Nothing ever grows there

How the impediment advances action

Prologue

When is the last time you deviated from your regular baseline of effort?

To help, think about the last few weeks of your life. Do you remember what transpired as the seconds — unceasing — bled into minutes?

Really think about it.

You and I are wired for comfort. Not happiness: comfort. Happiness can produce comfort but it is more to do with inner joy which has little to do with whats outside.

Snap back. What stands out? Is it troubling how hard it is to recount significant signals?

Now think about what you want — to hone a new skill, improve your fitness, build up a relationship, earn more money, do something novel at work, push a frontier or see a different place.

What progress stands between where you are now?

Let’s take a turn.

You’re the visionary technical leader and co-founder of a new company. Your product a new analytics suite — InsightPro — purpose built for understanding customer usage behavior.

Every new product company in the valley wants it. Making good on the ability to pinpoint signals from regularly collected telemetry, it fully articulates — via a proprietary piece of functionality called UsageSonar — what drives customer usage for a broad array of applications. The customers that deploy InsightPro can immediately make better decisions about where and how to invest in their products. This leads to higher revenues for them and happy customers. The perfect equation.

The initial success and industry acclaim lets you begin to rest on your laurels. As your company grows revenue, so too does headcount. There are new markets to take. New partnerships to strike. More time is spent on maintenance instead of innovation. Comfort sets in.

A few quarters pass and you’ve noticed that competitors begin to close in on core functionality that originally made InsightPro a standout. Danger, Will Robinson — you’re under threat. What was once a blue ocean starts to turn red.

What do you do? Do you have a choice?

The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. — 5. V

InsightPro was a first of kind breakthrough. And you intend it stay that way. Your plan: integrate machine learning and AI to not just describe usage but rather predict and summarize it from historical data.

Once a sonar, now an oracle.

If — no when it works — the money will keep pouring in.

You hear echoes of a mixed response — “Why risk what’s working”. The status quo’s heavy gravitational force.

Constraints are myriad — limited resources, legal unknowns and fierce competition. Ensuring GDPR and CCPA compliance while retooling InsightPro will require new re-work with existing customer contracts. Not to mention a new architectural paradigm.

Again, what choice do you have?

In the present you make resource allocation decisions — stopping some starts to pave the path.

You rankle some, hell you’re rankled.

You know this game. You approach requires small, manageable changes pushing boundaries slightly without overwhelming the team. The “why” is communicated like a drumbeat.

Slowly alignment begins to falls into place.

Vulnerability helps the cause. What was once an impassable object becomes a foregone conclusion. You’ll make it this time.

Epilogue

What is it that you want? Have you narrowed in on it?

Do you know the path to get there? And when you’ll turn? Are you comfortable enough to just sit still — idling in advance of a busy intersection.

No.

There’s progress to make. You turn.

Seconds are precious.