I’ve come to believe that ‘forcing functions’ are great tools to make things happen. What do I mean by forcing functions? External events that enforce accountability. In a startup, these can be a board meeting, a sales pitch with an important prospect, your competitor’s product launch, expiration of your office lease, you get the idea. In general, unless there’s some serious crack smoking happening during deadline setting, motivated people find a way to get stuff done in the time allotted.

Forcing functions are intimately linked to accountability. Once you have a deadline you can’t move, you are forced to meet it. We went through such an experience recently the first time we paid out users for commissions earned. Once we committed to a date to issue funds, we were forced to walk through the entire process and involve the appropriate individuals from development, marketing and accounting to work through the issues and implications. We found a lot of holes in our processes but were able to work out how to fix them in time to meet our deadline. Funnily enough, these issues were largely known, and were on our list of things to do, but the forcing function made us deal with them.

This model can only be successful when you have an organization that responds well to pressure. In addition, effective organizations find ways to create deadlines and forcing functions for themselves in order to operate at a high level of productivity.