Opportunity windows
Across architecture, engineering, project management, standards, and open source, we find related practices for progressively moving work from open exploration toward completion: Stage Gates, Design Freezes, Last Calls, Requests for Comment, Progressive Commitment, and the Cost of Change Curve, Building on these ideas, we’re developing shared vocabulary for the Cooperative around Opportunity Windows: making explicit when and how people can influence work as it moves toward completion.
Introduction
We’ve probably all experienced this: you’re nearing the end of a paper, a software project, a specification, or some other piece of work. You’ve put a lot of time into it, the finish line is finally visible, and then someone gives you feedback that would require changing the structure, revisiting an assumption, or starting a substantial part of the work over again. Sometimes the feedback is absolutely right. That can make it all the more frustrating.
Most of us have also been on the other side. You discover, perhaps rather too late, that someone has been working on something important and you have some serious concerns about the direction they have taken. You don’t want to derail their work, but you also don’t want to stay silent when you think something needs to change. By the time you see the work, though, changing course may already be expensive.
These situations are often the result of people trying to collaborate without a shared understanding of when feedback is most useful, or how much change is still practical. Early in a piece of work, almost anything can be reconsidered. Near the end, even a small change can have consequences for everything that came before it.
We’ve been using a simple idea within the Image Cooperative to make this trade-off more explicit. We call it an opportunity window.
What is an opportunity window?
An opportunity window communicates how much room remains for others to influence a piece of work as it moves towards completion. The idea is deliberately simple: early comments shape; late comments polish.
At the beginning of a piece of work, the window is wide open. There is plenty of room for ideas, questions, alternative approaches, and fundamental changes. As the work progresses, the window gradually closes, and the kind of feedback that is most useful changes with it.
At 100%, the window is closed and the decision has been made. The work may have been submitted, adopted, or published. This does not mean that the work can never change again: a future revision, amendment, or new version can open a new window. Closing a window records a decision at a particular point in time; it does not close the conversation forever.
This is particularly important for a cooperative. Distributed decision-making is at the heart of what a cooperative is: people who share responsibility for an organisation should have meaningful opportunities to influence the decisions that affect it. But distributed decision-making does not mean that every person must be able to reopen every decision indefinitely. A cooperative still needs to get things done. Opportunity windows give us a lightweight way to make participation possible early, make the progression towards a decision visible, and eventually move forward.
The stages of an opportunity window
We use four named stages to describe the progression of an opportunity window: Discovery, Direction, Refinement, and Review, after which the window is considered Closed. We sometimes use percentages as shorthand for how far the window has closed, but these are deliberately not precise measurements. A team can choose the percentage that best describes where its work is, and the boundaries between stages do not need to be exact. What matters is communicating how much room remains for influence and what kind of feedback is useful.
Discovery — a wide-open window
This is the time to explore the direction of the work and identify major concerns while changes are still inexpensive. Useful feedback includes alternative approaches, strategic concerns, missing stakeholders, scope changes, fundamental objections, and significant opportunities.
Major changes are not only possible but encouraged. If you think the work is heading in the wrong direction, this is exactly when we want to hear it.
Direction — an open window
The work is beginning to acquire a shape, and the purpose of this stage is to confirm that its structure and direction are right. Useful feedback might include architectural changes, missing requirements, significant content revisions, or changes to priorities and goals.
Substantial changes remain possible, but they should increasingly be concrete. The aim is to settle the important choices before too much effort is invested in them.
Refinement — a narrowing window
The work is developing into an emerging final product. Feedback is primarily about missing content, ambiguities, inconsistencies, and significant but targeted revisions.
Fundamental redesign is still possible, but it should now be exceptional. If a major change is proposed, there should be a reason to believe that its benefit outweighs the increasing cost of making it.
Review — an almost-closed window
The work is approaching submission, publication, adoption, or another final commitment. Appropriate feedback includes errors, compliance issues, factual corrections, blockers, and significant risks. At this stage, changes should generally improve correctness rather than alter the fundamental direction.
A serious problem discovered during Review should not be ignored. But asking everyone to redesign the work at this point needs stronger justification: the issue should be explained, its material impact made clear, and there should be a concrete proposal for addressing it. The person raising a significant late-stage change should generally also be willing to help implement it.
Closed — the decision has been made
The window is closed. The work has been submitted, adopted, or published, and the decision is recorded.
New concerns can still be raised. They are now concerns about a particular version and may become an amendment, a future revision, a follow-up project, or a new version.
A change is a new version.
Making opportunity windows work
An opportunity window is most useful when everyone can see where the work is in the process. The person responsible for the work should announce when a window opens, give people a reasonable opportunity to participate, and record what happens when it closes.
This does not need to be bureaucratic. A simple record of when the window opened and closed, who participated, and what significant issues were raised can be enough. When the window closes, a short summary of what was accepted, rejected, or deferred provides useful context for the decision and its future versions.
That context becomes particularly important when a concern arrives late. A late concern should not be dismissed simply because it is late. Sometimes a problem is genuinely not visible until late in the process, or circumstances have changed. Instead, we should ask: how substantive is the concern? Was there an earlier opportunity to raise it? What would it cost to make the change now, and what would it cost not to? And is the person proposing the change prepared to help make it?
This is the principle that responsibility accompanies influence. The later a significant concern is raised, the more responsibility should generally accompany asking others to change completed work. At the same time, the person doing the work has a responsibility to make opportunities for participation visible and meaningful.
Why use opportunity windows?
The aim is to avoid two equally frustrating patterns. In one, everything remains open for so long that nothing ever feels finished and decisions can continually be reopened. In the other, people work independently until something is almost complete and only then ask for approval, when changing direction is already expensive.
Opportunity windows provide a middle ground. They encourage people to share unfinished work while there is still meaningful room to influence it, while giving those doing the work a reasonable expectation that participation will eventually turn into commitment.
We think opportunity windows could be useful anywhere people need to balance meaningful participation with the need to finish things, and we use them throughout our own cooperative decision-making in Loomio, a platform for informed and democratic decision-making. We’ll share more about how we use Loomio to open, narrow, and close windows in a future post.