It Is What Is, Now What?
Something happened. Something got broken, something was ruined, something did not go as planned. Now what?
Freak out!
Nooo-oo.
Can we just stop and give up?
Again, no. Absolutely not!
No, you cannot curl up into a fetal position and start sucking your thumb either. You need to get up, put on your big kid pants, and make a decision to move forward quickly, to recover.
If anything, we gained wisdom. We now know something new! We are able to learn from that experience! We now know what NOT to do next time and we probably now know what we need to do next. Or maybe we really don’t?
Your project has gone sideways and you are out of money and is significantly underwater. The staff has too many other competing priorities, is it freak out time? Certainly — but only a little. It is what it is. You cannot change what has happened. You can not change the past.
Now what? Embrace what has happened — start with either OODA — Observe, Orient, Decide, Act or PDCA — Plan, Do, Check, Act. Start planning your next steps.
What are your next steps? The first thing you need to consider is if the project is worth its value. Does it have the right support? Is this the right idea? Can it be recovered, or has the window of opportunity passed? Or should you just kill it and ignore the sunk costs?
There is no doubt that a quick post-mortem is required. You need to discover what some of the issues were, where it fell off the rails. Discover the activities that were actively worked on that were not (and are not) the most important things for the team to be doing. The primary choice right now is to decide whether to continue or to cancel the project.
Maybe there are too many competing projects, so you have to cancel something. Do not look at it as a failure. But you do have to look at it. You have to get into the weeds, into the nuts and bolts. You have to make a decision.
Another scenario. You missed a date to submit a proposal or to submit documents, now what? It is what it is. You missed. Now what? You need to recover. What is the first thing you can do? You can ask for forgiveness. Ask for an extension. Ask for an opportunity to submit anyway — but you better be ready to submit immediately. You do not get to reset the time, this is the last gasp to get you into the fray. However, if you do not ask, the answer is always no!
Once again, what should you do? It is time for a hot wash of the process. You gather your team, put as many eyes on it as you can, investigate where you missed, you get to see the missed opportunities, you identify, you learn to correct. Now you can set up a new plan. What went well being the leading way to recover. It helps extremely well for the next opportunity you are pursuing.
The hot wash requires you to quickly document your mistakes. You have to realize that this is a quick activity. You learned of your mistakes, the things you need to look at later to gather in more detail, but now it is time to move on. Take that as wisdom. Take it as lessons learned and be sure to document. You now realize what you need to do next time to correct that issue.
Now, “it is what it is” is also a trap. It smacks of the status quo. Of acceptance. Of complacency. Of apathy. This is an unacceptable approach. When you hear that phrase you need to poke! You need to challenge the status quo.
How many times have you heard “it takes as long as it takes?” It is a shield. It just means that you have not taken the time to discover a better way. You have not taken the time to standardize the process. Nor have you taken the time to streamline the process.
It is not optimal to misdiagnose this project or to miss-deliver. It happens at times. Leadership is expecting to see results. We did not go into it planning to fail. We just failed to plan properly. Yes, it is painful. Yes, it is an opportunity. It is an opportunity to evolve and not repeat the same mistake later.
If you do not take the time to understand past failure modes or to discover what the possible pitfalls were, you are bound to repeat them. You need to do a fast, deep dive, you need to do the post-mortem, you need to do a hot wash. Look at the details, the failures, and faults, and understand what it takes to not make that same mistake again.
Make the phrase “it is what it is” extinct.
Go forth and be brilliant.
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