Delay what you don't understand?

I had an email today from a client asking if we could postpone some activity we were going to start in early September because there was nervousness amongst the team that they would not have the time to invest in turning their lives around.

Most of them are swamped by work and cannot afford to lift their head up and therefore the thought of even giving up a WHOLE DAY (let alone the full programme of activity planned) was beyond them.

Instead, they wanted to replace the proposed focused and high impact programme with some work to create a PID (Project Initiation Document), recruit and appoint a Project Manager, develop an implementation plan and really look to get going 'sometime in Quarter 2 of 2008' with a series of bi-weekly hour long meetings.

Now, I know that this is natural reaction to stressful situations - we are so busy firefighting we have no time to turn off the gas - but there is also a lack of understanding implied by the response. They seem to forget that the investment of time in an appropriate, targeted and (most importantly) quick implementation will generate better returns (by several orders of magnitude) than 'death by a thousand cuts' (this being my latest term of weekly/monthly meetings that go nowhere!).

However, there is a lack of understanding implied by this (typical) response which is that the previous programmes have required lots of time investment (admittedly in hour long chunks) and achieved nothing so the thoughts of investing (maybe) 200 hours over several months would not seem a good return when compared against the old model of improvement.

Therefore, the art of bringing this programme back on track (which it now is) was to stress that the approach is different, the results are different and most importantly the returns are different.

What do you think?

http://www.amnis-uk.com/