Expectations and the Shape of Progress
My Zen Buddhist training taught me that suffering doesn’t necessarily come from external circumstances. Instead, it comes from your expectation that circumstances should somehow be different.
Don’t believe it? Let’s talk about shapes. Let’s talk about a trap-a-trangle—which isn’t a real shape, but hopefully you’ll see where I’m going soon.
I used to imagine a project would begin with a maximum amount of information. That information could feel unsorted and in desperate need of structure, but I would think, that’s my wheelhouse. Get a hold of all this information and then, I imagined, we can “start”.
As a shape, I would have imagined a typical project looking and feeling like this:
Imagining it this way, work begins on the left-side with a whole lot of information — data about the problem, ideas for solutions, budgets, you name it. It’s daunting, but there is hope, because you know the project will only narrow from here as it progresses toward a deliverable on the right-hand side.
I was wrong. Worse, I was expecting something that wasn’t real. And because of that, when it didn’t start narrowing down immediately? Suffering.
In fact, the beginning of a project is when we have the least information. Instead of starting from the widest point like above, we start from a single point, where often all we have is our assumptions. We gather a team to begin, and the amount of information we have grows, and the point expands a bit. The triangle, at first, goes in the opposite direction we expected:
It’s not so bad, right? After all, it’s just a small triangle, and we can tolerate it, telling ourselves if we can get this phase “out of the way”, we can start the “real work” of narrowing down.
When I thought this way, I was wrong again. What happens next is different:
We might have been willing to tolerate that small triangle expanding, but this trapezoid feels like a problem. After all, we’ve moved past the assumptions of the small triangle. We’re designing, we’re in the code, building and testing, and expect our work to move us toward a solution — yet there are more and more hurdles, more unanswered questions, growing to-do lists with nothing getting checked off. It feels like we’re farther from shipping, not closer, as everything runs away from us. We’re freaking out (at least on the inside, right?).
Our instinct, especially if we owe our career and success to magically bringing order to chaos, is to CLAMP. IT. DOWN. This is suffering, project-management style.
But it’s all okay. We’re freaking out mostly because we expected something different. In fact, this expanding shape is good. Sometimes the key insights of projects only become clear deep into this expanding trapezoid-of-discontent. Pushing too hard, too soon to start the narrowing process and remove that suffering, on the other hand? It short-circuits a team’s learning, and that’s expensive.
If we resist that temptation instead, our velocity will be better when we do hit that right-hand triangle—and we will. And that feels like the shape of most important work I’ve been a part of.
What to do about it? I remind myself that sometimes I don’t have to do anything. Most of the time, the reminder suffices.
At YNAB, we’ve made this shape and its funny name a part of our conversations, like during a recent conversation at the beginning of a gnarly project. Alan, one of our senior product designers, said to me, in a very simple statement that carried a whole lot of meaning, big trapezoid on this one.
I first encountered the shape of this shape in a completely different context, as a way to imagine facilitating a conversation, in a course called Facilitative Leadership for Social Change. I am continually in debt to how much I learned from that one course, in a completely different field of work, almost twenty years ago.
