Photo by Nikita Suyetin on Unsplash.
What do you do if you want to achieve something important? Do you start with big or small? How is starting with a big step going to help you forward? Or is it rather a small step that’s going to help you decide if you’re even on the right path? How often do you really know exactly what you want? And even if you do, are you able to articulate it to others? 🤔
This is what I’ve been pondering about for a long time. Why is it so hard for many people (incl. myself) and companies to break work down into small parts? What’s holding us back? Splitting work is a skill (and a habit) like any other—it just needs practice.
The Psychology of “Big“
✂️ Why Big? Maybe it feels ”safer”? Perhaps you’re not used to slicing work? Or maybe the organisational culture equates release with value (value seen as binary). Are you caught up with analysis paralysis or sunk cost fallacy?
🛡️ Big work hides its massive underwater risks. If “almost done“ with big work means “months away“, how’s that affecting your motivation and morale? Ask yourself: are the receivers able to absorb the “Big”?
🔄 The Big promises certainty but delivers surprises. Small reveals uncertainty early, when you can still act on it.
Photo by Luke Thornton on Unsplash.
What Is Value, Really?
📏 What is value anyway? When and how do you know if something has value? Whose value is it? Is it valuable to you or someone else? All value is just a hypothesis until proven by real use.
Value has layers, depending on how you look at it. These also have value:
- Risk reduction
- Knowledge gained (learning)
- Validated assumptions
- Internal readiness
- Reduced uncertainty
💡 Most people chase the obvious value (the feature working) while ignoring the meta-value (learning it was the wrong feature!).
💡 Here’s the paradox: big work doesn’t necessarily bring more value. Sometimes small delivers exactly what’s needed while big overshoots and overwhelms.
💡 The challenge is finding the sweet spot—the smallest thing that delivers maximum learning and impact.
Photo by Mike Newbry on Unsplash.
Incremental or Iterative?
Do you work incrementally (build piece by piece) or iteratively (improve through cycles)? According to Alistair Cockburn, you should be doing both (PDF), because the alternative strategies to these—“big-bang” and “get everything right the first time”—usually won’t work.
- Only increment → risk poor quality surprises, or build the wrong thing ❌
- Only iterate → chaos from ripple effects, or never finishing anything ❌
If in doubt, start with incremental, adding iterative periods once you have something to iterate on.
Why Smaller is Better
Working in smaller tasks enables:
- Early feedback and faster learning
- Reduced complexity and risk (identify bottlenecks and issues earlier)
- More flexibility in reprioritizing
- Better decisions when you actually need to make them (JIT)
- More frequent testing → higher quality
- Greater momentum and morale
- More predictable flow of work
- Better process visibility → easier to inspect and adapt
- Easier (and cheaper!) to pivot
- Less context switching between different problems
All of this adds up to one thing: less stress, more success.
Photo by Ali Ahmadi on Unsplash.
One Radical Idea
What if you decouple the following two things?
- Breaking your work down to smallest possible valuable slices
- Releasing/showing your work to the world
🏗️ I know, releasing early is often preferred. Here’s a radical idea: you can work small internally even if you can’t release small externally. Breaking work into tiny slices costs you nothing—it’s the releasing that has constraints.
Ask Yourself This
💰 The benefits of working small should be well-known, but it turns out they’re not. No amount of repetition of these benefits is going to change your mind if you’re addicted to the “big bang”, or believe in “getting everything right the first time”. Change is hard, but starting small makes change easier too—it’s less scary to change one small thing than to overhaul everything at once.
⚖️ Which surgeon would you trust more: one who does ten small, targeted procedures with recovery time between each, or one massive operation that addresses everything at once?
🐾 Would you rather cross a river on one giant leap or a series of stepping stones?
What’s your next small step?