Patrick McKendry

In the mad libs news story of the year, 500 pounds of pasta was dumped in the woods in the small town of Old Bridge, New Jersey last month.¹ Given the novelty of the story, the unclear motive for the crime, and the near endless possibilities for puns, the story went viral. Word first spread after local residents shared photos of the scene on Twitter to raise complaints with local officials over the town’s lack of local pick-up garbage service.² The now soggy spread was quickly wheelbarrowed out by officials for proper disposal. To the town’s credit, after piecing together the culprit using home security footage, they chose to keep the person’s identity private - he was a veteran clearing out his mother’s house after she recently passed away. Local officials also chose to not pursue the case citing more pressing issues.³ And with that, the story ended.

But this is where our analysis starts. Much like the Old Bridge local government, our teams at work interact with our end users on a daily basis. Ideally, project roadmaps, documentation, and standard status updates can cover most questions and preempt a lot of back-and-forth. However, as we are reminded here, you certainly cannot plan for everything. Still, effective implementation of standard practices can decrease the odds of getting caught completely off-guard. And when the unexpected happens, your reaction can make a meaningful difference for future stakeholder goodwill. Here, we will look at the misguided focus on preventing edge cases, why aligning on goals only once is never good enough, and when the best response to a request is just to get it done.

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Don’t Fixate on Edge Cases

I previously covered high-reliability organizations (HROs), teams marked by undeniably strong records of error-free performance in dynamic and high-risk environments.⁴ We should all strive to be reliable. HROs take this to the next level, consistently seeking out potential points of failure and proactively adjusting processes to prevent negative outcomes. For an HRO, these “edge cases” - rare and unusual circumstances that occur outside the expected norm - can be dangerous or even lethal. For the rest of us, not so much.

Still, for most teams, when it comes to sending a new marketing campaign live or launching a new product, we worry about all the ways that things could go wrong. This uncovers more low-probability issues and pushes us to add more safeguards to prevent them. In the best case scenario, we are late to launch and slower to deliver incremental value through our work. In the worst case scenario, the product or campaign fails to achieve its initial benefits as risk mitigation turns the idea into a shell of its original concept. Old Bridge recycling and disposal centers seem reliable. They have the ability to take care of mattresses, old refrigerators, and more.³ Despite that breadth, they probably had not considered how to deal with a few hundred pounds of pasta. And frankly, they shouldn’t have. Quite the opposite, it would have seemed crazy if they were held up from offering the other services because they did not yet have a plan for pasta removal.

Allowing your team to spin their wheels chasing edge cases is bad management. Resolving edge cases requires a disproportionate amount of time and people, both of which can be better spent elsewhere. In some cases, that focus on iterative improvement to existing infrastructure can also be a distraction from finding new and more effective long-term solutions. Further, getting stuck on edge cases can be incredibly demotivating to the team and frustrating to leadership, as each grows more irritated by the fact that value-additive features are not going live.

For our teams, the best approach is not actually to ignore edge cases. You couldn’t even if you tried. Frankly, you also do not want to ignore them as it is not always apparent which problems are edge cases versus a core issue. For example, I know a story of an e-commerce business launching an online cart where a team member thought that controls for bots were an edge case, only to have the site’s inventory overwhelmed with bots upon launch. Instead, the best approach in dealing with edge cases is to acknowledge them, prioritize as a team, and then - most likely - put them at the bottom of the priority list. This can also be an effective way of maintaining a backlog of smaller tasks, which the team can pick up randomly when they have some spare capacity.

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Once is Not Enough

While speaking on the pasta incident, Old Bridge’s Mayor Owen Henry noted that the pasta could have been put to better use at the end of the day. Henry highlighted that if the township had been contacted first, they could have recommend alternative options, such as donating the pasta to the food bank.¹ For my part, when reading this story, the town’s food bank had not even occurred to me until this mention, even though it is the clear choice for what to do with a load of unwanted pasta. This is a prime example of the power of top-of-mind awareness in driving human decision-making. When we do not think about things regularly, they do not come to mind easily. If they do not come to mind, they might as well not exist.

For our teams, an important first step is to align our vision and roadmap with key stakeholders. An important second step is to do it again. The business environment is continually shifting. These changes will influence what stakeholders see as the best next step or lead them to question the decisions that were previously made. Too often, people can see a single point of strategic alignment as permanent, when in reality it is far from it. Regular alignment with stakeholders helps teams stay on top of changing company objectives, customer demands, and fiscal realities. Without aligning more than once on proposed solutions, team managers can risk falling out of step with their stakeholders. This also helps to ensure that new blockers are removed from the team’s way and can be used as a checkpoint to add resources if needed. Potentially, it may also mean moving someone off of a current project if changing context has made it a waste of time - to quote James LaPlaine, “Completing a goal that is no longer useful is a failure.”⁵

It is also critically important to remember that your stakeholders do not live in your team’s work everyday like you do. At times, you might feel like you are experiencing déjà vu and reliving the exact same argument for the same context from a prior conversation. You might be. On more nuanced decisions, it is not uncommon for stakeholders to completely forget what you talked about if the project is not central to their daily work and if you have not kept it top of mind for them. In our pasta example, I know what a food bank is, but I totally failed to remember it as a viable solution because I do not think about food banks every day.

For my teams, I typically like to use monthly touchpoints to realign with stakeholders. This can be done via a 1:1 between leaders but can also be a good growth opportunity for more junior team members to present a business review of the most recent month’s performance and upcoming objectives. In any case, a review of the roadmap, new blockers and opportunities, and the impact of various initiatives on the P&L should be discussed. I like the month cadence because it is not so frequent as to be a hassle, but is regular enough to maintain tight alignment over time.

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Just Do It

Credit where it is due, the Old Bridge waste management staff handled this situation well. They received word of the bizarre request and promptly dealt with it. There was no noticeable time spent on whether the issue was their responsibility or if it should be dealt with by another department. There was also no debating of when the problem should be tackled or a scheduling exercise to see when they could get to it. They simply showed up and took care of it.

Their handling of the situation probably sounds far from notable. However, most of us can probably think of at least a few situations at work where a problem flared up and the response - from our team or another - was to scope the problem, put it through the typical prioritization flow, and even review who was the best team to handle the issue. These questions are sometimes necessary. However, more often than not if a problem in production is brought to our attention, it is going to be fairly relevant to us. The best thing to do is take care of it. Immediately.

In my experience, there are numerous reasons to not let a known problem linger. First, a production bug or error does not fit with how things are supposed to work. As a result, they often create more problems downstream. For example, a campaign that has a misplaced tracking tag could seem fairly harmless, but that error will decrease performance visibility later on and potentially cause leadership to make a rushed decision on cutting the campaign early. The longer a problem is active the more potential it has to disrupt other parts of the system and create additional problems for you to resolve. Second, it takes less time to fix an issue right away. When the problem is raised, it generally comes with some clarity around where the issue is occurring, how it was identified, and the impacted teams. When we run the problem through scoping and prioritization processes, that context may get lost in documentation or when the task gets handed off to another team member. Clarifying this again becomes time wasted. Finally, errors nearly always catch the eye of leadership and our team’s response can ultimately show as either a strength or a weakness based on how quickly and adeptly we handle the concern.

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Conclusion

It is fairly well understood that in business, few things will go according to plan. Even so, there are things that do not follow our plan and then there is the totally unexpected. While tempting, planning for these situations is a futile waste of resources. We are far better off having tactics for maintaining alignment as situations evolve and, when needed, being willing to jump in and resolve issues.

References

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500 Pounds of Pasta & Handling the Unexpected