hill problem – From the desk of Adam Thomas

Yesterday I discussed the “Hill Problem.”

There are consequences if you put that focus elsewhere.

Task focus:

The important part – The Hill.

Whatever hill you find yourself facing now is “necessary.”

Great if you pick the right hill, but disastrous if it isn’t. Just focusing on the Hill is time-consuming.

Action focus:

The important part – The step.

When you put energy in how each level feels, you have a metric to figure out how to go ahead.

The difficulty of each level affects your next decision, and you dwell there. You think about the step before, and the test after, and pretty soon, you’re carrying far more than your baggage.

It might be the completely wrong hill.

Don’t lose the mission

A few days ago, I went over the Mission-Task-Action framework. The framework provides a heuristic to break down a goal into strategic and tactical parts. It is a fast way to organize a problem.

This morning, I thought about the “mission” part of that framework. It reminded me of a computer science problem that deals with selecting the right path.

There are many hills. The goal (mission) is to get to the top of the highest hill. So, how do you get to the highest one?

It isn’t as simple as just picking one and walking since there are more than two hills. While that may work once with luck, when we deal with computer science, we look at the scale. How can we consistently get up to the highest hill, especially if there are many hills?

The best way to solve it is completely counterintuitive. Instead of just picking a hill to start walking (luck), you walk up a random number of steps and check from time to time.

Once you are up a number of steps, look at hills around you. Start crossing off the ones you don’t see. If other hills around you seem taller, go back down and pick another hill.

This method is even more robust as the number of hills increase.

You want to test as early as much as possible, so you increase your chance of making the right answer. As a result of the increased chance, you end up with more time on the backend to execute.

It’s cut from the same cloth as Seth Godin’s principle of thrashing early*.

Only when you focus on the mission will you become confident.

Tomorrow I will talk about what happens if you spend time focusing on the “task” or “action.”

As a result of the wrong focus, there are consequences :-).

*If you want to know more – here is a great video on Thrashing from Seth.