Ged: [00:00:00] Okay, we are recording.
Welcome back to podcast. The podcast where Milan and I pick a card at random from a deck of cards just like this. Let’s pick a card at random and let’s go.
Milan: And the winner is Don, the do list. It’s a diamond card, which means it’s something about value, whether we are talking money or time, because that is the same thing in our lives pretty much. So. This card came from the realization of how much we do for one reason only, and that is because we’ve always done it. And how little we question whether what we are doing is [00:01:00] actually moving us towards our goals. We did have that brief conversation in the Impossible Goal card, a couple of episodes back. But this one is specifically about that little piece, right? Which is, hey what are the things that we are deciding not to do in favor of. Things that should be the priority, have the return on investment, are moving us towards, towards our goal. Because there is only so much time we can put into our energy or attention we can put into any, any of those things. How do you see this play out in your practice? Jeff, Joe.
Ged: I. Everyone knows what a to-do list is. And everyone has a to-do list or probably several. And there’s probably a load of things on there that are overdue or should have been done by now or are, you know, just not getting the focus and the intention [00:02:00] that they deserve. And, and that’s probably because they don’t have a do not do list. And the, the power of the do not do list is actually. Thinking about, you know, what are the things I’m currently doing that I should stop doing? You know, what are the things I’m doing that serve no purpose or don’t add value or don’t add enough value? Because even if we’re doing something that adds a little bit of value, we’re taking capacity and we’re taking time away from things that might add a lot more value.
So there’s an opportunity cost here. So. I, I, I use a tool called Start, stop, keep. A lot of us coaches do, and the do not do is the stop bit in the start, stop, keep. So it’s something I do regularly. Not necessarily every quarter, but I certainly do it at least every six months. And I find that. Be interesting to see what you, what you experienced the first time a leadership team does it.
They actually get very little outta the [00:03:00] don’t do bit because they haven’t actually got their head around stopping stuff because they’ve just always done it. They haven’t actually thought about the things that they could stop doing if they chose to.
Milan: Well my experience with the start, stop, keep, and maybe it’s the way I’m coaching it and I need to change that, is that I get a lot of intangibles in terms of not something that will waste us time, but more like a change in behavior that is, that is required. Like, let, let’s stop gossiping. Come on.
Like really? Right. Yes. But, but you know, if, if it’s a problem in the organization, then it’s obviously needs to be addressed. And I feel that those are valuable just to surface them, if anything else. But a do, do not do list is really we’re talking about, about activities that are taking time. They’re taking effort.
Sometimes they’re taking money, right? It could be somebody’s job that’s completely. You know, useless, you know, in the, in the big, big scheme of things. They [00:04:00] could be, their time could be used for something better or can they can be doing the same thing, a different company, which would actually have a need for that.
And we have it only because it’s still you know, because it always has been and it, nobody thought about whether it’s still creates the value that we want. I was really trying to think about the term of opportunity cost, right? Because opportunity cost is a cost of doing something. Because you’re not doing something else. But this is almost like the do not do list has a opportunity, revenue
Ged: Deficit. Deficit.
Milan: Income, you know, however you would call it, right? It’s like what you gain by stopping doing something right.
Ged: Yep.
Milan: Which could be significant, could be really, really, truly significant.. Both in the terms of, yeah, you know, there might be a immediate impact on your bottom line because you’re not spending money doing it anymore. Or [00:05:00] you are replacing, or, you know, you are increasing productivity of your, of your workforce, whatever that is. But also the hidden value, you know, the which is again, like once you free your mind of debt. Attention sucker, and you put that creative energy into something that actually does make sense. In the long term beautiful things happen. Seen it all the time.
Ged: Yeah, I, I think that there’s often two steps to to, to actually making a do not do list useful. You know, the first thing is identifying the things that you just don’t need to do anymore. And like that, you know, sometimes people identify just stupid stuff. You know, the, the report that’s been generated every day for the last 10 years that no one ever reads, you know, that’s an easy one.
But the problem is a lot of them are not so easy to actually deal with. So identifying them is just the first step. Now say you, you know, you identify something that you really. [00:06:00] It’s just stupid. There’s no point in doing it anymore. It serves no value. Often there’s actually an investment required to be able to stop doing it.
Now you’ve either gotta, you know, give it to someone else or you’ve gotta untangle something, or you’ve gotta change a process or, or something like that. So it’s often not quite as easy as just putting stuff down on a do not do list. You know, you then got to. Expend the effort to be able to stop doing it, and that’s often why things stay on people’s do not do lists because it’s easier to just keep doing it than it is to actually stop doing it.
Have you come across that?
Milan: 100%. 100%. And I think that the, the bias, you know, we call it bias for action, right? We also discussed that before, is that, all the glory comes to those who start something new, successful.
Ged: Mm-hmm.
Milan: The, the energy goes there and it’s so much easier to start something new than to stop something that was happening there because, you know, we just don’t go there.
The, the, the, [00:07:00] it, it seems like a opposite of creativity, right? It seems like who wants to dig through that? It’s fine, you know, and we build on top of that. But really going back and editing. It remind me of Hemingway actually who said like, you know, create, I’m paraphrasing, he said, create a drunk and it’s sober.
Right. Requires different state of mind. Right. Which which I think applies here. We need to learn. Create triggers that help us to get into that state of mind that allows us to edit what we are, what we are already doing. And you know, in the cart we’re discussing some ways of some companies what they, what they did to surface those.
To time and space to think about the to about identifying the shit we shouldn’t be doing because it’s working. And sometimes the leadership doesn’t know. Because that activity is completely invisible to them. [00:08:00] So you need to empower the whole team to say, Hey why are we doing this?
Does it really make sense? Right. Can we just think about it for five seconds before we commit another month to that project? Right. Whatever, whatever that is. So. What we need is to promote mechanisms in the organization that will allow us to identify those things so we can actually give it give it a space. Also reminded me about you know who Rory Sutherland is.
Ged: I don’t think I.
Milan: Fantastic chap, ex Ogilvy you know, admin. I would love his, I would love, love his stake on today’s state of ai. He did a, a beautiful speech on, the creative side of ai, while ago, but in another one, I remember him bringing up the concept of a chief detail officer. [00:09:00] That would be a person in the company who has unlimited powers to make changes and demand changes of people, but have zero budget to do that. Right? So literally their job is just to look and edit, edit, edit, edit effectively, right?
Ged: I’m not sure if I’m sure. Well, I’m sure, sure. You am, you are familiar with Elon Musk’s engineering process. And maybe that’s a separate card that we can dive into in more, in more detail and proper attribution of course. But you know, step one is always asking the question, why are we doing this?
Does it need to be done? And you know, and it’s, it, it’s something Sorry. Go, go. Go.
Milan: No, you are absolutely right. But the dangers in this, I was thinking about this like, you know, 30 seconds ago in the same thing. But the point is that it’s the qualification process of whether or not to do something that you are planning to do. And in that process, it is great. Right, but [00:10:00] the discipline to go back to something you are already doing and tirelessly investigate and reinvestigate and reintegrate the reality to whether or not it still makes sense, even though it might have been a great idea 15 minutes ago, is is where the difficulty start and where the do not do list and mechanism to create and maintain it. Is is extremely important because again, this thinking doesn’t come naturally to us as humans.
Ged: Yep. And if you, if you’ve read his biography you know, so it is a great, great read. It’s a long, it’s a long read. He goes, he, he is obsessive about that, you know, and, you know, and he pushes back and he says, okay, who made this decision? Go and find who, who out, who made this decision? And, you know, it could take that days, weeks, sometimes to find out who made the decision.
But in the end, the decision was. Oh, no, we did that because of this. And no, that’s not, not necessary [00:11:00] anymore. You know, so you need to know who made the decision, and you need to be able to find a way of getting back to that decision process so it can be challenged, because, you know, often engineering decisions are made on the basis of best knowledge at the time, and if that changes, the decision could, could be completely irrelevant now.
Milan: Yeah. Or best knowledge available to that person at that time, through
Ged: Yeah.
Milan: Right?
Ged: Mm-hmm.
Milan: Whether they didn’t do the right, it doesn’t, it doesn’t really matter how you go there. What matters is how you get out of it, right?
Ged: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Let’s take a quick pause there. Where do we wanna go from here? Do we wanna keep going or do we wanna wrap it up?
Milan: I think we’ll wrap it up.
Ged: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Milan: It up. So I think that we might do a quick fire of ideas of how to start, do not do list in the organization and as an, as an advice. And you know what it means and of it goes.
Ged: You’ve, you’ve got the simple team exercise, so do you wanna just go through that and [00:12:00] then I can sort of just add a bit around, you know, but, you know, just because you know, the next step is to, since you’ve got the i, once you’ve got the ideas, then it’s a question of working out what you’re gonna do
Milan: Yeah.
Ged: About them.
Milan: I really like your concept of saying that it’s actually not a while. The, the, the return on investment on the process is very, very quick. It’s not necessarily. For lack of a better word, zero sum game. You might, you need to invest, if nothing else, attention and effort. Instead of creating something, you need to actually reserve part of your energy to how do we identify the things to stop?
Ged: Yeah. So you’re just gonna go through that simple team exercise? Yeah.
Milan: I
Ged: Yeah.
Milan: I, I, I lost the recollection of it. I. Drawing complete blank. Do you want to do it
Ged: Oh,
Milan: Just read it?
Ged: Okay. Yeah, sure, sure. Yep, yep. Okay. So Luke, you can [00:13:00] cut this back onto the last bit before we took a pause.
There’s a very, very simple team exercise that you can go through to, to actually work through things that you can stop doing things for your do not do list. And it really is as simple as give everyone a sheet of paper or a virtual whiteboard or whatever, and then get them to write down stickies, you know, almost expect them to be ridiculous, you know, just outrageous statements that you think could be worthwhile stopping.
You know, we, you know, we should, we should stop. Producing p and Ls. Well, that’s not gonna get up, but there’ll be other things that might be more sensible. You know, the, you know, may, maybe looking at that in more detail. You know, you can, you should stop sending ’em to everyone who don’t read them. Okay.
Maybe that’s a, that’s a thing. So write them all down. Then you’ve gotta go through those one by one and triage them. You know, some, you’re gonna discard. Yeah, crazy idea or not yet, or put this on the, you know, do not do next year list. And you should probably have one of those too. [00:14:00] And. Then as a leadership team, actually make some decisions about what things you’re gonna put in, put in process now, what are the things you’re actually gonna stop doing, and what do you need to do to make that happen?
Some of them will be a stroke of the pen now some of them will be like, you know, let’s just not create that weekly report anymore. Okay. Done. You’ve just saved yourself some time. Yep. Others you might actually have to schedule.
Milan: To Yeah. Change to
Ged: Yep.
Milan: Of some kind.
Ged: Yep. That’s, that’s right. Yeah.
Milan: Replacing, replacing one type of input with another like Absolutely. Absolutely.. Ask the questions, right? Like, dive into it. It, even if it looks ridiculous, sometimes there is more behind it. It just looks ridiculous on that little piece of paper, but the thought behind it is much less.
So. So it, it might be word of conversation like, what did, what did the person mean by this? That’s,
Ged: Mm-hmm.
Milan: Interesting. And find out that the gems could be hidden, you know, behind the third or fifth why [00:15:00] question You’re going to ask about that piece of paper.
Ged: Yeah. Yeah. And I think one last tip that teams often miss is, with the time that you’ve freed up, you should make a considered decision about where that time should now go. Yeah. Now that’s not, that’s not necessarily, you know, scheduling something. It’s saying, okay, I’m stopping doing this. And in, in stopping doing that, I am devoting that time in the service of this other thing, this higher value thing that I think is worth more effort or time, more resources.
’cause otherwise you stop doing something. All that happens is everything else you have to do just expands to fill the void.
Milan: Yeah. Yeah. Even if the time is okay, I’ll go home earlier or you know, I’ll spend the time learning. I think it’s a really, really good commitment. I would like to add one more thing. The exercise is great to start that thinking and surfacing it, but I think that what is really important is, and.
[00:16:00] Ongoing process. Think kaizen of constant improvement of what’s happening in the company. So give, you know, whether it’s a box in the, or the office, or if it’s a specific email address or specific channel in Slack, whatever it is that the organization is where it’s dedicated and everybody knows it. If you see something you think we shouldn’t be doing, you know, no judgment, no filter. Just drop it in there so we can think about it and we can get better over time.
Ged: So in summary, you probably have a to do list, but you should also have a do not do list. Make a conscious decision and effort around things that you should stop doing.
Milan: It’ll take some investment of time and attention if nothing else. However, it’s probably the highest ROI activity you can think of in the short term.
Ged: Okay, that’s a wrap.
Milan: Yeah.
Ged: We need to do a teaser for both episodes [00:17:00] there, don’t we?
Milan: I was just thinking the same thing. Yeah. So let’s
Ged: So I’ll leave the recording going. Should we do the AI one for, or, or should we just do this wrap up here, seeing as it’s front of mind? Yeah, let’s do the, do not do list. Wrap up. Yeah.
Milan: Yeah.
Ged: Mm-hmm.
Milan: So do you, do you want to do the do the don’t do list and I’ll do the I’ll do the
Ged: Yep. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Milan and I have just finished recording our latest podcast episode and the card that we pulled out from the deck, the card that came outta the shuffle was the do not do list. You probably have a to-do list, but do you have a do not do list? It’s a really, really useful tool and it gets time back in your day, and that is what leaders often struggle with.
Milan: Nothing to add. It was great. Okay. [00:18:00] Okay, I’ll do the next one. Luke. 3, 2, 1. So Jett and I just finished recording a longer and more packed episode with our guest car Cardens. I don’t want to misspell that one, so I’ll do again.
Ged: It. Okay.
Milan: So Jet and I just finished recording an episode with esteemed guest Cari Jensen from The Uncommon Business. And we talked about ai. Unlike other episodes where we just randomly choose cards, this was so it’s a second degree episode in that aspect. And we actually brought three cards together and we just had a chat with somebody who’s really on the forefront of. The impact AI can have on business. So we are not going to be talking about text autocomplete, or we weren’t talking about [00:19:00] any of that. We were talking about where really the switch in mindset and really the impact that the businesses can see from jumping into at first and possibly even where to get started.
