Deadlines are dead: why deadlines are still ruining work cultures around the world

Stop demanding, start delivering.

I’ve always been a big adversary of deadlines in business. I believe that they create stress, rush unfinished products and normally aren’t even met, causing performance anxiety potentially leading to hostile environments and a high staff turnover rate for organisations. They are driven by over promise, often leading to under delivery. They are often set by someone who is not carrying out the workload or does not have an acute understanding of the ‘how’.

The etymology of the word deadline is interesting, coming from a very literal war-bred origin, alluding to a perimeter around a prisoner enclosure where they could not pass without facing consequences one could only assume by the namesake didn’t bode well.

The phrase then naturally found it’s way into the business world, initially at newspaper presses where reporting on breaking news is paramount to success. This is one example where there can literally be time, environmental or physiological constraints. Another example would be agriculture and seasons. I’m not implying deadlines are dead for these types of constrained environments.

So let’s look at possibilities as to why such an originally grim term eventually made it’s way into delivering business solutions. Deadlines do a few things, such as:

• ensure that goals, business or otherwise, are met in timely manners
• drivers for solving problems or driving progress quicker in competitive environments
• drumming up motivation as a ‘call-to-action’ in order to align a team together to achieve a desired outcome

These are good things, so why do I think deadlines are dead for everything else?

Deadlines just don’t make sense anymore.

Do products, not projects

Deadlines don’t make sense because we have so many learnings under our belt from ‘failed’ projects. We have stronger tools at our disposal that can do things such as automatically predict delivery dates based on data mined from teams and operations. We have new methodologies of delivering value quicker, more consistently and more precisely.

A project with a deadline insinuates something which has an end of life. When has a project ever finished on time, under budget and never had anything needed do be done after that project deadline?

The next question is, why did we start this project in the first place? To solve an existing problem and deliver customer value, of course. There are a few problems with delivering using the ‘project’ approach, which are as follows:

• you should not only assume you have to pivot daily, you should be ready to
• whilst your big goals may be less vague, your clients needs won’t stop evolving or shifting
• the initial problem you’re solving won’t stop splintering into others

When building something in this day and age, it should be treated like a product with, hopefully, no assumed end of life and something that will move, shift, pivot or bounce it’s way into evergreen success. If a product is unsuccessful, it probably points to a failure to truly understand the needs of your customers or rather, your customer research or product delivery techniques need improving, but that is a whole other kettle of fish.

Deliver continuously, not once off

We are living in pretty darn good times. We are enabled, we are quick and we can create a huge amount of impact easily. Why would we limit ourselves to a deadline when we are so empowered?

It’s all about delivery; from software and manufacturing to hospitality and training, things like practicing continuous delivery and continuous improvement reinforce the value we put in customers and their ever evolving requirements. Employees should be constantly delivering, always ready to pivot and live, dare I say it, agile work lives.

By focusing on continuously delivering and evolving a product, you get all of the benefits of deadlines (as above) — and more — but diminish any of the negatives that come with them.

Be declarative, not imperative

A culture of setting deadlines is imperative, imperialistic and archaic. A culture of continuously delivering value is declarative, holacratic and highly responsive.

Focus on setting up the correct product delivery cultural foundations and only good things will follow; less stress, add more value for your customers, less waste, more money saved and all the while still maintaining that speed to market and most importantly, the competitive edge.

Let deadlines go the way of the dodo.