Dig until done

Dig until done is about the art of knowing when to dive deep into the details, and when to stay at a high level. Rather than attempting to front-load all detailed analysis, it tells us to dig when it’s needed — and not before.

Everything changes so rapidly nowadays. This is why any attempt to capture every detail upfront creates more problems than it solves. Dig until done advocates for a more responsive approach: investigate details at the point that they become necessary for moving work forward.

• Avoid drowning in details. On complex projects, it’s easy to feel like you need to understand everything, immediately. It’s easy to drown in all the information. Dig until done offers a better way.
• Builds trust. No one likes to be micro-managed, and that’s especially true for your smart delivery team. Don’t be that person!
• Be an enabler, not a blocker. All that upfront thinking is often seen as slowing things down. By being strategic with analysis, you’ll become known as someone who gets things moving rather than someone who slows things down.
• Keep the tank full. By focusing brain-power and effort where it’s needed — rather than everywhere — you’ll have greater capacity to be across more things. You have the ability to influence more.

1. When undertaking any thinking work, use dig until done to guide how far to take your analysis.
2. When working out what work to pick up, use dig until done to identify the work that needs to be done now, rather than the work that can wait for bit.

But remember that sometimes, you need to dig a very large hole. There’s a lot of reasons why you might have to dig early, and well past done. High-stakes regulatory work, commercial agreements, or low-trust environments might require extensive upfront analysis. If you aren’t in a high trust environment, then sometimes you just have to dig as expected.

• Start simple. Begin every piece of work by asking What’s the least amount of detail I need to move this forward? You’ll be surprised by how little you need to get going.
• Ask the right questions. Instead of What else do should I know?, ask What’s blocking us from moving forward? This keeps the focus on progress, not perfection.
• The customer is always right. If you’re trying to right-size your analysis, then the greatest source of information about the right amount is the team that you are supporting! Keep an eye out for recurring questions, confusion in discussions, team members getting stuck — these are all signs that you might have underdone the analysis.
• Time-box. To avoid analysis paralysis when you’re digging, give yourself a set amount of time to dig, then test the outputs with the team. Maybe that’s enough?
• Build muscle memory. There’s a trick to digging enough, and you need to build a feel for it. Don’t expect to know where done is until you’ve had time to build your muscle memory. Continually examine and refine your approach.

• Avoiding the work. Misapplied, dig until done can become an excuse to not get into the details even when they’re needed. That’s not following the method, that’s just being lazy!
• Pretending you know. When facing stakeholders who have outdated expectations about how much analysis should be done upfront, you can feel pressure to pretend that all the digging is done already. But you’ll be amazed by how much trust can be built with simple honesty and an Oh, I don’t know that yet!
• Lurking risk. If you don’t actually do the analysis, you might be missing something big. Don’t phone it in. Do enough to feel confident that there’s nothing really scary lurking under the surface.
• Hiding the risk. Dig until done trades comprehensive upfront analysis for efficiency, which means accepting a higher risk of missing things. Be honest with yourself and others about this trade-off.
• Assuming that all needs are the same. Each team is different, thus each will need different amounts of information. Every time you join a team, you’ll need to recalibrate what done looks like.
• Over-correcting. After experiencing the pain of over-analysis, it’s tempting to swing too far the other way and stay too high-level. And it’s just as tempting to go too detailed after finding something that you missed. Aim for balance, not for the extremes.

• Start with something safe. Pick a low-risk piece of work to practice on. Notice how much detail you naturally dig into, then challenge yourself to do less. See what happens.
• Ask for feedback. Tell your team what you’re trying to do and get them involved. Most teams know what level of detail they need — let them help you to calibrate. Once they see that you’re responsive, they’ll start providing input.
• Practice your explainers. Start saying I haven’t dug into that yet or Oh, we’re not looking at that yet when appropriate. It gets easier with practice, and you’ll be surprised how confident not yet sounds.
• Keep refining. Team needs change over time, so keep evolving your approach. Watch, learn, and iterate.

• Right-size the rigour (method)
• Story map (tool)
• The Map

• The concept of fitting analysis to the needs is an evolution of the ideas first explored in, On the Meaning of Required: Are We Focusing on the Wrong Things?