The Problem With Action Items
Why ending meetings with clear next steps can be a mistake
The VP is just sitting there, pensive. Then you notice how she surfaces from thought and scans the room. You know she wants to see something done about this.
You’ve spent the last half an hour explaining the gnarly details of a serious outage. Half a dozen people have shared their perspectives. You’ve written down a timeline and a whole slew of surprises and observations. But the room is getting quiet now and people are running out of things to add.
“Okay.” You grimace slightly in expectation. “So how do we make sure this doesn’t happen again?” There it is. She won’t let this meeting end without clear action items.
As an experienced member of an effective team, you’ve probably learned to force discussions to actionable conclusions. You know that meetings can be a waste of time for most everyone involved. You’re biased towards action. Your end-of-meeting vocabulary is assertive and consists mostly of synonyms for “do”.
What you’re less likely to notice is how your good intentions distract your team and lock you into ill-informed decisions.
Luckily, this can be avoided. A slightly modified approach and just a dash of trust will help you retain your sense of clarity and progress without steering your team off course.
The Problem
The problem arises from the implicit assumptions that underlie the practice of action items.
To see how, consider the fact that action items are decisions. By writing down who does what by when, you are deciding that a) the thing is worth doing; b) it has the priority defined by the deadline; and c) the assigned individual should take ownership. This much is quite obvious.
What is less obvious, is that your decision assumes that 1) you have the right people in the room to make that decision; 2) now is a good time to make a call; and 3) you have enough context to understand the trade-offs involved.
The right people, the right time, the right context. The standard practice of action items assumes that these conditions are met. But not all meetings are well set up for all decisions. And we, creatures of habit, rarely stop to check. We use a familiar tool (action items) in a familiar situation (end-of-meeting) with little reflection.
Let’s return briefly to our story, to see how this can play out.
“So how do we make sure this doesn’t happen again?”
“Well, we should’ve noticed earlier that this is happening. We should add alerts when one client’s requests are taking that long,” somebody suggests. The VP is nodding.
It’s not that simple. The metrics are too noisy. Plus there is this one integration that runs rarely and has a similar latency profile but isn’t problematic. You’re thinking of how to formulate your response when somebody concurs.
“Yeah. We shouldn’t find out about this on Twitter.”
Yes. Of course! But we can’t solve it with latency metrics. You realize that explaining the intricacies involved to this large a crowd would take a while. But you only have 15 minutes and there are larger questions to be discussed. You write it down and hope you can weasel your way out of doing it or redefine it as something reasonable later on. You put your name on it. You notice the VP looking at you. You add a date.
The Wrong People
Decisions are made by whoever happens to be in the room.
Modern organizations have learned to distribute decision-making in a way that enables them to tackle unimaginably complex challenges. Individuals and small teams make countless significant decisions every day. No single genius would be able to keep up with, let alone orchestrate, everything that’s happening at even a medium-sized company.
Unfortunately, we don’t always appreciate this feat of collaboration. Meetings are one situation in which this ingenious approach tends to fall apart. Decisions are made by whoever happens to be in the room. HiPPOs (highest paid person’s opinions) have a disproportionate effect on what we commit to.
We like puzzles and we want to solve them. Whenever a question arises, everyone focuses on finding a solution. Little regard is given to who owns the question.
In the story, we saw the group decide on a course of action largely based on the thoughts of the first person to speak up. The VP’s nodding gave it additional weight.
Let’s say that the first person who spoke doesn’t have operational knowledge of the affected system. They are thinking about the outage in abstract terms. They learned what they know about the affected systems during the first half of the meeting. They’re not really the best-informed person to decide how to remedy the situation. Nonetheless, their opinion developed into group consensus.
In meetings like the one in the story, responsible individuals make up the minority of participants. The standard practice of action items unconsciously takes their area of responsibility and shares it with the whole group. Often to the group’s detriment.
The Wrong Time
The fear of deciding too late causes us to decide too early.
Sometimes the path forward is clear and what’s needed is a decision. At other times, we need to explore and experiment to understand our options.
An action item decides that we’ve spent enough time on thinking. It’s time for action.
Which is great. It’s the main reason the practice is so popular.
Our environments are uncertain and we’re never completely sure about what’s right. By deciding to act, we get out of the trap of endless deliberation. We fight our desire for certainty and break free from analysis paralysis. We stop waffling and move forward.
But the fear of deciding too late can cause us to decide too early. If the problem and solution spaces are well understood then further exploration would only yield diminishing returns. But if a question was first raised 10 minutes ago, then it’s likely that we could learn a lot with further exploration.
In the story, we saw a problem space converge to a point within just two sentences. We found out too late. We didn’t have latency alerts. Same with the solution space. Let’s add latency alerts. These are not necessarily bad ideas. But they’re also not the only possible ideas. Many problems and solutions were discarded once a solution was written down.
The Wrong Context
We can’t optimize for opportunity cost because we don’t consider it.
Everything we do has an opportunity cost. When we spend time, money, and attention on one thing we are choosing not to spend them on something else.
Effective teams know this. They funnel work through a single queue to focus and to prioritize well. They have a rhythm and rituals for comparing their options and then committing to the best bet.
Meetings that are not part of this rhythm can easily undermine this process. In meetings, we ask whether an action item is good or bad. We look at it in isolation. Rarely do we ask whether it outweighs other things the team is already working on or might be planning to work on. We can’t optimize for opportunity cost because we don’t consider it.
In the story, the addition of latency alerts was implicitly decided as worth doing. Nobody asked what else the team is currently working on. Maybe they’re working on stability improvements to avoid even more serious outages. Maybe they’re working on a new feature that would deprecate the system that failed. Look, it might be that neither of these things is true. It could also be that they are true but the latency alerts should take priority over them. But the point is that we don’t know. We don’t know because the group didn’t consider the responsible team’s full context.
The Solution
The next time you find yourself writing an action item, pause to consider if you’re ready to make that decision. Is the decision made by the right people, at the right time, with the right context?
If not; if you’re not confident about being ready, then that’s OK. Not all is lost. You don’t have to revert to all-talk-and-no-action. With a little organizational sleight of hand, you can still retain your sense of clarity and progress.
Instead of making the decision there and then, you can decide to decide.
Let’s return to the story for one last time for an example. Let’s say our protagonist wrote down the following action item.
[ ] Taylor to add latency alerts for <service> by <end-of-next-week>
Now consider an alternative:
[ ] Taylor to ensure <team> considers addressing the lack of visibility into the early signs of latency in <service> by <beginning-of-next-weekly-planning-cycle>. Consult with <team-responsible-for-upstream-service>. Inform the VP.
If the team figures adding the alerts right away is a good idea, then the outcome is the same in both cases.
If the team doesn’t think they should be working on this, however, then the outcomes will differ. In the first case, the team would need to either a) do something they don’t believe in; b) renegotiate the decision; or c) ignore the action item and risk their credibility. In the second case, they would collaborate with the other team to address the underlying concerns and clearly communicate their decision to the VP.
The alternative action item allows the decision to be made by the right people, at the right time, with the right context.
