In the last post I took apart a silly internet question: could 100 unarmed men beat one gorilla? Most serious answers agreed the men win eventually, if they accept heavy losses. One sub-question stayed with me. Who goes first?
The man who started the debate gave the most honest answer. He would join the 100, just not the first wave. Most of us would say the same.
So the first wave is made of volunteers, and probably the bravest ones. Here is the paradox. It takes brave people to go first. It also takes brave people to keep going after watching the first wave go down. If the bravest all go first, who is left for the rest of the fight?
First Consideration: The Volunteering Pattern#
Large programmes have their own first wave. Not the pilot users. The people who pick up the topics nobody can scope yet.
At kickoff, every programme has a few of those. The target operating model nobody has defined. The integration with a system whose owner left two years ago. The security concept that depends on decisions not yet taken. The workstream leads with clear scope take the clear topics. Someone has to take the rest.
It is often the same type of person who raises a hand. They like the unknown. They are energised by a blank page and don’t need a finished plan to start. In my experience, it is also often the same people, programme after programme.
That looks like a good match. In the first months, it usually is.
Second Consideration: Two Kinds of Bravery#
The paradox only holds as long as “brave” is one trait. I think it is two.
Initiative courage is stepping into the unknown when nobody else will. It needs a low fear of uncertainty and some appetite for being wrong in public.
Endurance courage is staying in the fight after you have seen what it costs. It needs tolerance for visible losses, and the ability to keep going once the energy of the start is gone.
Some people have both. They are rare, and they are exactly the ones who volunteer first. Send all of them in at the start, and you have used up your endurance in the phase that needed initiative. When the programme hits the middle, the long stretch where nothing is new and nothing is finished, the people best suited to carry it are already worn out.
Seen that way, the paradox becomes an allocation problem. And allocation is something leadership can actually influence.
Third Consideration: Using Up the Reserve#
The first wave rarely loses to the gorilla. It loses to friction. I see three sources.
The semi-involved. Every open topic has stakeholders who are not responsible for it but are affected by it. Security, data protection, works council, the owners of neighbouring systems. Each of them can raise a concern at no cost to themselves, and each concern is reasonable. The volunteer has to answer all of them, with a solution that does not exist yet. Influence without accountability on one side, accountability without a plan on the other. Remember the expert from the last post who sees every risk in her own field? Put five of her around one open topic, and the volunteer spends more time defending than building.
The ones who never volunteered. Early mistakes do not stay with the volunteer. The service desk handles the tickets. Users drafted into a pilot lose a week of productivity. Local IT at the first site cleans up after a migration that was not ready. None of them raised a hand, and they are rarely asked afterwards what it cost them.
The ones watching. The rest of the organisation sees what happens to the first wave. If the volunteers come out exhausted, blamed or quietly sidelined, the next call for volunteers gets a thinner response. And the ones who still step forward are not always the bravest. Sometimes they simply misread the risk.
The first wave is not only spent on its own fight. It shapes who is willing to fight next.
What Leadership Can Do#
Hold a reserve. Military planning keeps part of the force back for a reason. In a programme, that means not putting every person with both kinds of courage into phase one. It feels wasteful at kickoff, when the open topics are piling up. It pays off in month nine.
Make early losses survivable. The first wave will get things wrong. That is the price of going first. What matters is what happens next. If a failed concept is treated as something the programme learned, the people involved come out intact, and the next volunteers see that. If it is treated as someone’s fault, you lose the second wave before it is called.
Shield the open topics. Give the semi-involved a fixed place to raise concerns, a review at a set point, instead of a running veto. Their concerns still get heard. The volunteer just doesn’t have to answer every one of them on the day it comes up.
See the middle. Programmes celebrate the kickoff and the go-live. The people who carried the long stretch in between are usually missing from the closing presentation. Name them. It costs nothing, and the people deciding whether to volunteer next time are watching.
Count yourself in. The leader who sends the first wave is part of the endurance layer. You keep going knowing what it cost, and you keep asking the next group to step forward. That is arguably the hardest form of the courage this post is about.
Back to the Arena#
I left out one thing on purpose. The first wave doesn’t only burn out. Often it doesn’t leave. The person who took the unknown topic at kickoff is still holding it two years later, long after it stopped being unknown, and long after someone else would have run it better.
Sending them in is the easy part. Knowing when to pull them out is harder. That, and knowing when to stop thinking, is the last post of this series.
