27. Counterfeit Urgency

A tight deadline is imposed solely to contain costs.

It’s bad to be risk averse, right? If the new century has taught us anything, it’s that attractive opportunity exists only in risky waters. This premise is so widely accepted today that many organizations have become averse to being risk averse. But somehow that hasn’t made everything better.

When organizations aren’t willing to take on real risk, they can still talk a good game. Mostly, they do this by asserting the riskiness of certain endeavors that might more precisely be described as meaningless. We’ve all seen our share of these fiascos: death march projects that throw resources at an impossible schedule goal. On the surface, death marches look like gonzo undertakings, initiated by can-do, aggressive risk-takers. Often evident under the surface is a very different situation: a project that would simply cost too much if it were completed in the time that prudent estimation would allocate. Gonzo management sets out to do in one year what every sensible participant has said ought to take two. Of course the project is declared to be “extremely urgent,” a “unique management opportunity.”

To identify counterfeit urgency, we need to look closely at what benefit the project might deliver. If the benefit is real and substantial, then the one-year schedule certainly implies aggressive risk-taking, maybe too aggressive. If there are such important benefits to be gained, why not allocate the time to do the job right?

The far more frequent case is that the benefits are marginal, and that is the reason the effort was underfunded. The apparently aggressive schedule was actually just a funds-limiting mechanism.

Counterfeit urgency produces counterfeit risk. The projects end in tears, but that’s not the worst of it. The worst is that the organization hasn’t gotten on with the real business of doing high-benefit projects, the ones whose risks are worth taking.