“Mission creep is the gradual or incremental expansion of an intervention, project or mission, beyond its original scope, focus or goals, a ratchet effect spawned by initial success.”
- Wikipedia
When I was in the banking investments world, we talked about this phenomena all the time. Because of the portion of banking I was involved in, we had various securities and banking examiners. We also had internal and external auditors. We had risk assessors. We often said we were on “perma-audit”. The next one seemed to start even before the last one was finishing.
Like vines overtaking a tree and eventually choking the life out of it.
It was especially frustrating because we worked hard to play by the book and really keep our noses clean. For example, even after the market crash of 2007-2008, we never suffered a single loss in our investment portfolio. We were incredulous and even a little angry when we had to pay additional FDIC assessments to bail out all the others who hadn’t been as prudent!
Maybe it was because they couldn’t find any of their “aha’s” in their normal course of auditing, but they always seemed to be expanding their scope and poking into things that didn’t seem to fall under their jurisdiction. The term “mission creep” was first used in 1993 and has originally been targeted at military operations, but is used more generally and is almost always assumed to be negative.
Wikipedia explains further:
“Mission creep is usually considered undesirable due to the dangerous irreversible path, each success breeding evermore ambitious interventions, stopping only when a final, oftentimes catastrophic failure was precipitated…”
Ironically, while I don’t keep up with the government, regulatory agency practices, or even what the military is up to, I experience “mission creep” all the time. It is one of the vagaries of entrepreneurial success and has been the ruin of many.
Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, identifies something very similar and calls it the “success paradox”. The progression goes something like this:
Your discipline, focus, and intentionality at the outset of your entrepreneurial journey make you very successful.
Your success opens up a large selection of options and opportunities.
The original venture starts to plateau or even fail as you begin to allocate focus, time, and resources to the other things.
That, in a nutshell, is the success paradox. It is a self-determined mission creep that is a result of good things. But it is also the likely inevitability for almost anyone who allows the “undisciplined pursuit of more” (as Jim Collins called it) to overwhelm the “the disciplined pursuit of less, but better” that McKeown encourages.
If this didn’t show up in every other conversation, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation.
It is subtle.
It is subversive.
It has been the path to destruction of so many small businesses.
Consider
Did the success paradox born of mission creep sound all too familiar?
Is your mission creeping?
What are the new ideas and opportunities you are giving too much time to?
What do you need to do as a result of reading this today?