your project—not on the unpredictable elements. The impact is what everyone is interested in, anyway. It’s also the best way to align different stakeholders.

First, when you begin discussing your project with stakeholders, ask them to imagine two different scenarios:

• The project is a success, beyond your greatest expectations. What will be different when it’s completed?
• Now imagine this project failed in every possible way. What are all the things that went wrong?

Through these two scenarios, you can help them see areas where unpredictability may occur. Next, ask: What intermediary results—vertical slices—can help you reduce the greatest risks or ensure some of the most important hopes will be delivered?

• If you’ve done a similar project, you might make a list of all of its pluses and minuses. What worked well and what didn’t? Thinking about vertical slices in a similar project will help you to identify unpredictable factors and risks in the current project earlier. You also may find some instances when a result was checked early on, which helped steer the project in the right direction.
• A more direct method is to map out all the unknowns connected to a project. This works well if you are working with a larger group of people and can ask them to visualize all the things, they don’t yet know about the project that are important for its success. You can even let everyone present their visualizations to the group and make a list of all the unknowns uncovered this way.

Unpredictability can’t be avoided, and it exists in most jobs. Yet with feedback, you can recognize it, communicate it to others, and manage it.