Space Pen
Back in the early days of my career, I blagged my way into setting up an internal management consultancy at Rogers Communications, an enormous national-scale telco. I hired a team of very smart analysts who put their complete faith in me as the principal. All three had strong academic backgrounds, and were keen to put their knowledge into practice. I was slightly more experienced than them, and had already had the optimism mostly beaten out of me by circumstance and working at huge companies.
Our first big project was to create a complete, interconnected map of every operational process in the 2,000 person IT shared-services department and come up with a list of things to fix. This covered everything from desktop support to wiring up new servers in our data centres, with stops on the way for GSM networking, billing and rating and even payments. This was the kind of initiative that takes months, years even, at companies the size of Rogers.
I told them we had six weeks. And we'd all leave the office at 5pm every day.
A constraint is a no in advance. Six weeks to do a six month project meant we had to say no to a whole lot of stuff. It also meant we had to figure out our engagement playbook in hours not weeks. We had no choice but to embrace the 80:20 rule. In a rambling, unplanned inspirational speech, I stumbled upon a metaphor that became a guiding principle.
There is an apocryphal story about the development of the Fisher Space Pen during the Cold War space race. Normal ballpoint pens didn't function well in zero-g. The Space Pen was developed by the best engineers and scientists in the world with a pressurised ink cartridge that meant it could write in orbit just as well as on the surface.
The Russians used pencils.
This is what we used as our touchstone for every decision. This helped us keep our eyes on the actual goal, and avoid the temptation to over-engineer our approach. "Are we Space Penning this?" became the way the team would pull back and recalibrate discussions. It became a way for us to say no in advance.
We hit our deadline. Over six weeks, the four of us interviewed hundreds of functional owners, mapped out a complete view of the department, and produced a validated list of improvements to present to the CIO. It was a remarkable achievement from a remarkable team that embraced the constraint.
I moved on from that team in due course, and at a wonderful goodbye team dinner, they solemnly presented me with a space pen. It's still with me on my desk, all those years later, a physical reminder of the power of constraints.