The Rule of 3s
TLDR — Most work doesn't fail for want of a plan. It fails because the first step was too big to take, so nobody took it. The Rule of 3s is a simple habit from the same 2016 napkin as Mindset, Method, Momentum: every piece of work can be scoped to a horizon of three, from three seconds to three quarters. Pick the right-sized packet and momentum mostly looks after itself.
Watch how big ambitions die. Not with a dramatic failure, but with a diary. Someone has a genuinely good idea, everyone nods, and then it gets handed to a process that only knows how to think in quarters. A steering group is booked. A business case is drafted. A programme is stood up. Months pass, and the thing that was supposed to move has produced a lot of documents and no movement at all.
The problem was never the plan. It was the size of the first step. When the smallest unit of work anyone can imagine is "a quarter," the first step is enormous, and enormous first steps don't get taken. They get scheduled.
And the reticence to move has been exacerbated by the land and expand behaviours of big consultancies. Things that seem like clearly defined, well-scoped first steps all of a sudden come with a request for new desks for the new consultants that have appeared.
Work comes in packets of three
Years ago I scribbled a scale on a napkin, next to the three words this whole blog is built on. The idea was simple. Any piece of work can be sized to a horizon, and the useful horizons go up in threes:
| Horizon | The packet of work |
|---|---|
| 3 seconds | The elevator pitch. Can you say what this is? |
| 3 minutes | The introduction. Enough to make an impression. |
| 3 hours | The vision workshop. |
| 3 days | The prototype. |
| 3 weeks | The MVP. |
| 3 months | Version one, and the change embedded. |
| 3 quarters | And onward. |
The point is not the exact numbers. It is that every task has a natural size, and a natural gate before moving on. The most trouble comes from picking the wrong one at the beginning. Try to run a three-quarter programme when what you needed was a three-hour workshop and you will drown in governance. Try to answer a three-second question with a three-month project and you will have spent a fortune to learn something a good sentence would have told you for free.
The 3-second test does most of the work
Here is the part I would keep even if you threw the rest away. Before anything else, try to pass the three-second test. Say what the thing is, and why it matters, in one breath. If you can't, you do not have a delivery problem. You have a clarity problem wearing a delivery problem's clothes, and no amount of Gantt chart will fix it.
Most stalled initiatives fail this test quietly. Ask the people running a large programme to give you the three-second version and you will often get thirty seconds of throat-clearing and no actual sentence. That is the giveaway. The horizon was set to "quarters" precisely so that nobody had to pass the three-second test first.
Small horizons keep you honest
There is a reason the small end of the scale matters more than the large. A three-day prototype gives you feedback in three days. A three-quarter programme gives you feedback in three quarters, by which time the thing you were building may not be the thing you now need, and the sunk cost is large enough that no one wants to say so.
Short horizons are how you stay corrigible. You act, you learn something real, you adjust, and you pick the next small packet. It is the difference between moving and merely planning to move. And it compounds: three-second clarity feeds a sharper three-hour workshop, which de-risks the three-day prototype, which earns the right to the three-week build. Skip the small ones and the big ones wobble.
The fix
So before you scope the programme, scope the sentence. Name the smallest honest version of the thing and do that first.
Ask which horizon you are actually on. If you can't pass three seconds, your job today is a sentence, not a project plan. If you can, ask what the three-day version looks like, not the three-quarter one. Then take that step, learn from it, and choose the next packet deliberately rather than defaulting to the biggest box on the shelf.
Momentum sounds like a matter of willpower. Mostly it isn't. It is a matter of sizing. Name the smallest honest packet, take it, and the next step gets obvious. Choose a first step you can actually take before Friday, and you will have moved further by Friday than the programme that is still booking its kick-off.
That is the whole of it. Not a methodology. A napkin, and the discipline to start small.
