You’ve stumbled onto another corporate buzz phrase. I remember Molly — one of NetHope’s early executive directors, on loan from Cisco’s mergers and acquisitions group — using it like a tuning fork when things got weighty: “Let’s not try to boil the ocean, people.”[1]
It was more than a quip. It was a way of getting our small, under-resourced team to refocus, to choose what mattered now — not everything that might matter eventually.
I remember my own first encounter with a project that felt ocean-sized. I had just become the first CIO at Save the Children, and our IT mission was clear: connect the field offices and program sites around the world so we could share data and insight in real time. Simple to say. But the technical hurdles, limited infrastructure, and scattered resources made the goal feel overwhelming.
That’s when I learned that vision and execution travel at different speeds.
We didn’t need to solve every connectivity problem for every office overnight. What we needed was the smallest piece that could still make a difference — a Minimum Viable Product.[2] I didn’t have that term back then. But I had the impulse: start small, get something working, prove it matters.
In my prior programming years, I found the same idea in Extreme Programming, a software methodology that advocates solving only the problem at hand.[3] One of its core principles is YAGNI — "You Aren’t Gonna Need It." The idea? Don’t build it until you actually need it. That lean, do-less ethic became the soil out of which Agile Programming, and later Agile Project Management, would grow.
But a word of caution. A Forbes article warns that the phrase “don’t boil the ocean” can become a way to dodge big, necessary problems. Climate change. Equity. Digital transformation. These are ocean-sized issues that can’t be tackled with teaspoons.[4]
I agree. There are times we must aim big. But I also believe what Molly taught us: the way to change the ocean is by heating a single kettle, one cup at a time.
So when you’re leading your next project, ask yourself: What’s the first kettle? Who needs that first cup? And how will we know when it’s time to pour another? |