After you name it: how to find one sensible next step

Naming a hard thing gives it edges. But a thing with edges still sits there until I do something about it.

In the essay on name it, tame it I wrote that naming doesn't make the weight vanish. It gives the weight a border. This piece is about what comes after the border. On the Name it sheet it's the fourth line: one sensible next step.

It's also the line I find hardest. When something big goes wrong, my mind jumps straight to the whole plan. Fix the job, fix the money, fix the next five years. And because nobody can do all of that today, I end up doing nothing at all.

A big plan feels responsible. In practice it's often a hiding place. While I'm planning everything, I don't have to do anything yet, and nothing can fail.

The people who build software learned this the hard way. Long projects with one big plan kept going wrong, because the world changed before the plan was done. So many teams moved to short cycles instead. One of the best known ways of working this way is Scrum.

The Scrum Guide puts it simply: Scrum "employs an iterative, incremental approach to optimize predictability and to control risk" (The Scrum Guide, Schwaber and Sutherland, 2020). In plain words: do a small piece, look at it, then decide the next piece. Don't bet everything on a guess.

A Scrum team works in short blocks of time called sprints. Each one has a single aim. The guide says "the Sprint Goal is the single objective for the Sprint." Not five objectives. One.

I find that helpful far outside of work. When I've named what's wrong, I ask myself: what is my one goal for this week? Not for my life. For this week.

"Get my head straight about money" is too wide. "Know exactly how many weeks I can cover" is a goal I can reach by Friday.

Inside a sprint, a team builds something small that actually works, which Scrum calls an increment. The guide is strict about it: "In order to provide value, the Increment must be usable."

That word, usable, is my test for a next step. Not "think about calling my old manager". That's a wish. "Send her a two-line message before lunch" is usable. When it's done, something in the world has changed, even a little.

So my rule for line four of the sheet is this. A sensible next step:

• can be done today, ideally in under an hour;
• is in my hands, not someone else's;
• leaves something real behind: a message sent, a number written down, a form filled in.

Sometimes the problem isn't finding a step. It's that there are ten, and they all feel urgent.

The Scaled Agile Framework, or SAFe, which helps large organisations run many teams together, has a simple way to choose. It's called Weighted Shortest Job First. The idea is to divide the cost of waiting by the size of the job, and do the highest score first. Big cost of delay, small job: go first.

I use a kitchen-table version of it. For each candidate I ask two questions:

• What does it cost me to leave this another week?
• How long will it actually take?

The step that costs a lot to delay and takes ten minutes wins. Usually it's something boring, like a phone call I've been avoiding. That's fine. Boring and done beats brilliant and planned.

Scrum rests on three plain ideas: transparency, inspection and adaptation. See the work clearly, look at it often, and change course when it isn't working. The guide even says "inspection without adaptation is considered pointless."

That's what the last line of the sheet is for. Then act: a tick and the time. The tick isn't a reward. It's a record. Tomorrow I can look back at it and ask what the step taught me, and pick the next one from there.

The Bible has a line I like for this: "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might" (Ecclesiastes 9:10). Not whatever the whole world needs. Whatever my hand finds, today.

And it helps to remember what I'm working with. A next step draws on more than money: on people, skills, time and health. I wrote about those in The Eight Forms of Capital, Revisited, and the words I use here are in the glossary.

I'm not a doctor, and this isn't therapy. It's a way of seeing that helps me. If you are struggling, please talk to someone you trust or a professional.

Name it. Then find the one thing your hands can do today. Then do it, and look again.