Last Responsible Moment

The Last Responsible Moment sounds like a fancy name for procrastination, though it isn’t. Instead of procrastination, it’s about remaining flexible and deciding when we have more information.

A useful framing: think about how much more you’ll know about a problem or decision in the future. Is the person sitting here now the same person six weeks from now? Of course, the answer is “future me” will know more. So why lock in a decision today when future-you will be better equipped to make it?

With the Last Responsible Moment, we delay decisions until the cost of not deciding exceeds the benefit of delaying. When we make a decision too early, we bake in the assumptions we were making at the time. When we delay too long, we lose the ability to make the decision altogether.

A practical approach when facing a decision:

• When is the last time I could make this decision?
• What would I need to know before I make this decision?

This idea appears throughout the Agile Universe, even when we don’t name it. All Agile Engineering Practices are about avoiding early decisions. In Product Backlog Refinement, we encourage teams only to refine a few Sprints’ worth of work. The list goes on.

The idea of the Last Responsible Moment came to the Agile community via Mary and Tom Poppendieck’s Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit:

Delay commitment until the last responsible moment, that is, the moment at which failing to make a decision eliminates an important alternative.