You don’t really understand what your company is doing until you can compress it into a miniature form–and neither does your team.
The most influential ideas, both good and bad, have been notable in their tinyness: “E=mc2”, “no taxation without representation”, “sail west to India”. And some have literally been written on napkins: trickle-down economics, Southwest Airlines, the MRI scanner. I claim we don’t really understand anything until we can summarise it, which is why I make my coaching clients develop extremely brief descriptions of their company’s direction before we set any personal goals. Weighty documents and endless slides obscure the key ideas (not to mention boring the pants off everyone), and most of the engineering teams I’ve had to wrench back onto the right track have been hopelessly confused by inscrutable objectives. To keep your crew on message with the briefest of strategies:
1. Use simple Anglo-Saxon: “lead”, “stop”, “forget” not “co-ordinate”, “reassign”, “prioritise”.
2. Define what you won’t do, the “negative space” of your picture of the future.
3. Be wrong: elide and omit details that don’t matter (you can always clarify later).
I’ve got loads more ideas on this, but I don’t have enough room on this napkin.
This first appeared in my weekly Squirrel Squadron email, which goes out every Monday, and was originally posted on 3rd October 2022. To get my provocative thoughts and tips direct to your inbox first, sign up here: https://squirrelsquadron.com/