Back in February, the boss announced in his newsletter that he would no longer preview upcoming books. Do you remember this irrelevant missive, reader? It referred to the monthly book ‘preview’ which was stupidly organized into three categories – stop and go, dense, and light. The obvious problem – well, obvious to everyone except the author of the newsletter – was that no reader ever knows what kind of a book it is until reading it.
Fortunately for you, dear reader, I’m here today to squeeze a little juice out of the lemon that was the February newsletter. You see, this whole nonsense about books and categories reminded me of an entirely different problem – premature categorization. What I mean here is that sometimes worrying about finding fits for predetermined categories creates more trouble than all the extra effort from categorizing is worth.
Let’s consider the boss for a moment. His goal is to
I see this type of problem all the time in organizations. Instead of building an infrastructure to train new hires and waiting patiently for appropriate opportunities to arise, organizations are tempted by the short-term efficiencies of specialization and start defining projects, job descriptions, and career arcs at the minutest level of detail. When a new opportunity suddenly arises, these organizations are unable to shift resources and take advantage because all the available resources are locked into their specific responsibilities. In the worst organizations, good opportunities pass by completely unnoticed because everyone is so focused on carrying out the plans they made seven months ago.
An organization that could hold off on defining specialties until the very last minute would be able to quickly adjust their strategy to meet new opportunities. It would also be better positioned to understand what a new employee does well before finding a specific project, team, or role for the new employee. Many organizations pay lip service to this by boasting about internships or rotational programs but these are not as important as simply being able to properly assess performance. If the organization is assessing performance accurately, it should have no trouble finding the right roles for its employees.
The manager is likely in the best position to carry out this function. A good manager should be able to assess an employee’s strengths, think about what role would best utilize those strengths, and find a way to shift resources within the organization to match strength to role. If the manager’s performance assessment ability is limited, there is no way for the organization to gain the information required to reliably move employees around and take advantage of new opportunities. This is because a bad manager would only assess performance in the context of the assigned role. Inevitably, the manager would focus on shoring up weaknesses (perhaps in the vain hope of turning ‘a weakness into a strength’) and this in turn would mean internal movement was no guarantee of strengths aligning to opportunity.
Those who constantly build up skills, accurately assess performance, and always align strengths to opportunity will win. Those who train poorly, retain delusions about performance, and cannot apply strengths to opportunity will lose. It’s hard to understand why anyone would consciously call losing plays but that’s what seems to happen almost by default. I think premature categorization does a great deal to explain why.
When something gets categorized, it is no longer possible to reach one’s full and unique potential – instead, it is only possible to be good enough in the context of the category. A category rewrites the entire program for self-improvement by shifting the focus from doing what we are good at to improving where we are deficient. And of course, at the team or company level, questions like ‘is this the best opportunity right now?’ become questions like ‘are we still taking advantage of the opportunity we defined in the past?’ because categories create a shared tunnel vision. This tunnel vision is sometimes referred to as ‘focus’ but all I know about focus is that too much of it on one thing makes it impossible to see a better possibility somewhere else.
There is no irrefutable rule that suggests avoiding premature categorization guarantees success. But how does it help? Most of us have very little understanding of what we are good at until we try things. Rather than guessing first then doing everything possible to affirm the guess, we should instead define criteria for success, try as many different things as possible, and stick with whatever works. Focus on reaching your potential instead of being good enough by the standards of someone else's category. If you can stick with that, I think the categories will eventually work themselves out.
Signed,
The Business Bro
