On a recent trip to Seville, Spain, I was walking around the Grand Alcazar – a fort built initially by the Moors. A beautiful building that some may recognise as the back drop for the Kingdom of Dorne from Game of Thrones. The tour guide asked us how long we thought it took to make the fort, no-one guessed right, it took ten years. This is astounding given how grand a building it is, some of the great cathedrals of Europe have taken centuries to complete. The Moorish workmen didn’t want to build a palace for the ages but something that was practical and perhaps a bit ephemeral. This teaches us many lessons when it comes to building businesses and exploring ideas,
Done is better than never done (or done in the next lifetime)…
Done is better than never done (or done in the next lifetime) – I wonder what those great cathedrals must have been like to be a neighbour to while a century long building project was under way – makes ‘the dig’ in Boston seem like a weekend’s noisy construction.
Building something fast and temporary is not a waste of effort. Perhaps this is controversial but in the days of the Moors, your fort might be sacked the next week – was there any point building a colossus. What did they learn from building something ‘quick and dirty’ probably a lot about what the commissioner of the artifice liked and did not like with less expensive rework. I think a lot of modern agile techniques are true to this philosophy.
Research is a life long learning process, as much about experience as a spike of concentrated effort…
Research is a life long learning process, as much about experience as a spike of concentrated effort.
Now I don’t want to be too flippant and stretch this analogy of the Moorish engineers too far. I do like the scouts motto ‘be prepared’ but I’d like to tweak it a little to ‘be prepared just enough’. How much is enough, in the book “How to Be a Productivity Ninja: Worry Less, Achieve More and Love What You Do” (by Graham Allcott) the suggestion is for productive meetings, one should spend 40% of the time in pre-meeting prep, 20% on the meeting itself and 40% on the post-meeting work. The Lean Start-up (by Eric Ries) tends to suggest a bias for action, build something ‘quick and dirty’ that is the minimum viable example of what you need to build then iterate based on feedback and learning. I love the phrase often attributed to LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman, “If you are not embarrassed by your first release, you released too late”. Of course if you are in a high risks game of sending people to the moon, you may wish to spend a bit more time on planning for all possible eventualities, but even this has its limits otherwise you’ll never leave the launchpad.
“If You are Not Embarrassed by your First Release, you Released Too Late”
Reid Hoffman (Founder of LinkedIn)
The take-away – how much prep/planning you need before getting on and doing depends on the context and the cost of getting it wrong (and that argument, as we see from the agile philosophy, plays both ways on how long to spend in planning). If I had to nail my colours to the mast and give a strong steer, I’d say learn by doing, then explore/research based on what you learn. What do you think?
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