Are you tired of getting bogged down by rigid milestones that hinder rather than help your progress? It’s time to revolutionise your planning approach. Imagine a planning process that breathes adaptability and encourages continuous learning, creating a flow of change. This is the essence of using waypoints instead of traditional milestones.
Traditional planning methods, with their rigid milestones, often become more of a burden than a beacon of progress. Turning from milestones to millstones around our necks. Initially, these milestones might appear as achievable targets, but as projects evolve and the realities of the situation become clear, they can quickly turn into obstacles, impeding our path forward.
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Planning milestones on the road to a future that doesn’t exist.
In my previous blog post, i explained how science tell us the future is unlikely to go to plan. Well if the future can be described as Volatile Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) what does that mean for our planning process? Setting milestones is often setting up a trap for our future selves.
We therefore often get stuck in the dilemma of trying to hammer away at the milestones. Sometimes under the organisational trauma of the dreaded ‘red flag’. Often resulting in tough and stressful meetings with senior managers or key stakeholders. Or falling prey to the temptation of milestone creep simply moving the milestone out of our way to something more achievable. (Which often defeats the point of the milestone in the first place).
The curse of the red-flagged milestone often trips us up, dominating management discussion at all levels, and is frankly often a huge waste of time and stress. Wouldn’t it have been better to have avoided the stupid milestone in the first place?
Why Milestones Don’t work.
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”.
Goodhart’s Law
Waypoints are the very definition of measurements as targets. The point that the economist Charles Goodhart was making was that people will game cheat and misinterpret targets. If people change the targets then the targets are not a good measure of performance. If there is a motivation it will change people’s interpretation. That’s why the observers bias is such a big problem in science. It doesn’t have to be deliberate or conscious it just happens. If the setting of milestones as targets makes their reporting incorrect and unreliable they see to function as reliable indicator of progress and performance.
Waypoints are a Great Alternative to Milestones
Instead of milestones use ‘waypoints’. We can use these to ‘anchor’ and track our progress so that we can make a smooth transition from planning to implementation. Waypoints are clear, unambiguous markers that are easily recognised, observed, and measured. You measure your progress on a plan by either moving towards or away from a milestone. We don’t have to hit a milestone to progress, we only have to be aware of whether we are moving away or towards things that are better or worse. They offer a more dynamic and flexible approach. Unlike milestones, waypoints accommodate multiple paths to achieving objectives. This encourages innovation and creativity.
Why Use Waypoints?
Waypoints are not obstacles to overcome. Therefore the trend in the data for a waypoint is more useful than a target. Targets can be achieved by luck or cheating and encourage short term thinking. (As W E Demming ruefully points out in the second of his seven deadly diseases of management). Waypoints apart from being much harder to cheat at, (with multiple reference points) also lead to consistent performance over time, rather than a temporary fix to race to a milestone. It also creates a measure where we can use the scientific approach of testing a hypothesis. Improving our implementation over time through learning.
The Science of Waypoints
Of course, the waypoint approach mirrors the way aviators and navigators on boats use in real life. (Even with the benefits of GPS). As they address the challenge their own complex seas where they can easily be blown off course, or pushed away by often invisible currents outside of their control. You don’t want to to progress in a straight line towards your final destination, only to find you are miles off course and out of fuel. (This is the milestone problem in a nutshell) Even the earth curves away from us, meaning a straight line over any long distance will never get you where you want to go.
The Psychology of Waypoints
The process of setting milestones also fits around the way our brains process information. Psychological research shows us that people are not very good at judging distance or direction. Instead, they use landmarks to navigate the world. The tourist map with it’s focus on big outsized landmarks is a much better representation of how we think. (It may be that we evolved to think this way as a better way of adapting to an ever changing world)
The Maths of Waypoints
Finally, it also reflects the attractor approach from the mathematics of dynamic systems. An attractor is a set of states toward which a system tends to evolve. Therefore if we could amplify these attractors in our environment it is a way of changing the system to a state that will sustain our changes. (Sorry that’s a bit technical for some). The point is that the science of waypoints is much deeper than the makey-uppy targets and milestones that is common practice in planning.
An Example of Waypoints vs Milestones
The number of people attending a workshop is a great example. If you were to look at the trends over time you could test different approaches. Setting a target for a particular number of people going to a workshop on a particular date, is tempting failure and narrows the testing and learning process to a fingers-crossed approach. Resulting in a blame game if the target is not achieved or complacency if it is. Rather than viewing it is as a gradual learning and improvement process.
But we have always used Milestones for Planning our Projects
Project managers may be thinking; “Hold on the point of milestones in Prince2 is that they focus on the blockers to each project”. The milestone is a hurdle that has to be overcome to move onto the next stage. I would argue that is a little foolish to focus a project plan on all the things blocking it. Rather than focus the pragmatic achievement of a project plan on all the things that will deliver benefits to our service users. That being said milestones do have an important role in marking the achievement of minimum standards or approval. But we shouldn’t turn the whole plan into an obstacle course of targets.
Agile & Waypoints
Alternatively, agile avoids the milestone issue of getting stuck, leaving the outcome of each sprint open to the interpretation of a product manager. I would argue that is not very scientific. It also hides the tradeoffs of benefits, to end users that are never fully understood or addressed. Adding waypoints helps address the known problems with agile of fragmented output and measurement
Adding waypoints into an agile framework can offer a more balanced less subjective approach. Maintaining the flexibility of agile, while introducing a more systematic way of aligning and evaluating progress over the project as a whole. Leading to more informed decision making and better alignment with end-user needs.
Waypoints for Scaling Impact
As i previously pointed out, it is common for social impact projects to have diminishing returns as they scale up. Setting waypoints directly helps to address this issue. Milestones simply try and replicate the work and so are likely to have diminishing impact as it is scaled. Being used in environment ever more different from the initial impact. Waypoints work instead by embedding a continuous improvement approach directly in the implementation. Meaning that people can reinvent the impact with their local environment.
Waypoints Are Part Of a Wider Approach to Creating Social Impact Projects
Waypoints recognise that social impact projects are different from the traditional project approach which is designed to manage things and not people. Recognise that society is connected as part of a complex adaptive system means that we need approaches to manage change. If you want to learn more I’ve created a complete guide to social impact projects that will help you create a bigger impact in the world.
Conclusion: Using Waypoints help us Advance our Plans
Waypoints represent a more advanced and pragmatic approach in planning. They help us navigate the reality of an ever changing world that we can’t accurately predict. They help us to better navigate the currents of change an ever evolving complex world. Encouraging creativity to solve our problems. While providing a platform for a scientific approach through hypothesis testing to reach our goals. Using waypoints helps us plan enabling a flow of change rather than getting stuck on a roadblock on a narrow path to success.
Using waypoints is an important aspect of our approach at Leading to Impact where we aim to help leaders create a flow of change. Empowering leaders of change to go from vision to impact helping to create a better world.
Learn to create change that flows: Discover more at edgeofpossible.com