Tools for Time Zones

By?Geoffrey Moore

Author –?The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality

For those of us immersed in our digital worlds, it often feels like the pace of both life and work is accelerating.? That’s not all bad, as you can deal with the bad stuff quicker, and the good stuff has a chance to come sooner, but it can take some time management.? More importantly, I think it takes some tool management as well.

Take Excel for example.? It is an excellent tool for dealing with the past.? In the present, it has contributions to make as well.? But it is a terrible tool for dealing with the future. That’s because it is linear in all its extrapolations, has no ability to deal with nuance, and is as inspiring as a load of unfolded laundry.

I call out this issue because far too many executive teams lean on Excel far too much when they conduct their annual planning.? Planning is about possible futures.? It is not the domain of numbers.? It is the domain of narrative.? And here PowerPoint is a far better tool to use.?

PowerPoint is good for telling stories.? Stories are key to understanding our past, present, and future.? But here we have to be careful.? PowerPoint gives enormous power to the storyteller.? This is fine for talking about the future because there is no data as yet.? In the present, it is useful because although we have data, we may not yet have made sense of it.? Stories help us do that.? It is with the past that we have to be careful.? Here we do have data, and PowerPoint can roughshod over it if we are not careful.

I call this out because far too many executive teams rely on PowerPoint during their quarterly business reviews.? Day One puts it in the hands of the sales executives who tell stories that put them in the best light.? Day Two, it’s in the hands of the product leaders who do the same.? ?The dives are rarely deep enough, nor the insights sufficiently thoughtful.? Here Word is a much better tool, particularly around learning from variances from the plan.?

For most of my life, I have thought of Word plus Outlook as the right tools for managing in the present, but in this fast-moving landscape of digital work life, I think we need something more dynamic.? Slack has set the standard here, with other tools doing their best to emulate it.? Slack is strong for the present because it displaces personal computing with collaborative computing, overcoming silos with a fact base that is constantly being updated.? It can help with the past, although often there is simply too much stuff to wade through, and it can help coordinate the activity of planning for the future, leaving the output for a more formal treatment, the natural domain of Word.

The point is, each of these tools has one time zone, if you will, where it can shine, as well as others where if used there, it underdelivers.? It behooves us all to remember there are horses for courses.

That’s what I think.? What do you think?

Follow Geoff on LinkedIn?|?Geoffrey Moore Main Mailing List?|?Infinite Staircase Mailing List

________________________________________________________________

Geoffrey Moore?|?Infinite Staircase Site?|?Geoffrey Moore Twitter?|?Infinite Staircase Twitter?|?Facebook?|?YouTube