The “If it is too hard you end up not doing it” Effect!!

There are several things in life that we are aware that we have to do or that it would be very good if we do it, however since it is very hard to do them; we end up not doing them. For example you may be lying in bed and suddenly you watch a program on cooking healthy food, so you start thinking about eating that healthy food tonight. Then you realize that you have to go to several supermarkets to get all the ingredients, that once you get home (after all the traffic) you will spend 1.5 hours cooking it and at the end you will have to clean all the dishes!!! You end up ordering pizza.
A few weeks ago, I was asked to make a presentation for a group of Information Workers about the problems that they face and the opportunities ahead of them. While thinking about the presentation it occur to me that asking them about how much time they spend using e-mail, if they knew what RSS and Blogs meant, etc. would be a good idea for the presentation. However the presentations were 2 days away so I used an on-line survey tool and sent them the questions. In 1 hour 20% of them had answered the questionnaire and after that the tendency of the results was the same and we reached a 40% completion. The day of the presentation I only presented the results and the audience was amaze to see their behavior on graphs. I looked good but without a tool like this It would have been too hard to get this information and I would have ended up not doing it.

If your organization decides to go on a Balanced Score Card Project that would have 3 levels: company, department and personal. Very soon you would have to start thinking about building thousands of scorecards every week. They should give you information that is not more than one week old. First you are very excited about the new initiative and you start working on manual scorecards, staffing the department to deliver them on time to every level. Soon enough your team will be exhausted and de-motivated. They will start delivering the scorecards late and their relevance to the different levels will start declining. Next thing you know the whole initiative will fall apart.
Whenever you start to do something that adds a lot of value to the organization, make sure that doing it requires more work than the value being added. Try always to start small and build up from there so that you can start creating the proper systems that will allow you to scale up your initiative.