In the 1930s a not-for-profit organization established itself with the hopes of finding a cure for Polio. The March of Dimes fundraised to spur research to rid the world of the scourge of Polio. Some decades later with the development of a vaccine against Polio, the cause had been accomplished. Did the March of Dimes wind itself down because of its success? No, instead they pivoted to a new cause. Now, it wasn’t Polio to eradicate but birth defects. The organization didn’t scale back or down but amped up and expanded. This tendency for organizations to expand its reach steadily beyond any initial purpose is universal. Organizations aren’t established to be wound down. They seek to perpetuate their own existence.
This effect can be seen outside specific organizations and in causes. The original gay rights movement starting in the 70s sought to decriminalize sodomy and destigmatize the idea of homosexuality. Once these were achieved, then a new target of seeking marriage rights for gays and lesbians became the focus. As these goals, too, were achieved, sights shifted to expanding the umbrella of gay rights growing the acronym. Now, the acronym has expanded into an alphabet of its own. Gay rights aren’t just to be protected or tolerated; they must now be celebrated. With every achievement, a new target is announced. Gay rights has morphed into a transgender agenda. Encouraging kids to explore gender and access both hormone therapy as well as invasive surgeries are the current areas in vogue under this umbrella. Advocating for biological males to compete against women in sport is also in this rubric now. What started as a simple, reasonable ask has accelerated in any manner of direction.
The civil rights movement has seen a similar evolutionary expansion. What started as an ask for voting rights for minorities became an ask for equality rights in other areas. Blacks in the US earned their vote, then wanted to have access to equal education and other opportunities. As progress was made on these fronts, the civil rights movement didn’t celebrate and reduce itself in size. It expanded its ask. As equal opportunity was achieved, affirmative action became the next battleground. It was sought as a temporary assistance to right past wrongs. Then affirmative action sought to become entrenched as a permanent boost for minorities. From affirmative action, the ask for reparations arose. Concurrent with reparations are calls for anti-racism. The goal of being color-blind when it came to seeing one another wasn’t enough. Instead, we need to see color as a relevant factor and work to provide extra advantage for them.
Another example is offered in an article from The Free Press Planned Parenthood has evolved from offering information about birth control to the largest provider of abortion and contraceptives in the US. The organization started in 1916 as mostly an information provider. Then, even distributing information about birth control was considered illegal in some States. The organization has mushroomed into a behemoth with revenues more than two billion USD annually. Its services have expanded well past information into provision of birth control, provision of abortion, and more. In the past decade, another leap forward from birth control to offering hormone treatment for gender transitions began.
Less than 25 of its 600 locations offered hormonal services to young adults in 2015. Less than ten years later, almost 450 of its locations offer this service. The article suggests that more than 40,000 young adults availed themselves of these services in 2023 or an increase of more than ten times that in 2017. That’s quite a shift in services and expansion of engagement over not a long-time frame. What would the original founders of the organization think of the organization’s current focus?
When does a cause take a pause? It’s never after achieving applause. As John Tierney writes in an article in the City Journal, “For career activists, success is a threat.” Accomplishing an agenda isn’t something to be celebrated. It becomes the basis upon which to shift goal posts. The threat hasn’t been terminated. Now, there’s a new threat even more alarming than the last. Success results in a definition of a new mess. The evolution of an organization’s purpose is proof that it is not the original purpose that drives its direction but the perpetuation of its power. The goal to sustain itself is greater than the drive to solve the problem. The business model for these types of organizations is to do anything but fix the problem. They are constantly advocating for more help and arguing for greater intervention. No progress is ever enough. They are arguing for their own perpetuation not celebrating solving a problem as that would make them irrelevant. The narrative shifts to advance the interests of the organization not to solve a specific problem. Any progress achieved is discounted and offset by the negative noise of the next problem.
These examples aren’t intended as an argument in favor or against any of the issues any of these organizations claim to support. There may be plenty that support the shift in organizational objectives in a broader scope. I’ve no bone to pick with any of the original efforts of these examples nor their current ones. The goal is simply to suggest that what an organization starts with as a purpose can subtly slip into other areas completely unrelated to the original objective. This can be in part due to as much effort being put into looking for problems as there is into solving one. Yes, where we’re perpetually peeking for problems, we can’t help but find a new cause to chase. However, the main driver is that once established, an organization, like any organism, exists with a primary purpose, its own survival. It exists to persist. The organization takes on a life of its own.
Whatever the founding problem was, as victory over it is achieved, a new problem must be found. The argument is always for more money and more power. When was the last time a charity closed because of succeeding in accomplishing its original objective? How about a government department? The bureaucratic blob of government seems to bloat like our bellies at an all you can eat buffet. Existing departments grow their budgets and staff while new departments are constantly created. The government of the United States now includes over four hundred federal agencies. For the first hundred years of the country’s history, there were zero. This alphabet soup of departments has exploded at an average rate of four new departments annually for the last hundred years. Moreover, each of these departments, once created, grows in terms of budget and staffing each year. Government grows no matter what it shows. As President Ronald Reagan noted, “No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size.”
In business there’s a similar idea known as feature creep (or scope creep). In product design, software design, or other projects what starts as a particular undertaking morphs into something unrecognizable as more and more is added to the scope of the project. There can be perfectly reasonable reasons for expanding a project’s scope. For example, it costs less to add a certain feature to an office renovation at the outset than to do the same change a few years down the road. Putting a wall up now is much easier than tearing down existing structures to replace them a year from now, for example. An office renovation project that was going to upgrade some paint and flooring becomes a larger scale effort blowing through budget and timelines. Similarly, adding a feature to some software is much easier to do when developing code originally than after the application becomes legacy software where changes become cumbersome, complicated, and costly. Under the guise of being practical and prudent we do more now than originally intended growing the complexity of a project.
Outside of doing more now because it may be increasingly expensive down the road, we may be driven to add more to create something more desirable. More features mean more value. More value means greater sales potential. Customer focus groups or input may drive the desire to deliver more on a project or product. We may also be motivated to add more to a project in order to accommodate the wishes of internal groups. Different departments may want to see different aspects of a project be prioritized. The end result can be a larger project than originally intended. Again, it can be the best of intentions driving these expansionary decisions. Nonetheless, doing too much can create problems. We can run into financial and delivery issues. If limited resources are blown by over doing things, the project may never make it to completion. Even if it does, the time taken to build more into the project can delay completion for months creating separate unintended consequences.
To guard against being ground down by feature creep, we need to know that this potential problem exists. Our ability to manage it starts by being aware of it. At each step of our project we need to build in time to critically evaluate against our original project scope to ensure that we’re not falling into the clutches of feature creep. Is this proposal consistent with the project’s original intent? Is it necessary? Does it fall within the original budget and timeline of the project? Keeping Pareto’s Law in the back of our mind can also protect against feature creep. If we work to accept that 80% of our project’s benefits are likely to come from 20% of its inputs, we can focus on capturing the core inputs as opposed to creating more and more. It’s about getting the meaningful things correct and ignoring the rest. Less may be more. When evaluating features, changes, upgrades, etc. to a project, ask is this likely to be part of the 20% of the project generating 80% of its benefit? How sure are you of your answer?
Another way to consider limiting a project’s expansion is to build an expectation that for every additional feature accepted an existing feature must be removed. In other words, there’s a cap to the number of features to include. If we’re adding x, we need to remove y. This forces us to think hard about the value of x. Is it so necessary that it warrants removing y?
Feature creep is real and has consequences. Being aware of it and taking steps to limit its impact will help you keep your projects on time and on budget.
