Fast, high-quality decisions and approvals are the lifeblood of organizations. And if you've ever worked in development or construction, you know that there are a lot of decisions and approvals — some small, some big — but all of which can delay and hurt a project. Ultimately, the objective is to achieve both high-quality and high-velocity decisions. But how?

Very broadly speaking, you want a bias toward action and progress. How this plays out might depend on the specific situation at hand, but here's one technique that we try to use whenever possible. I call it (as of 30 seconds ago) the "default-to-yes" principle. It works well for approvals and reviews, and it is very common in construction.

All you need are two things: (1) a date by which something needs to be reviewed or approved and (2) a default yes. A default yes means that if I don't hear from you by the deadline established by (1), I'm simply going to assume your answer is yes and move on. Consent is implied unless you object.

The opposite of this is a "default-to-no" approach, which means things get stuck until someone gets around to reviewing or approving the thing. That's far less optimal because there's no outer limit to how long something might take. With the default-to-yes approach, I know progress will happen no later than X days from now.

This is just one specific technique, and I'm not suggesting it will work for all decisions and approvals, but there's significant value in high velocity. And to achieve that, you want a deeply ingrained cultural bias toward action.

Cover photo by Rubén Bagüés on Unsplash

I was on a panel this week, put on by BILD, called "Design That Sells." The focus of the panel was on how innovative product design can help sell homes in the current market environment. When I was first asked to be on the panel, I thought to myself, "I'm not sure I'm qualified to talk about this right now. Market conditions, rather than design, are the challenge!"

Of course, focusing on your customers' needs, solving their problems, and innovating with great design is always going to be the way. I think we've consistently tried to do this with our projects, and so that's what I talked about.

But what the discussion also got me thinking about — though I didn't mention this during the panel — is the late Clayton Christensen's theory called "Jobs to Be Done." I've written about this before on the blog, specifically about his milkshake case study.

The key idea behind the theory is that customers "hire" products and services in order to complete specific "jobs" for them. The problem is, businesses sometimes don't actually know the job that people are hiring for! In the case of the milkshake case study, this ended up being the job:

"Most of them, it turned out, bought [the milkshake] to do a similar job," he writes. "They faced a long, boring commute and needed something to keep that extra hand busy and to make the commute more interesting. They weren't yet hungry, but knew that they'd be hungry by 10 a.m.; they wanted to consume something now that would stave off hunger until noon. And they faced constraints: They were in a hurry, they were wearing work clothes, and they had (at most) one free hand."

This is why people were buying milkshakes in the morning, and why their efforts to sell more later in the day were not working. Now, let's talk about a case study that is closer to home. If you visit the Christensen Institute's site, you'll find a case study of his theory from the condominium industry.

The objective was for a Detroit-area developer to sell more homes targeted toward retirees and divorcees. They priced accordingly, had all the luxury finishes, and spent on elaborate marketing, and yet their inventory wasn't moving. Was it a design problem? A pricing issue?

Nope:

So, Moesta took a Jobs to Be Done approach: He set out to learn from the people who had bought units what job they were hiring the condominiums to do, and the conversations revealed an unusual clue: the dining room table. Prospective customers repeatedly told the company they didn’t need a formal dining room. And yet, in Moesta’s conversations with actual buyers, the dining room table came up repeatedly. “People kept saying, ‘As soon as I figured out what to do with my dining room table, then I was free to move,’” says Moesta. The table represented family. 

What was stopping buyers from making the decision to move, he hypothesized, was not a feature that the construction company had failed to offer, but rather, the anxiety that came with giving up something that had profound meaning. “I went in thinking they were in the business of new-home construction,” Moesta recalls. “But I realized they were in the business of moving lives.”

To solve this problem, the company offered moving services, two years of free storage, and a "sorting room" in the condominium where new owners could dump their stuff and then take their time deciding what to keep and what to discard. And it worked. Brilliant.

Once you understand the actual barriers and "jobs to be done," you can solve for them. Sometimes it might be a design problem, but it could be something totally unexpected. Regardless, the solution lies in caring about and understanding your customers. This is true in all market conditions.

In addition to the recently proposed HST rebate for new homes, the federal government and the province of Ontario announced that they will be providing funding to help municipalities reduce their development charges by up to 50% over the next three years. And according to some estimates, these two measures will temporarily cut the cost of building a new home in Ontario by something in the range of 15-20%.

From what I have seen, most, if not all, of these savings are now going to the consumer. As Mike Moffatt points out in this recent Globe and Mail article, developers are passing them along because of competition, because they need to compete with lower-priced resale homes, and because, frankly, it's the only way to try and unstick this market.

What is not so clear, though, is whether this is enough. Moffatt argues that "now that new homes can be sold at prices that make them viable to build, more homes will be built, adding further downward pressure on resale prices." This is certainly one of the policy goals — to get more developers building again. But I don't think we're there quite yet. I guess we'll find out soon enough.

Cover photo by Jaipreet Singh on Unsplash