Welcome to the debate. Today we're tackling a
really foundational tension. It's derived from
the material parking lot ideas versus ship it
now. And we're diving into the professional etiquette,
really, and the efficacy of managing those valuable,
sometimes disruptive, non -agenda ideas that,
well, they inevitably surface during focused
collaborative meetings. Right. And the central
question we're facing, I think, boils down to
priority. Is the best professional standard to,
you know, rigidly adhere to the parking lot mechanism
to preserve the sanctity of the agenda? Or should
we prioritize a kind of ship it now action to
capitalize on creative momentum and frankly velocity?
And I'll be arguing that discipline, structured
idea parking isn't just some mechanism. It's
really the essential social contract for groups.
It's necessary for maintaining focus, managing
that collective attention, and preserving what
I like to call decision hygiene. And I'm going
to argue that prioritizing immediate but constrained
action soul velocity over strict order is actually
superior for driving real progress. It helps
avoid organizational paralysis. and maybe most
importantly ensures we respect the perishable
nature of a creative breakthrough when it happens.
Okay, so structure, I believe structure is paramount
because, well, time is the only commodity we
really cannot manufacture. Parking discipline
isn't just process. It's about respecting the
group's collective energy. That discipline, it
acts as a crucial social contract, doesn't it?
It ensures people feel heard while preserving
the meeting's intended outcome. I mean, we've
all been in meetings where every tangent gets
airtime and the whole thing just derails. Parking
the idea, it reduces that cognitive overload
and helps secure a clean outcome. And importantly,
it signals true psychological safety. People
feel heard, and they trust the ideas captured
with intent for future action, not just dismissed
out of hand. Hmm. I acknowledge the need for
focus. Absolutely. But we need to address the,
let's call it the psychological reality of deferred
hope. Because in practice, the parking lot, well,
it rarely functions as that perfectly positive
memory system you describe. Real organizational
progress, I think, favors immediate small wins.
You know, excessive parking leads almost inevitably
to this massive backlog bloat that just kills
urgency. When valuable ideas are constantly deferred,
the parking lot becomes, well, the later graveyard.
It signals organizational apathy, really. That's
a strong image, the graveyard. It is, because
I think it reflects reality in many places. The
most toxic insight a contributor can draw is
that their best ideas, the ones they're excited
about now, are simply not important enough to
warrant resources now. And over -structuring,
it ultimately pushes teams into analysis paralysis,
doesn't it? Where the search for perfect order
becomes a kind of stalling tactic. Conversely,
I mean, nothing validates effort like shipping
something. Velocity is morale for many teams.
Okay. So, we agree on the need for some structure,
but we diverge on the priority, it seems. Is
the sanctity of the agenda more valuable than
capitalizing on a, as you put it, perishable
moment? My position remains that focus is the
highest professional etiquette in these collaborative
settings. The parking lot ensures promising ideas
aren't lost. It captures that value without hijacking
the immediate agenda. Think about sprint planning
for a critical checkout flow. the team must finalize
that immediate high -stakes deliverable. Now,
if a brilliant idea for a, say, pricing revamp
surfaces right then, parking it, capturing its
essence, assigning an owner, scheduling maybe
a discovery session next Wednesday, that protects
today's necessary high -stakes outcome. It's
triage, really, in real time. But the cost of
freezing that moment, that might outweigh the
benefit of the focused output you're aiming for.
Flow matters just as much as strict focus, I'd
argue, especially when you're working on innovative
systems or features. When a genuine breakthrough
idea emerges mid -meeting, just confining it
to a written note, well, that can kill the creative
spark. Creativity is perishable. If that pricing
idea is hot, maybe we should strike now, but
with constrained action. Contrast your approach
with, let's call it, the velocity model, instead
of parking the revamp until next week. Maybe
we initiate a 40 -hour spike. A spike, just for
clarity, is a really time -boxed investigation.
Maybe one or two developers prototype the core
idea to figure out feasibility and impact quickly.
While the rest of the team finalizes the checkout
flow as planned, the spike team generates an
answer on the pricing idea. This action, it respects
the emergent value and it might unlock a faster
win. It turns a week's delay into a 48 -hour
discovery. That 48 -hour spike is interesting,
but... Well, it brings me to accountability,
actually, because this is where the ideal system
of parking lots. It often breaks down in the
messiness of organizational reality. I think
we have to design processes that account for
human nature, for how things actually work, not
just academic ideals on paper. If the organizational
culture won't diligently maintain a pristine
system, and let's be honest, often it won't,
than parking equals forgetting. It just does.
So we have to favor immediate small slices of
shipping because realistically people trust what
gets done now far more than what's scheduled
for later in some perpetually growing backlog.
Okay, that raises a critical challenge. Organizational
compliance or maybe just discipline. But I think
we must distinguish between a bad parking lot
and a good one. the abuse you described that
ghost backlog, the graveyard. That happens when
no one curates it, no one owns the items, no
one maintains a revisit cadence. That, to me,
is a failure of process maintenance, not an inherent
flaw in the concept itself. A good parking lot
is a living system. It demands high fidelity.
It acts as focus with memory. For instance, every
parked item must immediately have defined fields,
a clear title, and explanation of why it matters.
you know, the business value, an owner assigned
to shepherd it forward, maybe a tentative due
date for resolution, and critically, a concrete
next step, like schedule 30 -minute discovery
next Tuesday. The failure to include these concrete
feels, that's what leads to the cynicism and
the feeling of apathy you correctly identified
earlier. OK, so you're saying the implementation
is often the problem, not the idea of the parking
lot itself. Precisely. Furthermore, rigorous
parking Done well facilitates crucial risk triage.
It's necessary for separating high, medium, and
low value ideas, and perhaps more importantly,
distinguishing reversible versus irreversible
decisions. You know, etiquette for managing risk
demands we don't allow a shiny tangent, however
exciting, to derail a critical path activity.
Take a nonprofit board meeting, for example.
If the annual gala logistics have an immediate,
calendar -dependent deadline, parking an excellent
but tangential discussion about implementing
a new donor CRM is, well, it's absolutely necessary.
Discipline requires protecting that critical
path, especially when external deadlines or maybe
regulatory compliance are involved. Hmm. The
pressure to protect the internal calendar? That's
a powerful incentive I grant you. But we have
to recognize that opportunity costs, it cuts
both ways, doesn't it? The longer the delay on
a potentially valuable idea, the more market
advantage we might cede to competitors, or the
more critical external windows we might just
miss. Etiquette for impact, I'd argue, means
respecting the customer or the donor by delivering
value sooner rather than later. So in your nonprofit
board case, what if a critical donor matching
window closes in just 10 days? Approving a lean
pilot tier for that CRM immediately, a kind of
ship -it -win focused solely on servicing that
specific donor cohort, that could deliver impact
within that tight window. Delaying until after
the gala might mean sacrificing a core mission
delivery goal. The truly professional choice,
maybe, respects the constraint of the external
opportunity even above the comfort of the internal
agenda. That's a fair challenge on opportunity
cost. And I fully acknowledge your point that
we must avoid organizational chaos, absolutely.
But ship now doesn't have to equate to chaos.
It requires disciplined action through let's
call them guardrails. We don't have to choose
between paralyzing structure on one hand and
wild abandon on the other. We can propose methods
where immediate action is tightly constrained.
This means explicitly defining ship at guardrails
for any emergent idea that gets the green light
for immediate, limited action. Things like a
firm time box. Maybe it is that 48 hours for
a spike. A clearly defined success metric. What
does a good outcome actually look like? And most
critically, a mandatory revert plan. If this
quick experiment fails, how do we roll it back
cleanly without causing more disruption? This
is action with constraint. It honors velocity
while actively mitigating risk. Okay, I agree
completely. The discipline is the crux here.
And those guardrails you mentioned are an essential
part of the Ship It Now toolkit, if you're going
to use it. But we must add another layer of complexity,
especially when dealing with global or hybrid
professional groups. We need to consider global
etiquette. In many high -context cultures, where
discussion itself is integral to relationship
building and showing respect, just parking an
idea, however efficiently, can easily be perceived
as a brush -off, or even a subtle disrespect.
If we must park an idea on these settings, the
etiquette demands mitigation, clear mitigation.
This means providing explicit appreciation, publicly
recording the item with the owner, and those
clear next steps we talked about earlier, title
owner next step, and setting a definite concrete
revisit date. If the process feels opaque, it
feels dismissive. So maybe we need a practical
playbook rule. If the idea genuinely accelerates
the agenda's core outcome, OK, maybe ship it,
but with strong guardrails. If it threatens the
core outcome, you park it, but with absolute
transparency and commitment to revisit. That
cultural point is powerful. I agree. If parking
feels like dismissal, it absolutely destroys
future contribution. But the counter to that
cultural concern could be that some high -context
cultures might actually value immediate, tangible
outcomes like the quick launch of a small fix
over a long, deferred process. Tangible action
builds trust immediately, right? Whereas deferred
commitment relies on a high degree of pre -existing
organizational trust that, let's face it, often
isn't there. So, to summarize my position, disciplined
parking, when done right with proper owners and
scheduled dates, is fundamentally focused with
memory. It represents, I believe, the highest
professional etiquette for groups working under
collective cognitive load. It honors both the
agreed -upon agenda and the team's collective
attention span. And crucially, it helps prevent
the rework and the tech debt, those long -term
costs that inevitably come from dumping half
-baked pivots into shared systems without a structured
landing zone. And I maintain that shipping with
gates and safeguards in place is courage with
constraint. It's the ultimate etiquette for outcomes,
honoring both velocity and the needs of the customer
by prioritizing impact delivered sooner. The
ultimate failure of professionalism here, I think,
isn't really the choice between parking or shipping.
It's the choice of ambiguity saying, later, with
no owner, no date, no next step, or executing
now with absolutely no guardrails, no revert
plan. That's the real danger. Ultimately, I suspect
the most professional teams, the most effective
ones, they have to master both approaches. They
recognize that the choice is contextual. It depends.
They adjust their default setting based on the
item at hand. For instance, serious regulatory
or compliance issues? Those probably should default
to park and expert review, but a critical customer
on fire issue that likely has to default to ship
now, perhaps with immediate post -mortem and
mitigation planning baked in. Exactly. Clarity
is the ultimate courtesy, isn't it? We could
even utilize quick tools like the two -minute
test. Can two minutes of focused discussion right
here, right now, decide the go -no -go status,
the initial scope, and the owner for this new
idea? If yes, great. Decide now. If not, okay,
park it, but immediately apply those necessary
professional fields we discussed, title, why
it matters, owner, and next step, ensuring it
moves into a living, trusted system. The true
professional standard lies in that explicit communication
about why, who, when, and how the idea will be
handled, whichever path is chosen in that moment.