The Three Levers
I love thinking about tradeoffs, and I love thinking about efficiency, so when I think of something that combines the two, I have to explore it. Throw in the opportunity to represent it visually with a triangle, and you know you’ve found something special.
That’s what happened the other day, when I reflected back on projects I’ve worked on—both professional and personal—and noticed a common thread.
Whenever you work on something, there are three primary levers you can pull:
Your Outcomes - What are you trying to achieve? For example: “I am going to create an ideal social network like this one.”
Your Actions - What steps will you take to get there? For example, “I will segment my work into these bounded steps: X, Y, Z.”
Your Time - When do you need to finish it by? For example, “I will finish this within 10⁵⁰⁹⁶⁹ seconds.”
The Execution Triangle
What occurred to me is that, at most, you can only ever feel confident about two of these three levers. Any time you try to fix two of them, you’ll find the third grows elusive.
So we can think of the three sitting on a kind of Execution Triangle:
First, let’s take a look at fixing outcomes and actions. Here are a few examples of what happens when you do so, and why time becomes variable:
You’re building a product and want to achieve Product Market Fit (your outcome). Doing so requires repeated iteration/failure/iteration/failure (your actions). You therefore cannot know in advance how long it will take (if it ever happens at all). In the case of my previous company, Anchor, it took three years and two major pivots. In the case of my current company, Oboe: 🤷♂️
You want to hire an amazing team to work at your company (a wonderful outcome to strive toward). You have a rigid hiring process and a high bar (great actions to get there). And as anyone who has tried to hire without compromising on what matters, it’s anyone’s guess as to how long it will take.
You want to read all 1,200 pages of The Count of Monte Cristo (your desired outcome). If you fix the steps to do so (reading every page, sequentially), you can’t know ahead of time how long it will take. In my case, when I did this last year, it took two months. And it was worth it!
Next up, fixing actions and time. Here, the outcome becomes uncertain:
Your team is given a budget and one year to do user research, design a product, and ship it. The time is set. The steps are clear. The outcome is entirely unknown (and in this case, likely not very good).
You sign up for NaNoWriMo, the online community where aspiring writers commit to writing a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. The timeline is clear: “30 days has November.” The actions: an average of 1,667 words each day, no matter what. The end result? Who knows…
You decide to run a mile every morning for the next three weeks. Good for you! I can’t do that. Nor do I know what shape you’ll be in at the end of that window, or how much endurance you will have unlocked.
What about fixing outcomes and time? I call this the “anything to make it work” approach:
Your team has $X in marketing dollars to spend by the end of the quarter. This explains why we see a spike in marketing dollars spent, often on ineffective ads, toward year-end. Anything to make it work.
You’re on a baking competition show. The last challenge of the episode is to bake a jaw-dropping cake in two hours that will impress the judges. As we’ve all seen on these reality shows, the strategy always becomes: Anything to make it work.
You want to read all 1,200 pages of The Count of Monte Cristo. You need to do so before your book club meets next Tuesday (so time is fixed). Sounds like a recipe for skimming the book, or skipping entire chapters, or listening to the audiobook on 3x speed, or reading the Cliffs Notes. The actions here are variable. Anything to make it work.
You’re the protagonist in the plot of any suspenseful story where a clock is counting down to something bad happening (Argo, Armageddon, Run Lola Run, every episode of that show 24 [maybe, I’ve never actually watched it]). In all of these cases: Anything to make it work.
Why It Matters
I find it helpful, with any long term initiative—whether business or personal—to address upfront that one cannot guarantee all three of these levers. Between what you’ll achieve, how you’ll achieve it, and how long it will take, one lever will always have to give. You’ll never be able to fix more than two of the three.
And so, candidly addressing upfront which of the three you’re willing to compromise on is key. Take my hiring example from above: setting off on the journey with the unrealistic expectation that one can control timing is a recipe for disaster. Or take a team with a fixed budget and a fixed timeline: believing you can control what that team will produce when the clock runs out is certain to lead to disappointing outcomes.
Embrace the uncertainty. It’s there whether you like it or not.
Your Recommendations?
Last December, I shared recommendations for 2024, including ones submitted by Z-Axis readers. Now I’d love to hear your recommendations for 2025! What books, movies, shows, music, etc. did you love this year? Why did you love them? Email me and let me know. I’ll feature some of the responses in an upcoming article.