Dealing with the Firehose Problem

Coping With the Volume of Stuff to be Done When You Build a Business

Building a business is an amazing experience - it's exciting, you’ll learn loads and it can be very fulfilling. But it can also be extremely stressful.

The sheer volume of new things to deal with can be overwhelming. Most of those new things will be outside of your area of expertise - if you’re a scientist or engineer starting a tech business, it might be a shock to discover that the biggest challenges that you face are not actually to do with technology. Instead, the biggest challenge will be building a business that works - an organisation that can turn your technology into things that customers want to buy. That challenge will include assembling a team that works well together, motivating people, managing finances, finding customers, negotiating legal agreements and so on.

There will be all sorts of decisions to make, often with imperfect information and unknown consequences. It’s easy to be so busy and keen to get going that you don’t stop to think clearly about what you are doing and why you are doing it. That can wait for later. Instead, you get sucked into getting things done. Information, decisions and opportunities are coming at you in a never-ending stream. At first, it’s energising - you’re finally creating something. But there’s no end to the stream of things that you could be doing and interesting people that you could be talking to. The work is never finished, there is always more to be done. You quickly get out of your comfort zone - you are having to operate at multiple levels - from working on the strategy, building a great team and finding customers, to deciding on branding, ordering stationery, doing the banking and cleaning the office.

This sense of having an overwhelming volume of things to do and decisions to be made has been compared to drinking from a firehose. Stuff is coming at you faster, and in much higher volumes than you could ever consume. You risk being drowned by it. The thing about drinking from a firehose is that it can be done, but it’s going to be messy and you’re very likely to get hurt!

So, what can you do about it? How can you control the firehose and turn down the flow? Productivity tools and life hacks all have their place - to-do lists, journalling, Getting Things Done, Pomodoro, Inbox Zero are all helpful tactics but, for me, the improvements seem to be temporary. They may increase my capacity but the growing volume of stuff soon overwhelms me again. The volume of the firehose seems to increase faster than my capacity to deal with it.

Is there another way? Rather than just battling inundation, can we structure things differently to tackle the source of the problems? Can we turn down the flow? It’s helpful to look at some of the factors that make the firehose such a problem in the first place. Then we can set about structuring things to deal with them.

So why is it so difficult to deal with the firehose? It starts with the basic fact that the problems that we have to deal with are hard, and many of the factors that influence the outcomes are outside of our control. Dealing with that is challenging - we’re not naturally very good at making decisions based on limited information. And then we have to work with other people to get things done - motivating and coordinating people is rewarding but it is tough.

It’s this combination of factors that makes it difficult to start and build a business. Let’s look at each in turn, before we think about what to do about them:

1. The problems we have to solve are hard because some are complicated and others are complex.

Although we often use those words interchangeably, they describe fundamentally different types of problems, which require different approaches to solve them. Complicated problems usually have lots of detailed steps, requiring skill, expertise and experience if we are going to master them. Making things is an example of something that is usually complicated. If you’re going to build a boat you will have to follow detailed instructions, source the right materials and employ experienced craftsmen to help you. Building a boat is complicated, but if you follow the instructions and get expert help, you’ll end up with something that floats.

Complex problems are quite different - the outcomes can be impossible to predict accurately because they are very sensitive to conditions that can’t be controlled or even measured perfectly. Weather forecasting is the classic example. We can accurately forecast the weather for the next day or two, but longer-term forecasting is impossible. The best you can do is to be aware of the likely trends and be prepared for a range of outcomes.

If you want to sail your new boat across the ocean, you will have to deal with the complexities of weather forecasting. Similarly, if you’re growing a business you’ll have to grapple with economic complexities. The commercial world shares similarities to weather systems - long-range forecasting of either becomes impossible because of complexity and sensitivity to factors that we can’t perfectly measure.

Businesses have to deal with both types of problems, often at the same time. They need to have skills, resources and good planning to deal with complicated situations, and a clear vision shared by an empowered team that can steer the business through complex problems.

2. Compounding that, luck will play a role.

Luck will always have an impact. Random events, decisions by outsiders or accidents can all affect your business. And luck can go either way. Good decisions don’t necessarily lead to good outcomes, and bad decisions can produce good outcomes. Focussing just on the outcomes can therefore be misleading. We need ways to make decisions that are robust and that do a good job of dealing with the things that we can control while trying to mitigate the effects of things we can’t.

3. Our brains don’t work the way we think they do.

It’s tempting to think of our brains as sophisticated computers, taking in data, processing it logically to reach unambiguous decisions. But that really doesn’t come close to explaining how we actually think and make decisions. We’re not that straightforward!

We may be great at combining lots of information and reaching a quick instinctive decision. But we are oblivious to all the information that we don’t see. And we are full of biases - that makes it hard to deal well with complex problems and unknown factors. We need to develop ways to make decisions that help us avoid our blindspots while allowing us to operate quickly and instinctively when needed.

4. And critically, people are not just mindless machines that follow instructions perfectly.

We all have hopes, fears and emotions. We need to be motivated and inspired by how we spend our time. If we ignore those deep and fundamental needs, work starts to feel very hard and uninspiring. Your team will need input, vision and feedback from you - not just a set of instructions. They need to be nurtured and helped to grow. And that doesn’t come naturally to many of us. To be effective leaders we need to behave more like gardeners, rather than old-school military commanders, expecting to micromanage every action.

This is a heady mix - it’s no wonder things get difficult! As we start to dig into these challenges it can feel like a daunting task. How can we possibly cope with the myriad decisions and build a business in a way that inspires people to work with us and to buy from us? The temptation is to ignore all of that and just get on with the next task in front of you. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make the difficulties go away. Instead, we need to find an effective way to deal with them. We need to find a way to turn the firehose down.

We can start to do that by organising the business so that it makes effective decisions as efficiently as possible - this is called good governance. It’s good governance that will help you turn your desires into strategies that people can follow and turn strategies into plans that teams can come together and deliver. To make that happen we need to take into account the 4 problems that we have discussed here. Dealing with those is key to turning down the flow of the firehose, to make it manageable so that you don’t get drowned. We’ll look at how to do that next. First we'll look at some key questions that we can ask ourselves. Then we'll look at how to build those answers into the structure of the business.

What do you think? Have you seen these problems in your work? Have you come across others that add even more challenge? Either way, I'd love to hear about your experiences. And if I can help you think through some of the challenges, please do get in touch.