Two Minute Warning
Aug 14th, 2008 by mark
Throughout my career I have been fascinated with process. At a certain level of abstraction my job is nothing but implementing processes, big and small, to achieve some goal. After spending twenty-five years examining existing processes to understand them, and designing new automated processes to replace or augment them, I tend to see processes everywhere.
The best processes are the ones that you don’t see, that fade into the background. The worst are ones that constantly jar and batter you as they run counter to your goal. Most fall in the middle ground somewhere; they work well enough to not require updating or change, but they are at times cumbersome or annoying.
One pitfall a number of processes seem to fall into is what I call the “two minute warning syndrome.” American-style football is played for 60 minutes, and with just two minutes remaining on the game clock a warning is sounded. Many teams shift gears into a hurry-up offense, or “two minute drill” at this point in the game, trying to catch up or win the game.
To my way of thinking this is wrong. Why wait until the last two minutes to catch up and win? Why not come out and play the first two minutes to win, and then the next two, and then the next, and so on?
The most recent example of this “two minute warning” thinking I have seen is a placement program I’m in at work. My position has been eliminated and the organization is searching for a new assignment for me that matches my experience and compensation level. The program is six weeks in duration, with a possible extension should there be a placement pending when it expires. The announcements sent out to over two dozen managers made no mention of the deadline involved. Few, if any, response trickled in during the first four weeks. Now, in the middle of the fifth week, HR has started calling managers to inform them that the opportunity to interview me ends next week. Suddenly there have been several inquiries about me, and I have three interviews lined up, with one or two more potential interviews pending.
When HR sounded the “two minute warning” on the placement program everybody shifted gears and the placement process actually started to move. Had that kind of motivation been brought to bear in the first week, I would have been placed weeks ago, and all this stress and confusion these last minute efforts would have been eliminated.
The two minute warning may make for good football games, but it is a lousy paradigm to model (consciously or unconsciously) your process after.
Annoying, isn’t it. But most of us do this in many areas of life. Students loaf until the evening before an exam, then they cram all night… Christmas shoppers have all year to find the right present for someone, but they storm the stores in a frenzy of last-minute shopping the week or day before the holiday… we don’t really worry about debt when we go into it or while we live with it “comfortably” (how can there BE such a thing??) but when the payments become too much to handle and dealing with it can’t be avoided anymore… “lose ten pounds for bikini season” is another example, or driving less only when gas prices are finally high enough to break the bank.
Taking steps to take care of problems and projects is a hassle, so we procrastinate until we’re faced with that “two minute warning”. It’s not good for business or people, but it seems to me that it’s just part of life in these days of short-term thinking and minute attention spans.