The Audacity Balance Dilemma

I think one of the most important things Executive Managers must manage is the Audacity Balance Dilemma. This is my term for dealing with multiple difficult trade-offs when target setting, planning and organizing new projects and it's especially true with technology projects. Remember a Dilemma is quite different than a Problem. Dilemmas require tradeoffs with no perfect answer compared to problems that can be overcome by solutions. Problems are the things that must be dealt with by the Project Team. The Executive’s challenge is to deal with the Dilemmas most of which SHOULD come well before the project starts.

The basis of this is high-performing human teams have complex needs beyond straight-line business objectives. I believe planning a project from an executive’s perspective (again not the project manager's seat) takes understanding what motivates the PROSPECTIVE team of humans to actually achieve results accomplishing AT LEAST the organizational objectives worthy of the effort and cost. I believe far too many executives run away from this responsibility because they don’t understand the impact of getting this right or think they are too busy or maybe just don't want to be seen as intrusive and in the weeds. Executives set the Audacity Balance when establishing the vision for the project and subsequently reviewing project plans.

Earlier in my career, running teams ranging from a few people to 100s, I noticed there was a very tight correlation between “perceived” stress levels and accomplishment that wasn’t what I was expecting.

In my definition, “Audacity Balance” is the product of the technical challenge/schedule/staffing/target cost. So a project with stretch technical/logistical/quality/cost challenges - needing to be done in a short period of time - with limited staff and at low expense would be a High Audacity Balance project and so forth. Most people think of High Audacity Balance projects as being more STRESSFUL than Lower Audacity Balance projects but there's more to that story...

To keep it simple, I began to think of this as a single number. A “comfortable” project might be 90% Audacity Balance (Low), a “normal” project might be 100%, and a “stretch” project might be 110% (High). The first way to gauge this is based on the project team’s reaction when hearing about the project. If the reaction was “Ok fine - when do we start?”. I would rate it below 100%. If the reaction was serious but not stressed I would rate it around 100%. Finally, if the reaction was something like “Are you F- ing kidding me?” it was PROBABLY over 100%.

It's easy if those reactions are in your face but most of the time it takes digging those out in the hours and days later which takes some effort and maybe some courage. In all these reactions, it's critical to realize people on the team will continue to process through their assessment of the project for days or weeks. They will talk to colleagues and friends in your absence and their initial conclusions will evolve. Earlier I used the term “Prospective” team - sometimes there’s a strong disagreement on the team regarding the Audacity Balance. Occasionally, solving the Audacity Balance Dilemma could include changing team members.

In a couple of cases in my career, circumstances dictated the project be High Audacity Balance. In one specific case - the project was called LH - for Last Hope, for a very real reason. That project got all the resources that were available but that amounted to a fraction of what the team thought was required.

The upshot of all this is those projects and teams operating at or below 100% Audacity Balance almost always were UNSATISFYING. The team didn’t feel good, the results were often less than expected, costs were frequently higher than expected and schedules were missed. There are outliers to everything but in general, that’s what I have seen.

At the other end, Executives can set the Audacity Balance so high that projects breakdown, people become disenchanted, and achievements and costs suffer - you get the picture. When the balance is too high you probably could have seen or felt it if you looked in the right place and believed what you were seeing.

The stunning fact turned out to be that projects with Audacity Balance levels well into High Audacity Balance but not too high tended to turn out better than expected with additional features/quality/innovation plus probably more importantly, a team that wanted to do more as opposed to less in the next project. Leading to these teams increasing capacity for higher and higher levels of Audacity over time resulting in compounding achievements.

Through all this, it's CRITICAL to note that generally, the Executive is the ONLY person who can actually manage the Audacity Balance. If it's not right, you can tweak it early on, just don’t do that once it really gets going. But it's possible to take projects from lower levels to higher levels as well as from higher levels to lower levels. You can do this.

So this brings me back to the term “dilemma” - finding the right balance is never perfect, it takes practice and monitoring. You also can’t leave this on autopilot because the magic of past successes fades quickly and takes work to recover. A few executives have an innate sense of this and a presence that allows them to manage this without thinking about it. For the vast majority of us, it takes hard work and attention. But the nugget of wisdom in this is - don’t be afraid of pushing the Audacity Balance higher than the team or even you think is reasonable. There are many more angles to this line of thinking that I will be exploring in future articles.

A friend of mine - Deborah Gilboa, MD probably can provide much more detail and science on these effects from a different angle. Please see her work on the subject of “Resilience”. She has a wonderful way of exploring the relationship between stress and success.

If I can help with working through this in your situation please let me know.