Low-Criticality Pilot for Changing How You Work
Never test a new way of working on something that matters — you get one shot at first impressions
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 90%
Most process adoptions fail not because the process is wrong but because teams try to switch on a dime, on a project that matters, and then blame the method when it goes badly. Fried's rule: organizational momentum is physical — the more mass, the more energy needed to change direction. So you keep working the way you work, and you run the new method on a deliberately low-stakes project until you are actually competent at it.
Origin
Jason Fried's answer to the question of why people who try to adopt Shape Up 'spectacularly fail' — his diagnosis after watching companies attempt 180-degree changes overnight.
Core principles
- 01Momentum is mass: the way you have worked for four years will power you forward whether you like it or not.
- 02You will be bad at a new method the first time, the same way you are bad at guitar the first time.
- 03A failed experiment on critical work poisons the method permanently — nobody will try it again.
- 04Partial adoption is legitimate; you can take 30% of a method and leave the rest.
How to run it
- 1
Accept that you cannot turn on a dime
Reject the 'starting Monday we do it this way' plan. Recognize that the existing root structure of how the company works cannot be redirected instantly — you have to plant a new seed alongside it.
Watch out The bigger the organization, the more energy it takes to change direction. Big companies move slowly for a reason, not out of stupidity.
- 2
Pick a project whose failure costs nothing
Deliberately select a low-criticality upcoming project — one where being bad for a while has no consequences — and run the new method only there.
Pro tip Small teams inside larger companies are the natural host; the method does not need to spread company-wide to be worth it.
- 3
Be openly bad at it for a while
Expect the first attempts to go poorly. Practice until the team can say 'I'm actually getting quite good at this now' before it goes anywhere near important work.
- 4
Graduate to critical work only after competence
Once the team is genuinely good at the method on throwaway work, move it up to more critical projects.
- 5
Take only the parts that work
Adopt piecemeal rather than wholesale. Maybe only the six-week cycle sticks, or only the appetite-versus-estimate distinction. That is a success, not a partial failure.
Pro tip 'Take whatever works — you don't have to go wholesale on any of these things.'
In the wild
Teams come back to Fried six weeks after adopting Shape Up saying it does not work. He asks how they did it, and they invariably describe flipping their next real project to the new method overnight.
→ Fried is 'really not surprised' — the method never got a fair test, and the team now believes it is broken, closing off any future attempt.
Where Shape Up has landed at traditional companies, it is almost never a company-wide mandate. It is one small team or one division running the experiment, sometimes spreading, sometimes staying contained.
→ Partial and localized adoption survives; big-bang rollouts do not.
Common mistakes
Testing the new method on the project that matters most
When it goes badly on critical work, everyone remembers, and the old way — which 'kind of sucked but worked' — wins by default forever. You have destroyed all future opportunities to try it.
Judging a method by the first attempt
First attempts at any new practice are incompetent by definition. Evaluating the method on your worst execution of it tells you nothing about the method.
Is it for you?
Best for
Engineering and product leaders who want to change a team's operating model without triggering organizational antibodies
Not ideal for
Genuine crises where the current way of working has already failed and there is no low-stakes project to spare
From the transcript
“keep working the way you're working but some future project some Low criticality”
“Project try this new method on that so if it doesn't work it's probably not going to work very well the first time just like…”
“there's this thing called momentum I always try to think of things in terms of like the physical world like the more mass of an…”
“when people try to try something new on something really critical and it doesn't work they will never try it again”
From the episode
Jason Fried challenges your thinking on fundraising, goals, growth, and more