Deck Chairing

Or, how I learned to trust myself from two weeks ago.

The idiomatic phrase “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” is often used for signifying a pointless or useless action, but it actually means something slightly more subtle: an action which, while it may seem useful now, will quickly become insignificant in the scope of larger forces at work.

Startups I’ve worked with, especially early stage ones, often suffer from this behavior (and I’m as guilty of it as anyone.) The problem stems from the fact that getting through the Build-Measure-Learn loop is not instantaneous.

In order to measure and learn from what you’ve built, you’ve got to build and get something out the door first. Otherwise you’re not reacting to your product you’re just reacting to your ideas of your product, which are very different. Until you do that, any insights you may have aren’t necessarily better than the insights that led to your first round of decisions of what to build

Since we never stop thinking and learning, however, we’re tempted to assume that our more recent decisions are better than the ones we made previously. But oftentimes the decisions are different because we’re focusing on a different goal or result than before, and so need to build something different to achieve that.

Rinse, lather and repeat that process every week, and you’ll end up working extremely hard with no achieved result. You’ll feel like your always heading in the right direction, because you keep optimizing for something, but since that something keeps changing, you’re not actually moving forward.

The only way to break out of this loop is to trust the decisions you made in the near past enough to finish the implementation process at least to the prototype level. Then you can test the product on yourself and others before jumping to your next round of conclusions.

So, stop Deck Chairing and give your ship a chance to sink or float without spending all your time rearranging the furniture.