The Rule of Cy

Yes, I named it after myself. Also, where the hell have I been?

Howdy folks, been a few months. I’d offer excuses but (a) there’s like 25 of you, (b) this substack is and will always be a tool for helping me find clarity of thought before it is an actual newsletter for readers, and (c) it’s free so shut up about it.

In all honesty, I have been writing, I just haven’t published. I’ve got a couple of massive articles ~80% done, I just can’t seem to find a way to wrap them up. So I’m sidestepping all that by publishing some quick thoughts. Mostly repurposing what I find myself repeatedly saying to my team at work. So this way, I’m sort of building my own corpus of management techniques. Maybe later I will build a Cy bot that recites all this stuff adnauseum.

And finally, I’ve been trying to focus on doing fewer things, but better. There’s a discipline required in saying no to things and I’m trying to embrace it. I used to see every un-booked hour on my calendar as a chance to do MORE. To have side hustles, networking opportunities, hobbies, etc. As I get older, I find myself finding greater satisfaction in doing LESS. And sometimes that means I let those ~80% complete articles sit there for a few months.

---

Anyway, enough about all that, let’s talk about a super handy tool you can use as a manager to quickly identify which parts of your team/org know what they’re doing vs. which ones are just shooting from the hip. Introducing…

The Rule of Cy

(I’m aware of how ridiculous it is to name it after myself, thank you.)

The Rule of Cy states that “any goal that ends in a 0 or a 5 is a bullshit goal”.

As in goals that use 50%, 75%, 100%, etc. as their final target.

Why?

1. Because these are lazy numbers. They’ve been picked as the target without intellectual rigor. They feel “nice”. Something about ending in a 5 or 0 makes us feel comfortable, probably because it’s either a half or a whole of a larger number.

2. They are uneducated guesses about what can actually get accomplished. They were picked without a good working-backward plan, so we don’t actually know how much work has to be done to reach them.

3. It shows a lack of understanding about the current state of the project. A goal must have a starting point to have relevance and if someone is actually aware of what that current state is, they aren’t going to select some arbitrary goal that is detached from the current state.

Let’s play this out in a scenario. You’re doing quarterly planning with your team. Some team member presents a project they want to do and they have a goal of “train 75% of the company on the new bill approval workflow” (it doesn’t really matter what the project is, just focus on the 75%). Because I see that 75%, my spidey sense starts tingling and I know to start digging in because I don’t think this person applied as much rigor to the project and its goal as I’d like them to. The conversation tends to go something like this:

Me: What percent of the company is currently trained?

Them: Well, it’s a brand new workflow we’re rolling out so I guess technically 0%

Me: Okay, so with 13 weeks in a quarter, that means you’ve got to train an average of a little over 5% of employees each week. So are you starting right away in week 1?

Them: Well, no, because we are still not officially done with setting up the workflow. That’s probably going to be done in 2, maybe 3 weeks.

Me: Okay, so let’s say there’s then 10 weeks left in the quarter to hit your goal. You need to train an average of 7.5% of employees per week once you start. How are you going to do that?

Them: Uh

The Rule of Cy is a bellwether. It helps me identify what areas of my organization need more attention and assistance in measuring their KPIs, setting up successful project plans, and being held accountable for achieving great results.

What’s the right way to do this? Using that same example (workflow training), let’s replay the situation:

Me: What percent of the company is currently trained?

Them: Right now? 0%, as the workflow is just now finalizing. Since we don’t yet have a good idea for the rate we can get people trained, we’re going conservative, estimating 2.5% per week. We’ll spend the first 2 weeks doing pilot training with the teams most immediately impacted, as they’re obviously the most critical stakeholders. After that, we'll have a much better idea of how much training is necessary for people who will be spending less time with the workflow. We can trim down the training to a “101” style class that will let us 2-3x the percentage of folks getting trained each week once that happens. Assuming we get a 101-style course launched in the 3rd week of the quarter, we estimate we’ll hit 57.5% on the conservative side, 82.5% on the aggressive side by EoQ.

Me: 50 points to Gryffindor

In the first example, the team picked 75% as a random, “feel good” target that had no plan for achieving it. In the 2nd example, the team knew that they didn’t know how long it would take so one of the first parts of their plan was to go out and learn how long it takes to train folks. Despite having only rough estimates on what that rate of training would be they still provided EoQ targets.

The goal for the 2nd example didn’t really even matter at that point because the team so impressed me with the rigor of their planning. I had every confidence they would go out and crush it. Whereas the first folks are going to need my help decomposing their project plan, establishing a baseline measurement, and then thinking through all the activities to accomplish a target (after we reset it, of course).

Good goals are precise, aggressive yet realistic, and rigorously thought through by the teams executing against them. When I see a goal of 93.6%, a current state of 35.9%, and weekly targets that start modestly but increase in size over the quarter, my eyes light up because I know I’ve got folks who know where they are, where they want to be, and exactly what they are going to do to get there.

Every manager’s dream!