Owning the downside

One thing I’ve learned from working on projects with the expansion stage software companies in OpenView Venture Partners’ venture capital investment portfolio is that it is very important to manage for the downside.

What I mean by that is, when creating a work plan to achieve a goal, think about all the stuff that can go wrong, and build into the work plan the activities and flexibility to resolve the things that can go wrong (or at least are likely to go wrong).

I call this “owning the downside”. That is because when people take ownership of goals and the initiatives to get there, they very often own only the upside, meaning they plan for everything going according to plan, and when things work out well, they own the success with pride. When things go poorly, they blame it on all the unexpected things that happened that disrupted their perfect work plan. They don’t own the downside.

To be successful more often, one must own the downside as well the upside. One must embrace things going wrong, and assume they will go wrong…the first proposal will be rejected, a critical bug will be discovered, management will depend something on a tight deadline, and so on.

Planning for this and building time buffers for downside also relieves the stress from the project owner when things do go wrong, since there is now time and a plan to deal with it.

This applies to small plans and large strategic plans.

To individual contributors, project managers, and to management teams.

To product and development and to marketing.

To the software business, global consulting services, and to venture capital.