When brainstorming, you are supposed to leave all the ‘yea buts’ out and just hammer on making a list of ideas. I agree. But once an idea is being moved forward, all bets are off. And I feel a little guilty about that.
You see, myself and and someone from our finance department were asked to review specific parts of our terms-of-sale. As a marketer and former sales guy, I was hopeful that this would be an opportunity to streamline our process and save us some headaches.
But change is fraught with peril. The greatest peril is opening a can of worms. We had our opening meeting and agreed on what needed to be done and how. And then the worms started coming. It was too much to bare and we soon adjourned.
Instead of meeting again, I instead wrote a long email full of bullet points, trying to put names on each of those pesky worms. It felt silly writing a memo for a committee of two, but those worms needed names and needed to be counted, something that couldn’t be done easily in a meeting.
Road-block?
When I described my memo to one of our sales people, that’s when I started to feel guilty. Did I just create a road-block for our project? Should I have limited the scope so we could move forward? Would it have been better to meet again? Will the project die on the vine? Guilt!
Road-map?
After a weekend to ponder, I still agree with my actions. The memo becomes a road-map of success, with all of the holes in the road marked. Either with it or without, success will be challenging. But moving forward without all these issues addressed would just become a game of “Whack-a-Mole” (or to carry the analogy, wack-a-worm), which is not a good management method, don’t you think?
And if the project dies, it won’t be the memo that killed it, but the ‘worms’ named within it. In that case there shouldn’t be guilt, but only sadness.