Seth Dobbs (he/him): Have you ever faced a problem so large in scope that it seemed insurmountable? Have you worked on one of those issues that seems to pull more and more problems into its gravity? Do you engage with a kind of “all or nothing” thinking? Hi, I’m Seth Dobbs, and this is the Principle Driven Leadership podcast, where I share principles of leadership along with examples of how to apply them to help make you be the best leader you can be. These principles are based on my years of experience as an executive leader in building teams and organizations and in coaching others to become leaders themselves. And I believe that not only can anyone develop leadership skills, but that everyone can and should develop leadership skills.

I think they’re essential for achieving your best wherever you might be trying to make an impact. And that’s because leadership skills help you better influence others to effectively create durable results. And leadership as a journey. The step we’re taking today involves understanding the challenges that come along with taking on just too much at once.

Sienna was an accomplished leader who many years ago, was working at a large technology firm where they were given the opportunity to take on developing a virtual reality, or VR, gaming platform. They were super excited as they felt that this could really revolutionize the gaming industry. Now Sienna’s ambition and enthusiasm were high , and boundless, they saw the potential for VR to reshape not only gaming, but also education, healthcare, and various other industries.

So the potential impact of one platform to serve all of those needs was irresistible. And so with grandiose ideas in mind, they gathered a team of talented engineers, designers, and other subject matter experts, and together, they set out to create the most advanced VR platform the world had ever seen. Sienna convinced their management to invest heavily in this with a promise that in under two years they would launch something that would put them well ahead of the competition. Team was passionate-

they really believed in this vision and this created a ton of energy and dedication. They worked around the clock on research and development and testing and experimenting, even putting together preliminary marketing plans to start teasing out the future. The team was ready to face, whatever challenges Sienna brought, which was nothing less than being a true pioneer in the industry. As time progressed, they found even more domains that could be positively impacted by virtual reality, and so they added those kinds of things into the release schedule as well. This plus other challenges such as higher complexity than expected, led to timeline and cost increases. And at some point after all this time and effort with nothing to show for it, the employees started burning out and morale went downhill. Worse than that perhaps competitors started releasing simpler versions of Sienna’s platform,

focusing only on one aspect of VR, more often than not gaming. Unfortunately, because they’d created something that was so massive and intertwined, they weren’t able to quickly adapt to these new threats. And so in short order, instead of being a pioneer, they were becoming a laggard and not from inaction.

Now I’ve seen this kind of story play out in a lot of different ways in a lot of different places at a lot of different scales. For example, an operations leader at a friend’s company set out to make a report to support supply optimization. And ended up putting together a project to overhaul reporting for demand forecasting, go to market planning, new product introduction, and more. And so much got pulled in it actually never really got off the ground. And I get it.

We want to move boulders. You want to make the big impacts and you sometimes feel, you can’t see how to be successful if you don’t do everything that’s related to the idea, if you don’t make a big splash. In many ways, it can feel like tackling a boulder, a massive project is the ultimate in forward motion. But more often than not in my experience,

it’s that tackling a boulder actually prevents forward motion. So I like to use the metaphor of boulders and rocks to think about chunks or levels of effort. And I found that more often than not, we just need to move rocks. However, you might feel that you need to do something much bigger that sometimes you need to move a boulder in order to make progress.

That is the progress you want to make even. And I think this metaphor helps depict the challenges at hand. If you’re building a road or hiking a path, and a rock is in the way, it’s pretty easy to move it and just keep on trucking. Boulders on the other hand are really, really heavy and difficult to move. If you were blocked by a boulder on some kind of hike or exploration, it would seem almost futile to try and move it. If you needed to get past it, it seems that it’d be much easier to chip away just enough to be able to move on rather than trying to get the whole thing moving. And the same goes for our work. When you encounter a massive problem or challenge, you might find that your instinct is to look at it as an all or nothing proposition. And I’ve heard things like, “well, if we can’t fix all of this, there’s no point in even trying on any of it.”

But instead of thinking that way, I’ve learned to look at massive problems the same way as I look at a massive boulder in my path that by breaking a large problem into smaller pieces and prioritizing, you can resume forward motion much more quickly. And you just might find that you never need to solve or deal with the whole entire thing. Now, certainly large problems will occur for your team.

And I’m not saying that you shouldn’t take them on. It’s about how you approach it. Just think about a project that will take you two years and $4 million to execute until it’s completed. Nevermind that there’s a high likelihood of not being on time and on budget for something that large and that long you have no way of measuring success for a long period of time and no return on investment for at least two years. Emphasizing that last part: with a project structured this way, you’ll see no value for two years.

And for all that spend. And as with Sienna, you’re giving your competitors the opportunity to come in and disrupt sooner. And you’ll be caught out unable to make a rapid change because you took on a single, huge thing. Now there’s exceptions of course. Think building out a new power plant, a manufacturing facility, et cetera. Takes a lot of serious planning and work to really get it right. But even so you should think about how to streamline the process focused on outcomes.

So Sienna’s problem.

This concept is fundamentally about solving too big a problem. And “too big” is relative.

This could be about something as small as days or weeks of effort , or it could be months or years.

It just depends on your resources, your organization’s pace and so forth.

Getting this right, is about applying lean thinking into everything. The concept of lean thinking has been around for a really long time, but deeply rooted in manufacturing in the early part of the 1900s and more recently in software development, but it’s applicable everywhere. And the very simple concept is to eliminate waste from your efforts where waste is anything that gets in the way of reaching your outcome. So in Principle Driven Leadership terms, this is the notion of doing less to achieve more from season one, episode three. A boulder have a problem

often contains lots of things to do that aren’t directly related to resuming or making forward motion. This is also an application of go slow to go fast that I talked about earlier this season, but in this case, it’s about slowing down to really assess the problem space, to ensure you focus only on what’s truly preventing you from reaching your desired outcomes. Sometimes a project and initiative, whatever, takes on a life of its own and starts pulling in efforts that appear related and at some point you might convince yourself that it all has to be tackled at once. The thing to consider when this starts to happen, is that the more work you pull in, the bigger boulder you’re going to tackle as a whole then means the longer it’s going to take to see any kind of results. And Sienna’s case their desire to make the biggest impact ultimately resulted in them making no impact at all.

What if instead Sienna went in the other direction and launched only the gaming platform. For most perspectives, there was no reason to tie that into medical, educational and other industries and use cases. And this could have given their team a solid foundation that was put out into the world much earlier and earlier than anyone else. And could have made a real impact and then pave the way for them to take another step.

And then another step. Rock by rock tackling the VR problem space. Breaking it down would have perhaps made it easier for them to see that maybe they didn’t want to get into medical or health applications due to all the regulations surrounding it, which was slowing them down. Or they could have isolated that particular application to a different team that pursued its own path. Separate from the main platform from the main effort. They might even have found that when implementing the VR gaming platform, that it was actually enough for them enough for the company’s growth enough for the team to feel challenged and fulfilled enough for Sienna, even to feel that they’d accomplished something..

In the previous episodes leading up to this, I’ve talked about the need to face reality. And some ways, this is the other side of that coin facing too much reality and how it can overwhelm you. So, whether you’re thinking about problems as new opportunities or problems that are preventing outcomes and need resolving. Taking on too much can be as detrimental as turning a blind idle of it. And the temptation is strong.

These boulders can become all consuming. These large projects, bringing in whatever you can convince yourself as related. And again, phrases like “we can’t solve the real problem without doing all these things” will manifest in this kind of situation, but that’s it. That’s an approach that centers on doing. By understanding what you want to achieve,

you can map out smaller steps to get there. The best way to measure progress towards your vision is by seeing smaller outcomes that get you there. When you start seeing that the only progress you can mark is time passing and money being spent, you’re actually stuck moving a boulder. It’s time to go slow, regroup, break off a smaller piece and resume forward motion.

Tackling boulders often prevent forward motion. You might think that you’re getting a bunch of things done, but the more you pull into it, the less actually gets achieve for a longer piece of period of time. And fixation on the boulder can be a form of paralysis and it can create blinders. Similar to episode eight, this season, the solution fixation. You become more and more obsessed with your solution than what you’re trying to solve. And the longer something takes to resolve the more room there is for uncertainty and chaos and the ecosystem to manifest and make your actions and efforts increasingly irrelevant.

So I want you to think about. What problems are you currently faced with that seem to be becoming black holes, just pulling everything in? What issues are your team tackling that seemed to have no end in sight? And what can you do today to start chipping away, smaller pieces that can be more easily addressed to help regain forward motion? Thanks so much for joining me, please subscribe, comment, and share with a friend if you liked it. Send thoughts and questions to contact@pdlpodcast.com and we’ll address a few towards the end of the season. And join me next time, where I’ll talk about the inevitability of change and what that means for us as leaders.