At the Buzzer

Posted June 10th, 2009

I watched last night’s NBA finals game between the Lakers and the Magic. In the final seconds the Lakers through up shot after shot trying to win or tie the game.

Now that I have some distance, I can look back at the Conference final series in which the Magic beat my home town team the Cleveland Cavaliers. The first two games were decided by a one point margin by shots at the buzzer. The Magic won the first game by one point and the Cavs won the second game by one point. For days the highlight reel showed LeBron shooting a three point shot. Time expired while the ball was in the air and we held our breath until it fell through the bottom of the net and the game had been won.

Exciting basketball. That last minute drama is much more compelling than game six in which the Magic surged ahead and stayed ahead. We pay attention to what happens at the buzzer and not so much to the early adjustments teams make to keep games from ever getting close.

In the first game, the Cavs got off to a twenty-three point lead. People in Cleveland talked quite a bit about the last minute of the game and the mistakes the Cavs made to not pull this game out. It would have been fun to win in that last minute. There was a shot at the buzzer that didn’t go in. The shot that would have won the game for the Cavs was not the shot that lost the game for them.

What happened to that lead? The time to make adjustments and maintain your advantage was when the Magic started whittling away at the twenty-three point lead. In game two the lead was sixteen. We forget that because the Cavs ended up winning the game that they’d led, but it never should have come down to a last second shot.

We see this is software development. Identifying problems and fixing them early in a project’s lifetime is much easier and less costly than making the fixes late.

It’s like the classic quadrants from Covey’s Seven Habits where you divide your tasks on one axis as being important or not and on another as being urgent or not, we spend way too much of our time on tasks that are urgent but not important.

At the end of last night’s game the Lakers had to put up all of those shots because the time was urgent and important. You can never ignore that combination.

But as Covey says, you want to spend as much time as possible on important but not urgent. Building up that twenty-three point lead in whatever you are doing and then maintaining that lead while you work on other tasks that are important but not urgent.

I’m ok not making the highlight reel.

This post originally appeared in the Pragmatic Life blog.