As I am typing this, I am sitting in a United flight back to San Francisco, watching the movie “Rental Family” on the inflight entertainment system. For those of you not in the know, the movie contains the story of an American second rate actor in Japan who makes a living being hired as a stand-in family member for funerals and other events. It is a lovely movie about the importance of connection and about how lying is often easier in the short term than telling the truth.
In the movie, actor Phillip Vanderploeg (a Dutch or Flemish name if ever I heard one) gets hired by a single mother who decides her daughter “needs” a father for a little while in order to help her pass the entrance exam for an elite school. Obviously, the actor gets pulled into his role as the absent but now miraculously appearing father. When the cute daughter takes a shine to him, problems ensue. How to extract yourself from this situation? The moral, for me, is obvious: He didn’t have an exit plan.
More than a year ago, I wrote a Wednesday Wisdom article about a pop-psychology personality typing scheme that we used at Google as part of the “Edge” technical leadership program. In this scheme, your preferred behaviors in various circumstances are grouped and then characterized as being one of four dominant colors. Obviously, a scheme like this is severely limited (and please read the WW article if you want to know more), but there are definitely tendencies to a person’s character.
My primary color (in that system) is orange. The oranges are the impulsives, the people with five ideas before breakfast, but also the people with (culturally sanctioned) ADD and ADHD. Oranges are liable to jump on any great looking idea that comes along, sometimes (or maybe: Often?) without giving much thought on how to get out…
Time for an anecdote: Many decades ago, when personal computers and local area networks were becoming all the rage, my business partners and I got talking to the senior partners of a large law firm. We agreed that office automation in the legal profession could use a boost and we decided to develop a turn-key solution for Dutch law firms, with features encompassing customer relationship management, file building, writing legal documents, and invoicing. We would become 50/50 partners in this endeavor, with the law firm providing business expertise and money, and we would provide even more money and of course technical expertise.
Wonderful idea, really. Powerful business idea too. So we jumped on it “con mucho gusto.”
Long story short: We did pretty much everything wrong when it came to executing on that idea, but here was one particular thing we did wrong that I want to talk about today: We did not have an exit plan.
As development started and then continued, we found out that developing business software is a) very hard, b) very expensive, and c) takes a really long time. Because we were young and naïve, we really didn’t have a good plan or a good budget for this whole affair. Eventually, when amazing results failed to appear, despair set in. How long was this going to take? How expensive was this going to get? How long would we continue before giving up? And how to tell our business partner that we were wavering in our commitment, after they had already sunk a lot of money into this project too?
Internally, my business partners and me had many conversations about this struggling project, but we were never able to figure out how to proceed because we were impressed by the sunk cost fallacy, by the embarrassment of having to tell our business partners we had royally effed this up, and because we didn’t have a clue how to get out of this, seeing as we did not have a time table with milestones and an exit ramp. Who was to know whether this was the right time to get out or really if we should hang on for a bit longer?
Sad but true, most things fail.
Also sad but true, people rarely plan for failure.
Obviously except for my flight instructor, who just texted me the following about our upcoming cross-country flight: “And remember, on return trips, engines tend to fail and diversions tend to be required. :-)”
These days, exit plans are not just for business ventures, they might also be essential for jobs.
In the last few decades the nature of employment, especially in the tech sector, seems to have changed from a more or less lifetime proposition to shorter stints where you seek to accomplish a particular goal. Once you reach that goal, you might be lucky and find your next mission in life at the same organization, but it is equally likely you find it somewhere else. With that shift in attitude comes the need to have an exit plan. If you get hired to build some product, rescue some team, or maybe just to contribute to some effort, how do you know when it is time to get out? Answer: Because of your exit plan!
Whenever I talk to someone who is about to engage in some endeavor, I stress the importance of having an exit plan. Rarely do I meet any resistance. An exit plan? Of course, sure thing! Very important thing to have, an exit plan. But then when things start going not as expected, I rarely see any evidence of an exit plan in action. And I have not been any better myself. After the failure of our software development, I have been involved in at least two or maybe three endeavors that could have done with a decent exit plan. But did I make one? Nope!
Why not?
Obviously, thinking about failure and early (or at least: Earlier) exits when things are not going as swimmingly as we would have wanted them to go is a bit painful, so that’s probably a major reason why we’d rather not do it. And of course, planning is hard and who wants to make time for doing hard things in the exciting rush of your new shiny project? Another reason is maybe that we live in a culture of mindless imagined success. We are drowning in vapid messaging about how success is really just a mental thing. Kids are told that they can do whatever they can imagine and there is an incredible amount of claptrap going around on the power of positive thinking. Thinking about your exit plan might seem like an incredible downer and something that could actually stand in the way of your success.
I don’t think that’s true though.
An exit plan should not be an analysis of all the things that could go wrong and what you would do if any if that actually happens. To the contrary, your exit plan should be a realistic timeline resolving around meeting pre-established success criteria. Instead of thinking about how you are going to fail and when to pull the parachute, figure out all the ways in which you are going to succeed and on what timeline. And then, when the time comes, evaluate yourself honestly against these criteria and wonder if you are being as successful as you said you would be. At that time, you can still delude yourself, or maybe course correct and try to stave off the inevitable. Or you can decide then that it actually is time to pull the ejector seat. An exit plan is not there to execute mindlessly on, it should be there to make sure that you have the right conversations with the right people at about the right time.
Of course, when things are going badly, it is really hard to pull your head out of the bucket due to something called “Plan Continuation Bias”, the tendency of people to continue executing on a set plan, even if the circumstances changed, even if things are going badly, even if, all things considered, it is really not a good idea to continue as planned.
Many accidents in general aviation happen because of “plan continuation bias” or, as pilots often call it: “Get-there-itis”. It turns out that it takes an incredible force of will to realize that things have changed to the point that the original plan is no longer feasible and to draw up a new plan based on the current circumstances.
During the aforementioned software development disaster I would have loved to have an exit plan in place because it would have at least given me and everyone else (including our lawyer business partners) a vehicle to have the right conservations. It would still be awkward, it would still be very difficult conversations, but a regular review of the exit plan would have created a structure for having these conversations.
When you write your exit plan, you are not planning your failure, you are defining your success and you are creating a structure for yourself to honestly measure it and draw the right conclusions.
