Kendall Card 2.0

I once asked my cousin-in-law what was the key factor to why his business seemed to thrive. He contemplated for a moment and said,

“Because I don’t promise more than I can deliver and what I do promise to accomplish I do so on time.”

To illustrate this point I share this sad yet true story about someone creating a totally impossible situation and causing a lot of people to suffer for it. Don’t let this be you.

A teacher in a private Salt Lake City school decided that all of his students needed to pass a series of proficiencies before they could pass his class. The theory being that the students needed to be able to do these tasks in real life, not just learn about them in a book. Sounds fair, right?

Each of the 25 students had the next two weeks to pass 40 proficiencies. Each proficiency took about a half hour to do, and could only be passed off by the teacher.  Each student was supposed to schedule times with the teacher (outside of class) when they were ready to be tested.

Now let’s take a look at a very fundamental problem with this idea…

1. 40 proficiencies X 30 minutes each = 1200 minutes of work
2. 1200 minutes X 25 students = 30,000 minutes (500 hours) of the
   teacher’s time (as he was the only one evaluating)
3. Working 24 hours a day, doing nothing but these proficiencies, the teacher would have to work 41.6 straight days with no breaks to allow all the students to pass.

As he only gave the students two weeks to pass all the proficiencies, this was clearly an impossible task.

The students were reasonably upset about the situation. The teacher (after one week had gone by) didn’t see the problem.

Moral of the story: Don’t plan (or promise) to do more than you can possibly accomplish.