Be impactful

Be impactful, focus on the impact, this doesn’t bring enough impact. I am sure you heard these words before, as a comment, feedback, or a passing sentence in a meeting. And they are deep and right.

But what does it really mean? As so many different variables lead to a high impact, we can’t calculate all the options, especially not during a meeting where we want to make a decision.

I use a few thoughtprocess to estimate impact of roads taken, not MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive):

• Opportunity cost: great concept from economy, important that you understand the downside or cost of every decision and action, this can be surprisingly hard without specialist experience, seek out and learn to become better
• Range of uncertainty: always question, what is the worst that can happen and how realistic it is? Then the second, the third least realistic and so on. With experience, it is faster. Even can communicate it, e.g. time estimations always should have two values, lower and higher end, lower is the earliest we can see result, higher is the latest we need to make a decision to cut our time investments.
• Tangible: is the impact monetary, time or cost savings in any form where we can put an exact number on it, or just a perception or feeling it is better. Not demeaning the perception part, yet conscious understanding always deepens understanding. E.g. we all know tech debt is not good, but how really it is? The exact one in front of you actually worths a week longer task instead of a day?
• Lasting effects’ scale: usually from experience or comparing situations and cases, you may have a perception of the long term changes an action can make, and how hard to sustain, increase or mitigate (depending on if the effect is sought after or not).

E.g. if I need to code an email sending, I know I can do it in half a day with tests in my most well known language. Now I need to do it in my least known language. Worst case? I can’t even do it for unknown reason. Which is very unlikely. I had learned a new code langauge before in a few days, so more likely worst case scenario I can do it in a week in same quality. Can be faster is quality not that important, e.g. a proof of concept is enough.

And lasting effect, for example if you don’t have emails implemented and later you want to introduce, one effect can be that you did not collect it from all your customers. The cost of this is how long it takes to create a solution that can reach those customers too. Rare that you can’t have an action to reverse lasting effects, however knowing their cost helps avoid pitfalls early.

What do you take into consideration to find the most impactful decision?