Deadlines are dead. Long live consequences!

What is a need?

The Nonviolent Communication (NVC) methodology encourages us to be judicious with our use of the words “need”, “must”, “should” and “have to”, because they restrict people’s agency - their ability to choose the path most suited to them.

When you have one of those words in a sentence, it can pay to really think about what the actual need is. A classic example is this one:

I need to get ready for work!

But you have chosen to do your job: you chose it because someone wants to pay you for something you are good at, and money helps you achieve your actual needs like food, shelter and entertainment.

Preserving your own agency in this situation, you could instead say:

I would like to get ready for work because being paid this salary means I am less likely to worry about how I’m going to eat well or pay my rent this month

In this situation, you’re reframing the action as a choice, and explaining to yourself why you do it. When I do this, I always feel much more positive about the thing I had previously described as a need.

Great. But if we try to apply this same approach to the example at the start of this chapter, we might get something like:

I would like you to submit that report to me before I start work tomorrow.

All the urgency and stress of the earlier statement is gone, but so is the motivation!

Now, your team member sees your request and recognises they have a choice, but doesn’t have any reason to choose to file the report by your deadline.

Replacing deadlines with consquences

Deadlines are consequences in disguise. In the example above, you have information that the team member doesn’t: namely, what will happen if they fail to meet the deadline you’ve imposed.

Deadlines are called “dead”. This term comes originally from the publishing industry: your article is “dead” if you can’t complete it in time for the newspaper going to press. In the modern workplace, this association is lost; and people tend to associate death with very bad stuff. Every time you set a deadline without naming the consequences, it’s likely your team members are thinking the consequences are punishment, or even being fired.

But as a manager, you probably know why you have chosen the date you’ve chosen, and you have the option to share the information about the consequences with the team. Once everyone is aware of the consequences, it’s easier to feel like you are pulling together towards the same goal, instead of standing in opposition to each other.

In the example above, you could say something like:

I have a meeting tomorrow where I’m expected to present our findings. Without time to read your report, I won’t be able to explain to the customer where their money has been spent this month, and I don’t know how they would react to the absence of that information.

The urgency is back! But this time, the team member knows why the urgency is there and is also given the opportunity to respond to that urgency by coming up with alternative ways to meet your need.

A real example

In one job, I found myself faced often with the following phrase:

16th March next year is a hard deadline. We have to finish the migration project by then.

The whole team knew and had internalised this phrase. We all knew that whatever else we did, the whole project had to be completed by that date… or else. We also knew it had something to do with a legacy software dependency - let’s call it Ghostwood, so it was sometimes called “the Ghostwood deadline”.

Knowing that we had a “hard deadline” in a year meant that every month we got a little bit more stressed as the deadline got closer, but it wasn’t possible to be strategic about what work we did because all we knew was that it had to be done in time.

Talking to the stakeholders involved, I discovered where the deadline had come from - there was a very expensive annual licence renewal for Ghostwood coming up and 16th March was the date of the renewal. The people spending the money in my organisation wanted to be able to say to Ghostwood “thanks but no thanks” on that date, because they’d already been committing that money to the salaries of the people developing the replacement product.

This information hadn’t been communicated to the whole team. Or, maybe it had, but it was so long ago that the makeup of the team had changed, and/or the people who were there at the time had long forgotten.

So we changed the story. Instead of talking about a deadline, we talked about consequences:

If the migration project is not complete by 16th March, Ghostwood will ask us for an annual renewal fee of £120,000.

Wow, OK. Now we know. Now everyone knows the very very serious consequences of not meeting the 16th March date.

This, firstly, means that now everyone is on the same side. Everyone can see that’s the equivalent of a few whole salaries that the organisation would have to find to maintain the status quo. Everyone has the same motivation to avoid that renewal fee.

But there’s also a hidden extra bonus. Now we all know the consequences, we can think strategically as a team about ways to avoid those consequences - about mitigation of the risk, rather than committing everything to meeting the original goal. For example:

• Maybe we only need another month, not a year. Could we negotiate a monthly renewal fee with Ghostwood instead of an annual one?
• Maybe we could prioritise migrating the features of the more expensive plan and downgrade to a cheaper plan?
• Maybe we could create an intermediate system that lacks all the functionality of Ghostwood but allows us to shut it down whilst we finish the migration?

Suddenly, the “hard deadline” no longer felt hard or dead. It was just a line - a line with consequences that everyone knew about and we could work together to avoid.

Now, you try

Do you have deadlines right now at work?

Was your deadline set by your manager? If so, do you know what the consequences are of not meeting it? What do you imagine the consequences are? Now ask your manager and see if you’re right.

Did you set the deadline? If so, do your team know the consequences of not meeting it? Do you know them?

Try rewording your deadline in the form of a consequence: “If X is not done by this date, Y will happen.” Does it help take the pressure off? Does it help you with feeling that you and your colleagues are on the same side? Does it make mitigations and alternatives easier to visualise?

You might even have self-imposed deadlines. Sometimes I find myself saying things like “I need to clean up the kitchen before my friends come round”. But even here I can think about the consequences - will it ruin my friends’ visit if I have a few unwashed pans? Reframing this as a choice gives me the opportunity to think about risk and mitigations, even for something as trivial as this household chore.

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