Deadlines, Pain and Pleasure
I was reading a piece about Rupert Murdoch complaining about Google indexing their news articles and the newspaper companies losing out on revenue. Apart from saying that fighting against Google is committing suicide, I don’t want to talk about that issue; but Mr. Murdoch did say something that made me think.
He said he “couldn’t promise to meet his own deadline” – but did say it remained a work in progress and “we are all working very hard” on delivering the pay solution.
It made me think, does he know what a deadline is? What’s the point of a deadline if you’re already preparing to miss it?
The problem with deadlines is that they are essentially results goals, not action goals. You’re aiming to achieve something that you don’t necessarily have 100% control over.
I understand there’s a need for deadlines because a project cannot just continue indefinitely, but when I was working for a boss, I saw too many deadlines come and go and there was nothing I could do about it.
All the traditional CEO’s are saying “Nonsense. You were just a crappy employee.” Yeah I was, but let me give some weight to my point.
There are certain kinds of work that call for deadlines because everything is within your control if you do that kind of work. It’s just a matter of time. There are no other variables.
For example, if your job is to pack stationary into boxes, you can commit to packing X amount of pens in Y hours, but take a typical example from when I was an employee: I would be developing this piece of software and the deadline would be, say, tomorrow.
No problem. Everything is going smoothly, but then I find a logic error. The problem with logic errors, as all computer programmers will know, is that it doesn’t stop the program from working, it just stops it from working correctly.
The code is technically correct and it doesn’t stop the program and point to where you made the mistake like with syntax errors. The program just doesn’t work correctly and sometimes you have no idea where in the mountain of code the problem could be.
You could find the problem in ten minutes or in ten days. There’s no way you can commit to a time and say, by such and such a time, I will have found the problem – the same way you cannot say by tomorrow 12h30pm I’m going to find the love of my life. It’s not within your control, and a deadline assumes that all the variables are completely within your control.
Now what you can say is, “I will work at it until I’ve solved the problem and I will work through the night if I have to.”
Imagine when they were developing the atom bomb, or when they were developing German V2 rocket technology to the point of taking Neil Armstrong to the moon.
Can you imagine the Admiral standing in front of the scientists, “Guys, I’m the Admiral, I can put you in jail for the rest of your life or have you standing in front of the firing squad, and I want this project completed by next month or else that’s exactly what you’re gonna get!”
You and I both know that no amount of threats to make the deadline is going to make any difference. Those scientists cannot just spontaneously know what they need to know. And they can’t say when they’ll discover the critical pieces of information. All they can say is that they’ll work at it to the best of their ability.
So a deadline is in some types of businesses almost pointless, in fact it can be counter-productive in the sense that it introduces pressure and some people don’t work well under pressure.
I know that companies run on deadlines and that deadlines are not going anywhere. If your company is hired to deliver a solution, you cannot say, “We’ll get it to you when it’s done. Maybe next month maybe next year, but you’ll get it don’t worry!” but at the end of the day, in certain types of work such as the ones I mention above, a deadline is just a psychological tool to pressure employees to give their best, because employees will slack unless there’s pressure to get things done.
Pain and Pleasure
Throughout this blog and in life, when I highlight an issue, I try not to do so without suggesting a possible solution, so how about this:
In the scenarios I’ve described above where you don’t have control over all the variables, you’re never going to create a system that makes people meet all their deadlines all the time. BUT…
When you get down to the root of things, people do things for two reasons. To gain pleasure and to avoid pain. It’s as simple as that.
So with that in mind, to make a deadline a little bit less toothless and a bit more effective, you can either offer a reward for making a deadline, or some sort of pain for missing it.
When I missed a deadline, my boss knew how to introduce pain. He crapped all over me. It worked, but I eventually quit as did most of my colleagues leaving my boss in a difficult situation.
Of course, if someone is just plain lazy, and especially if it’s the kind of work where all the variables are within your control, like the packing stationary example, then the pain factor is called for.
But it’s amazing the inspiration you can get from the possibility of having a few extra bucks in your pocket, or a day off, or something pleasantly creative and interesting. It puts one in a better frame of mind and solutions come to you more easily. In the types of work where the variables aren’t completely in your control, this is the best you can do.
Most bosses only have the pain factor for employees missing a deadline. I recommend a pleasure factor without the pain factor, well, not a direct pain factor anyway (losing the reward is pain enough sometimes).
Even though humans are driven to action by both the possibility of pleasure and pain, if you introduce a pain factor for failing to meet a deadline, people will lose all momentum and it takes the wind out their sails. It sucks enough to lose the reward (pleasure) and if you now also have to face the pain, it will be counter-productive.
So you don’t want to create situations where people don’t even bother trying. It must just be enough to inspire people, but not so much that it takes away their desire to even try if they fail.
Besides all that, you want a company culture conducive to achieving great things, and going the pleasure route instead of just always the pain route will help create and maintain that culture.