I had some followon thoughts to my last post.

I wanted to tie this back from just being a “fun motivational observation” to something more actionable for business leaders.

So let’s say you’re in this position, where your portfolio is a plethora of projects or projects, each just a single grain of sand but the aggregate is what makes up your financial outlook. Maybe you’ve got a $100M organization, but it is made up of 300 $350,000 projects.

As with an ant colony, each ant moving one grain of sand, if a single ant gets lost or eaten by a bird or whatever, it doesn’t really impact the colony much. One less grain of sand doesn’t really make a significant difference. Now what makes a difference is when 30%, 40%, 50% of the colony’s ants suddenly don’t move their grains of sand. Suddenly your velocity and bandwidth of building and maintaining this underground network of tunnels is profoundly impacted.

The parallels are there with business. If one of your 300 projects stalls, it doesn’t impact your financials that much and you may not even really notice. But if 40% of your projects all stall at once, now you’ve got significant impact and you are taking note. The issue I’ve seen is when this happens, the leadership starts looking for the “silver bullet”. They start trying to find that “one thing” they think will solve all of it. If only we could write one whitepaper, send everyone to one training class, do one change like buy everyone pizza in the office every Thursday, that it will fix most if not all of the projects and everything will be back on track! After all, that’s what “scaling through others” means, right?

But the reality is, when you dig in, it is that there’s not one singular problem. One project stalled because the customer can’t decide on the requirements baseline. Another, the lead developer took a vacation. Or the developers couldn’t get access to the customer gitlab repo. Or there were travel logistics problems with getting everyone to the customer site. Or the VPN went down for a week so no one could log in. And so on and so forth. Not one singular problem, but many, many problems, bespoke and unique to each project.

As a business leader be prepared to notice this, and respond appropriately. There is no universal solution when managing hundreds of projects, each with their own unique obstacles. You have to figure out how to manage problems at scale, to include concepts such as pushing decision-making downwards, giving teams time and resources to solve their own problems, and also hiring and training the right people to handle their own problems. That’s the secret to leadership at scale; not being the one to solve all the problems, but building a team and an environment that can solve their own.