Answer Shopping Starts At the Top - Here’s How to Stop It

I’m all for autonomy and “flat” structures; but there has to be some top-down intentionality in how your teams talk to each other and who does what.

Why?

Ultimately, if people are left to themselves, you’ll have a few teams that have learned how to say “no” (protecting themselves from being overtasked) and other teams that haven’t. And it’s those more agreeable teams that will be burdened with everything.

Do you want to get answer-shopping? Because this is how you get answer shopping.

If people know they can find another team willing to say “yes” to their project idea, then you’re encouraging it.

Priorities need to be set at the top and implemented below. And priorities don’t work if low-priority stuff can get “snuck in” by answer-shopping

Remember, strategy is about deciding what you won’t be doing. That’s why it’s hard. If you shove all your ideas on your people, everything goes slower than it otherwise would have (because being overtasked slows everything down); and some will fail because you couldn’t be decisive.

Don’t you think it’s wiser to decide upfront what’s worth doing?

You need to make sure those priorities and goals are set for each team. Otherwise, any “idea guy” middle managers looking to take credit for something start answer-shopping their latest bad idea. The idea goes to whatever team won’t say “no.” This sabotages the much higher-priority work you’ve already given them.

Here’s what Project Managers Actually Do

Project managers, agile coaches, scrum masters, and all the other coordinate-y people are all trained to help teams get more done.

That’s rarely what they do, though.

They provide a name for ineffective middle managers to claim they’re doing more work. You can’t start a project with one front-end developer; and you can’t start a project with one database admin.

You can start a project with a project manager even if they have no team to do the work.

So we have 10 projects and 9 people. Then we try to solve this problem not by deciding which project to swarm and finish but rather by hiring a 10th person who’s incapable of actually executing the project. Remember, project managers are trained to coordinate with other executors!

Still, we get excellent slides out of it, don’t we? We can say we’ve started that “urgent” project, which the boss said we had to start yesterday but then refused to allocate any resources.

It feels good to start projects. But remember, we only get paid when we finish them.

Start finishing. Stop starting.