American organizations run a small version first, in one region, one store, one department — and write the procedure afterwards from what happened. The rollout follows the pilot. The rule follows the rollout.
Minimum Viable Product
Build the smallest thing that can be put in front of a real user, ship it, and learn from what happens. The word viable is doing the work. Not good, not finished — just alive enough to generate information.
Move fast and break things
Facebook’s internal motto for its first decade. Not move fast and be careful. The breaking is named, accepted, and put in the sentence. It was retired in 2014, which is itself part of the story — the company iterated on its own motto.
Fail fast
Two words, and the logic is compressed into them. Failure is assumed. The only variable worth managing is how quickly it arrives, because a slow failure costs more than a fast one to reach the same information.
The Agile Manifesto
From 11 to 13 February 2001, seventeen software practitioners met at a ski lodge at Snowbird, Utah, and in three days wrote sixty-eight words. The fourth of the four values is the one that matters here: responding to change over following a plan. Not instead of a plan — over it. The plan is acknowledged as valuable and then explicitly ranked second to the ability to change course.
The change order
The American answer to scope creep is a document. Either party proposes a change in writing, the supplier delivers an impact assessment naming the effect on fees, timeline and acceptance criteria, both sides approve, and only then does the work proceed.
The standard clause is blunt: work performed without an approved change order is performed at the consultant’s risk and may not be billable.
The American supplier is not defending the boundary of the work. He is building the machinery to price its expansion.
One-way and two-way doors
In the 2015 shareholder letter, Bezos divided decisions in two. Type 1 are consequential and irreversible — one-way doors — and must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. Type 2 are changeable, reversible, two-way doors, and should be made quickly by high-judgment individuals or small groups.
He gave the irreversible kind one sentence. The rest of the passage warns that large organisations apply the heavyweight process to reversible decisions, producing slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, insufficient experimentation and diminished invention.
The framework is not a case for careful analysis. It is a case for identifying which decisions do not need it.
Seventy percent
In Amazon’s 2016 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos wrote that most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70 percent of the information you wish you had — and that if you wait for 90 percent, in most cases you are being slow.
He added the necessary companion: either way, you need to be good at quickly recognising and correcting bad decisions.
The threshold is named as a number, published to shareholders, and adopted across American business as a rule of thumb.
Iteration
The term iteration has become common within American companies: to communicate several or many communications, back and forth, between two or more parties, in which information is exchanged, decisions made, activities (action items or more simply actions) agreed to.
Merriam-Webster online defines iteration as a procedure in which repetition of a sequence of operations yields results successively closer to a desired result.
Americans iterate, some intensely so. It allows them to maintain flexibility, to ensure information flow, to discriminate between what is important and unimportant, to reduce risk. Like any strength, however, it can be inflationary: too much communication, too little action.
Instead of front-loading an agreement with in-depth discussion about the details, Americans iterate.
Back out
Americans reserve the right to back out of an agreement at any time during its early stages. This sounds like a contradiction in terms, in the sense that once an agreement has been made, one should keep their word.
It is not. American agreements in their early stages are agreements in the making, they are under consideration, are conditional. Americans will do their best to deliver what they have agreed to, if they can, are permitted to, if time and resources enable them.
To go into too much detail of an agreement up front is a potential waste of time and effort. Americans want first the very basics of the agreement, in order to quickly assess whether they can and want to enter into it.
If the initial response is positive, they will enter further into the agreement, taking in more details, proceeding if they can, are permitted to, if time and resources enable them.
It is a step by step process, and not an all or nothing decision.