Incredible Shrinking Commitment

Standards efforts in industry consortia often go like this.

Everyone agrees that there ought to be a standard.
A working group is formed and great progress is made in a frenzy of activity.
Time passes. Much has been accomplished, but there is heavy lifting yet to be done.
People start skipping meetings and then bailing out entirely. The excuses are different every time but one way or another the group keeps shrinking.
Progress slows to a crawl as all of the work is done by a few die-hards who are working in a near vacuum.
If the work is ever finished, there is nobody left who cares. A few die-hards are not representative of industry consensus.

There's also the fast-track version:

Everyone agrees that X ought to be done.
Somebody (group chair, champion, whoever) dutifully draws up the plans, which require everybody to commit to doing something.
When it's time to PutUpOrShutUp, people give excuses and bail out en masse.

Because IncredibleShrinkingCommitment so frequently results in standards that nobody uses, ObjectManagementGroupRules specifically address the problem.

-- DavidFlater

The alternate view.

Someone wants to do X.
No one says "no" or can find a reason not to do X.
Someone then draws up schedules committing everyone else to do X.
Most people ignore it and trust it will go away.

Aside from a single individual, there was never a commitment to do X. X died on the vine due to lack of initial commitment, not shrinking commitment. --AnonymousDonor

That could happen if X was the champion's idea to begin with and she was just dragging others along [ala StupidCollaborationKickoffMeeting ?], but there are lots of alternate explanations which all lead to the same behavior.

Alternate view #2: People say "Yes! This is a great idea! We should do this!" but what they really mean is "It would be great if we could get this for free so we are going to feign enthusiasm for the project in hopes that all the work will be done by others and we will be able to exploit the end product," a strategy that fails if everybody is thinking the same thing.
Alternate view #3: "It would be politically incorrect to be seen saying no to this idea, so we will support it now and make sure that it dies later when nobody is watching."
Alternate view #4: The people who came to the meeting were going to do it but their bosses pulled the plug. (How high up do you have to go before a commitment is a commitment?)
Alternate view #5: Herd behavior. After the first one bailed, the rest instinctively scattered.
Alternate view #6: All of the above. Everybody's reasons for bailing are different, but the bottom line is everybody bails. Critical mass just disappears all of a sudden.

--AnonymousDonor

Applying the 80/20 rule, 80% of the image maintenance payoff PC benefit comes with 20% of the effort, and yet the actual dividend from completion never comes except after the HeavyLifting?, on the other side of the "80% effort" hump. "Fast-in fast-out" should result in unambiguous consequences with an eye to operant conditioning; I'd suggest the use of a flame-thrower. --BenTremblay

This is an instance of the PublicGoodsDilemma.

CategoryCollaboration