From FOMO to JOMO

You start hearing about the next thing—EOS, Agile, Scaling Up, AI.

At some point, there’s enough FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) that you feel like you SHOULD do something about it.

I’ve had numerous business leaders reach out and ask me to help them “do the thing” (the latest example being AI Transformation).

When that’s the ask, adopting a new thing (process, tool, approach) fizzles more often than not.

Because you don’t really care about the thing for its own sake, you care about expensive problems.

Let me suggest a prediction: If you’re entering AI Transformation mainly out of FOMO, it will soon turn into JOMO (The Joy of Missing Out)

That’s precisely what I’ve observed happening with Agile, Scrum, OKRs, and EOS in the past, and I’m already seeing it occur with AI.

Want to sanity-check a big idea before you invest?
Instead of blindly following your FOMO, consider having a ‘why’ conversation. (This is the conversation I have with leaders who reach out to make sure we head towards real impact instead of JOMO, but you can have it with yourself, or even your favorite GenAI chatbot… )

Write down:

• The problem you’re solving (who has it, why it matters) or the opportunity you want to leverage

• The business impact you expect if you solved/leveraged it.

• Why is this so important to you? Why deal with it now? Why not wait a couple of months before we tackle it?

• The behavior change you expect (who will do what differently, by how much)

• What are the alternatives? What have you tried? What else might do the job instead of doing this thing?

• The central hypothesis you’re betting on (we believe [business impact] will be achieved if [who] attains [benefit] through the [thing])

If you’re still in FOMO mode, think deeper about:

• The smallest experiment you can run to test it

• The signals you’ll watch to know if it worked

If you can’t see the connection between the thing and your most expensive problems or most lucrative opportunities, it probably isn’t worth your time.

If you can see the connection, you have just framed the initiative in a way that makes it clear why you’re focusing on it, what the outcomes are to align towards, and empowers everyone to make the right decisions to steer it along the way based on what you learn.

All of which will dramatically improve the odds of getting real value out of this initiative, rather than it becoming another tombstone in the initiative graveyard.

May the odds be ever in your favor (improve your odds by applying product techniques to develop your company…)