The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - Moving Past Paralysis During Analysis | S4Ep10

Episode Date: January 14, 2025

In Moving Past Paralysis During Analysis I'm sharing five considerations for leaders who need to move their teams to a decision point and out of an analysis rut whether planning a disaster response or a technology project.

Welcome back to People, Process, Progress podcast, season four, episode 10, moving past paralysis during analysis. I'm the host, Kevin Pinnell, and today the people I'm speaking to are leaders, managers, individual contributors who struggle with indecision and fear of failure. The process that I'm focusing on

are teams implementing new initiatives, organizations facing complex decision-making challenges, and the progress I hope each of you make is for the businesses seeking to improve agility, increase efficiency, and accelerate innovation. But first, please silence your cell phones, hold all sidebar conversations to a minimum, and let's get started

with the People Process Progress Podcast. In three, two, one. As we said, if you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you'll never get it done. Getting stuck in data and moving past the decision precipice is hard, particularly if you're a new leader or the decision you're making could negative impact money, cost time, reduce quality. More importantly, it could hurt people. So how do we consider each of these risks while also moving our personal and professional initiatives forward?

Let's dive into what I found most helpful as a public safety and project management leader. The first thing is getting stuck on the dangers. So in public safety, considering danger is the most crucial factor, right? In response planning. Life safety is number danger is the most crucial factor, right? In response planning. Life safety is number one on the list for a good reason. People matter more than anything else. Holding onto this notion also freezes up teams and can lead to a delay in response that

causes more lives to be lost. Think back to the video of the officers at the Uvalde school shooting. Now I'm not tactical and I have had an opportunity to take some scary actions. As a firefighter, I climbed a ladder that was balanced on ice by two of my teammates so that I could ventilate a room to reduce the heat for the other firefighters inside and help stop the fire, and it was calculated and coordinated effort. That doesn't mean there wasn't a danger, but the decision point was, we've got to do this thing. Similar decisions can be made in the business world. Early in projects, we consider what risk could or will occur and what we'll do if they become reality or issue. So how do we work through the dangers? To me, and what I've

seen work the best is most importantly, talk about dangers openly and transparently. In the project world, talk about what the risk is if we go beyond a certain point, or if we spend this much money and how it impacts next year, and you throw it out there, and you don't have to hold things back for the team that's going to help get this done and help us move past these dangers. Think of a tactical combat casualty care scenario. What are the dangers if I'm planning a rescue task force that some firefighters and some police officers to go in and they're still an active shooter, but maybe he's around the corner in the hall and the contact teams can go hold that person off when we go in. And that's calculated, right? That's sending people in, in the line of fire, military veterans out there that have been in combat, you know better than I do,

but that's a public safety consideration. Also consider the likely positives, right? Not just the negatives. A lot of people are really risk averse and that locks them down and that helps, that not to help them, it makes them get stuck on the dangers. But also think about, hey, if we move forward with this, what are all the positives we're gonna get out of it?

Which should be the catalyst really for any project or response. The positive is saving lives or saving money or making more efficiency, of course there are some negatives. So the first thing that I found that we don't wanna do is get stuck on the dangers. The second thing to help us get past this paralysis

is not identifying hard stops, right? It's like a virtual guardrail for projects or even a physical stop on an emergency scene, like a barricade, a fire line. And on projects, these are kind of big ones, right? Budget, scope, schedule, quality. So in response, or project team, if we identify these virtual real stops in the process, they'll function as really guidance for folks to look back on. So when they're trying to make decisions, and you're not there, they can know, oh, within this budget,

in this scope, in this schedule, in this quality, or we are the fire line we briefed on on the map is this don't go beyond that, those kind of things. So it gives people these guard rails to stay on the road, where we want them from a safety standpoint from a money saving standpoint, but not really stop their dynamic kind of agile way to make decisions. So stops to consider are areas too dangerous for responders to work, areas too dangerous for the public to be exposed to. And then for projects, right, a cap on project spend, a regulatory timeline that a corrective action has to happen before, before there's penalties or something, the limitations in scope, right, so that we can complete per the statement of work or contract we agreed to with other entities. And then the level of quality a customer will or will not accept, right?

These are all hard stops that help us make the decision and say, okay, within these confines, what can we do? The third thing is accepting good enough data, right? Data is everywhere. Some of it's good, some of it's not. And as I shared this or I was writing the notes for the show, I was reminded of some excellent guidance from one of the best leaders I had to include in all the reports, all the graphs. And that's the statement, these data are subject to variability in reporting.

In short, this means the data could be wrong and this is my best interpretation. But if we have some data, here are some tips on how we can use that and not get stuck in the matrix of data that we can. One, use the data you have to make the decisions you need to make. So if you have limited data, much like in early response, you still have to make decisions. So if we know there's a threat over here, but not over there, and we have a question about this area, you're going to have to determine how much risk you're going to send folks into like in a shooter situation or something like that. With a project, you may have never done this before. You've been sold a bill of goods, so to speak, from the vendor.

Now you're going to try and do this new product and you have to use the data you have from the vendor, from maybe other folks that have done this project, something like that. If you're really crunching numbers and you're trying to make money decisions or how many users are affected or how many people are impacted by this flood, clean the data as much as possible to get old stuff out or things like that that's hard to do in a more emergent situation. But do that as much as possible without impeding progress. You can't have someone saying, no, no, the data is not perfect yet and we can't make a decision because life doesn't wait for us to do that. Now, in a strategic long-term data management use kind of thing, that's different. Also, never use data to overrule the human factor. And I'll touch on the human factor here in a second.

But data shouldn't trump how our actions do or don't affect people positively or negatively. And it's easy to get stuck in looking at a monitor or looking at my phone. You see it all the time. And then people don't look up and aren't humans to each other or think about what's the impact to the customer, to the patient, to the bystander, to whomever it is. And so this fourth area is leaving out the human factor. This is how we can move past the paralysis during analysis is don't leave that out. Just like the first word of the title of the show, people are the world's most precious asset.

Each person is unique, brings a distinct perspective to the team. Sometimes, and I've done this, we can get caught up in crunching those numbers, like I mentioned, or holding too fast to rules, or even letting fear overrule a decision to positively impact people we sport a sport or protect or the teammates we should be supporting and empowering. So consider understand that technology will not solve a human error issue. It doesn't matter how awesome the AI is a robot is, if people aren't doing something they're supposed to do, if they refuse to do it, if

they're doing it wrong, the technology is not going to help. Second thing is fear is always a factor, just like the show. But training can help reduce this impact, right? So if someone's afraid of change, then we can give them knowledge to help reduce that fear, because they can see what it's going to look like. Hypothetically, we can give them the knowledge to take on this new thing. And don't let the distance from the end product, right, decrease the value of what the team's doing now. And that's a valuable lesson I've learned from other good leaders I've used is we have to remind the team and show them this is

what you're doing, even though we're in the messy middle part of the project, or the exhausting part of the response, like there's firefighters in California that have just been busting their ass. What's the end result, we're going to save lives and property and hopefully have less impact to the environment somehow. That's kind of hard on the fire. But then in the business world, how are we helping the people that then help the patients? And I'm in healthcare, so that's the example I use often. But it's good to remind project teams that because we can get caught in this software thing and this server thing, but we have to remember how we're affecting folks. The last thing is that we let fear keep the bandaid on, right? Fear is the mind killer.

There's an amazing quote if you've seen the Dune movies, old ones or new ones. It's impactful to me because it's true, right? Fear of flying, fear of bad health at times, or that I might have bad health, fear of the cold before I get in it, fear of being health at times, or that I might have bad health, fear of the cold before I get in it, fear of being crushed in jujitsu. These are some of the fears I faced, right? And it's taken personal and professional support for me to move past them. So just like it will take the team coming together to pull the virtual bandaid off of a festering decision that needs to be made. So how can we help our teams do that so we can acknowledge the fear, right? And then

plan to mitigate it. This is like risk management type stuff that needs to be made. We understand this could happen. So how can we either avoid it or accept it or make it less impactful? Those are really basic risk management things. And there's more to it than that. But we can input the real fear into simulation training and public safety, right? Some of the best training I went through was the tactical combat casualty care course. We use simunition. People are screaming like they're actually dying. It's the closest you can get to the real thing, right? You have blood, moulage, that's the makeup and that kind of stuff. But you make it as impactful as possible when you're exercising. So then in the real world, it's a little less even though nothing is

like the real world. We can educate team members and customers on what to expect with new products. I mentioned that in kind of the human factor there, which help reduce those fears and, and learn legit stress management, right? I've talked about wellness on this podcast before, on my YouTube channel, people process progress, but learn mindfulness breathing techniques, right? Burn off nervous energy with movement. Some of this we can do in the moment, right? Some quick breaths to help reduce that and then some long-term things that we should be doing, whether we're working in an office or we're out on the fire line in, you know, California. I hope this episode moving past paralysis during analysis has been helpful. In it, we explored ways to get out of the rut of focusing on dangers, right on setting virtual and

real hard stops for ourselves and our teams, when to consider data good enough, right? It can't be perfect, there's variability in how we get it. And making sure not to leave out the human factor, right? The people are the number one asset and resource that we have. And sometimes it's hard to remember that when we're stuck in data mode or technology mode and how we can rip the fear bandaid off, right? Fear doesn't have to totally go away, but we're going to figure out how to work together with it there. Please subscribe to the show on Apple or Spotify, leave a review, recommend to someone that you feel this would help if this episode or this show has been helpful for you. You can follow me on X or IG at Penel KG and visit the People Process Progress YouTube channel for fitness tips, 15 seconds at a time. Until next time, keep letting your hope ignite your

path forward. Use your plans to guide your way and take action to make progress through the challenging pathways of life. Godspeed y'all.