by Aaron Dignan
Thought Starters
Flow Interrupted. If the way your teams are structured doesn’t reflect the way your organization actually creates value, you’re in for a world of hurt. Your sales team is waiting on your marketers, who are waiting on your product people, who are waiting on the engineers, who are waiting on infrastructure, which is waiting on funding. To witness this in action, choose a project that created real value for a customer. It could be a product, a service, or just a piece of one. Trace the line of who needed to be involved to create that value—by skills or by person, whichever is easier. Now compare that network with the org chart that represents where people sit day to day. How many teams does it touch? What is the cost of those handoffs, in ownership, speed, and coherence? In an ideal state, your day-to-day value-creation structure—where people spend their time physically and virtually—and your workflow are one and the same. Your formal structure, to the extent you need one, is tucked in a drawer somewhere for the regulators.
Nothing but Projects. Could it be that an organization is nothing more than a series of projects? I know, the traditional definition of a project says that it must have a beginning, an end, and a defined scope and resources. But technically speaking, isn’t that every activity we undertake? Everything from product development to cleaning the bathroom matches that description, depending on your time-frame orientation. Some projects last a century and some last a day. Just because we do something repeatedly doesn’t mean it’s independent of the bigger picture. Indeed, treating everything as a project allows us to be more intentional—starting, stopping, and evolving activity with the same level of scrutiny. A project has a purpose. A project has a cadence. A project uses feedback to learn. A project lens allows us to share a common language about the work of the organization. It forces us to take quotidian tasks and make them more strategic. Cleaning the bathroom as a task is disempowering. But the “clean bathrooms for our guests” project creates possibilities. Can we automate this? Can we design our bathrooms differently so they’re easier to clean? Everything is in play. Of course, this doesn’t mean tasks cease to exist. Just that they are often (and possibly always) in service of a project, consciously or unconsciously.
Workflow in Action
Working in Sprints. One way to establish a better rhythm at the team level is to work in sprints. Rather than basing your rhythm on the project’s time line or complexity, consider running every project as a series of one- or two-week sprints. Think of a sprint as a unit of time during which you must produce and share a unit of work—a self-imposed deadline. While this might seem arbitrary, sprints enforce a lot of good habits that seldom emerge without a rapid cadence. For starters, they force teams to get going. If you know you have to ship something, anything, at the end of the first week, you don’t waste time debating which #2 pencils to order. Sprints also force teams to break down the work into smaller bites. If you’re building enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, or an app that scans brain waves, you won’t be done in a week. So teams are left to figure out what can be done. An MVP. A paper prototype. A list of approved vendors. Because come Friday, something has to be shipped. And of course, sprints force decisions. Rather than debating or agonizing over what could be, the constraints mean it’s safer to make a choice than to wait. If we show our users or customers that week’s work and find out we missed the mark, so what? We spent one week to invalidate a direction that might have soaked up months of time in a previous regime. In my first meeting with a new project team, invariably someone will say, “When should we meet again . . . maybe three weeks from today?” And I’ll reply, “What do you think we can ship by Friday?”
Limit WIP. Want to maximize how many cars pass through a stretch of highway? Pack it bumper to bumper and everything grinds to a halt. Instead, you want a constant flow of cars with enough space around them to keep moving fast. Limiting our work in progress (WIP) increases flow and overall productivity. But how does this work in practice? First, think about how many projects you can reasonably juggle at once. Now cut that number in half. If it’s more than seven, try again. Create a Kanban board with three columns: “To Do,” “Doing,” “Done.” I recommend using Trello, but you can do this on the wall with tape if it suits you. Put everything on your plate in the “To Do” column. Now move the most critical and urgent projects over to the “Doing” column until you’ve reached your newly minted project threshold. When you finish a project, move it to the “Done” column. Then, and only then, you can pull a new project out of the “To Do” column and get started on it. Try this at an individual level and a team level. You’ll be amazed how freeing it is. And remember, if a new request comes in that you agree to tackle, something else has to go back on pause. You can change a lot about your way of working, but you can’t change the number of hours in the day.
Workflow in Change
As my colleagues and I begin to share and experience new ways of working with our clients, we’re immediately confronted by their workflow norms. There’s a lack of clarity about bandwidth because everyone is maxed out. As a result, there’s an instinct to operate at a much slower cadence than we prefer. They think in big chunks of polished work; we think in small chunks of raw output. They think in months; we think in weeks or days. They coordinate through email, calendars, and assistants. We coordinate through messaging apps, cloud-based documents, and an established operating rhythm. Sometimes we try it their way, but more often than not we offer them the chance to try something new. And wouldn’t you know it, most people quickly experience relief and a sense of momentum.
Questions on Workflow
The following questions can be applied to the organization as a whole or the teams within it. Use them to provoke a conversation about what is present and what is possible.
How do we divide the work of the organization?
What is the relationship between our workflow and our structure?
How do we handle projects that are too big for one team?
What is our approach to project management?
Who is accountable for project outcomes?
How do we maintain visibility across all our projects?
How are projects initiated, canceled, or completed?
What is the role of rhythm and tempo in our workflow?
How do we optimize our workflow to minimize waste and maximize value creation?
What does it mean to be People Positive about workflow? Recognize that healthy workflow comes from organizing around the work, not working around the organization. When our teams and projects live in the same place, relationships fuel the work. And instead of pushing for uniformity, let local methods and tools flourish.
What does it mean to be Complexity Conscious about workflow? Accept that workflow is something to be coordinated and refined, not something that can be solved. Ensure that every team has the capacity to do the work and improve how they do the work at the same time. In order to maximize the adaptive potential of the organization, create the infrastructure to support loosely coupled, tightly aligned teams.
MEETINGS
How we convene and coordinate; the many ways members and teams come together.
To meet or not to meet? That is the question on everyone’s mind as we reconcile our visceral distaste for dysfunctional meetings with the fact that maybe, just maybe, we need them. Coming together around the fire as a tribe is an ancestral tradition that spans cultures and centuries. And there’s no reason to believe that we’ve transcended that need. But we’ve allowed meetings to move well beyond their rightful place.
The average employee attends sixty-two meetings a month and considers more than half of those meetings a waste of time. The salary cost of unnecessary meetings is now $37 billion for U.S. businesses alone. Organizations aren’t just overloaded; they’re addicted. No daylight exists on their calendars, just back-to-back meetings as f
ar as the eye can see. Their every need—for information, for decisions, for feedback—seems to call for a meeting. They hate them, but they can’t quit, because there’s no other way to get things done. Salesforce executive Vala Afshar masterfully highlighted the irony of our meeting culture when he tweeted, “You likely have to get management approval for a $500 expense . . . but you can call a 1 hour meeting with 20 people and no one notices.”
Meanwhile, new tools have emerged that allow the more technologically savvy among us to communicate and coordinate across space and time. Teams that have adopted messaging apps such as Slack have cut meetings by 24 percent. And some have gone further than that. Fed up with meetings as usual, some renegade firms have banned them entirely, casting them out as wasteful and unnecessary in the future of work.
Are those our only choices? A wave of soul-crushing meetings or none at all? Pixar’s Braintrust would suggest otherwise. The Braintrust is a part of Pixar’s special sauce, the magic pixie dust that has enabled the company to produce nineteen number one box-office openings, fifteen Academy Awards, and an average Rotten Tomatoes score of 88.5 percent. The concept of the meeting is simple. The film, in whatever condition it’s in, is screened in front of a handful of Pixar’s most seasoned storytellers—directors, writers, heads of story—people who have been there before. What follows is a two-hour free-form discussion, a feedback session known for what author Kim Scott calls radical candor. That’s what happens when we challenge one another directly but make it clear that we care personally. The Braintrust leaves egos at the door, pulls no punches, and puts all their energy into making the movie better. As Ed Catmull, the cofounder and president of Pixar, says, “The film—not the filmmaker—is under the microscope.”
There’s one more thing that makes a Braintrust meeting different from a traditional feedback session. The Braintrust has no authority. The goal of the meeting isn’t necessarily to solve problems but to shine a light on them, to trace them to their source, and give the creative team the perspective they need to start fixing them. Ultimately it’s up to the director to decide how to proceed. “We don’t want the Braintrust to solve a director’s problem because we believe that, in all likelihood, our solution won’t be as good as the one the director and his or her creative team comes up with.” Teams leave the Braintrust with a renewed clarity about their film, one way or another, determined to unearth the greatness within.
Like it or not, great meetings offer higher bandwidth—more information per second—than any other form of communication. When we’re together, we not only hear one another but also see and sense body language, emotion, and energy. Our mirror neurons start firing. We can shake hands. We can breathe the same air. We can stand shoulder to shoulder. Even organizations such as Automattic (the creators of WordPress), GitLab, and Basecamp, which are famous for working remotely, host regular gatherings of their global membership. A million years of evolution didn’t evaporate because someone invented the videoconference. If we want trust, if we want shared consciousness, if we want vibrant networks . . . eventually we have to meet.
Thought Starters
Death to Status Updates. One of the most popular and dysfunctional meetings I encounter in my work involves a team presenting work in progress to their boss for their feedback and/or blessing. Many leaders believe that these status updates are the best way to scale themselves across multiple projects. But holding court and dropping “pearls of wisdom” on teams actually causes more trouble than it’s worth. For starters, leaders often lack the context to understand complex initiatives and the situation at the edge. This can lead to naive questions at best and irresponsible recommendations at worst. Updates are also disruptive, and not in a good way. Last-minute changes undermine teams and waste much of the time that was invested prior to the review. And, as you might imagine, these meetings become theatrical productions. Teams see updates as their chance to shine, so they overprepare, spending an average of four hours per week preparing for these moments. The alternative is far simpler. Leaders can either join a team and become part of the workflow, or they can be part of an advice process at the outset of the project or upon request. As one of my colleagues likes to say, “status should live in software.” Words to live by.
One-on-One Fun. One meeting that employees love is the one-on-one they have with their manager every week or two. Most managers speak with pride about how often they meet with their direct reports and how “the time is theirs.” We’re servant leaders, right? Sure. But here’s something I’ve noticed that you might not expect. One-on-ones are often used as a salve for hidden dysfunction. When members lack the authority to make decisions, these meetings become the only mechanism for moving things forward. When members lack the ability to resolve conflict, these private audiences with the leader become a forum for politicking. Great one-on-ones can provide feedback and mentorship, deepen relationships, or give us a chance to collaborate on the work. But if you notice they’re becoming a venue for other unmet needs, pull the rip cord and bring those conversations into the light.
Governance. Over the years, corporate governance has become a circus of compliance and risk avoidance. In the meantime we have forgotten that true stewardship comes from participation and ownership, not fear. Put simply, if we want organizations to learn and adapt—if we want them to be good citizens—then we need a distributed mechanism for steering and changing the organization. One way to do this is to encourage every team to hold a monthly governance meeting. The goal of this meeting is for everyone to have the chance to voice their concerns and propose local changes to structure, strategy, resources . . . anything that will help the organization pursue its purpose. Thousands of organizations around the world that practice Sociocracy, Holacracy, or other forms of participatory governance are doing this today. Imagine every team in your organization continuously and deliberately tweaking, not just your products and services but the organization itself.
Meetings in Action
Facilitators and Scribes. One of the best ways to increase meeting effectiveness is to ensure that someone is responsible for the structure, flow, and output of every meeting. Two roles that we have found to be particularly effective are facilitator and scribe. The facilitator role keeps the meeting on track, enforcing whatever format and ground rules the team has agreed upon. That could include cutting off conversational tangents, noticing when some people need to step up or step back, and even pointing out when the leader isn’t playing by the rules. The scribe role captures any actions or outputs created throughout the meeting and leverages any tools or interfaces required by the work. This could include anything from a digital Kanban board to a live document to a task manager. To get started, try electing a facilitator and scribe in each of your recurring meetings. Give them the authority to design and hold the space for meaningful interactions. After ninety days or so, elect new players to fill those roles, until everyone has held that responsibility.
Meeting Moratorium. Sometimes the only way to see things clearly is to stop the madness. Instead of trying to fix all the meetings in your current operating rhythm while they’re in flight, see if your team is open to canceling all meetings for two weeks. At first blush, this sounds impossible, irresponsible even. But it can be done. One leadership team coached by The Ready had amassed an average of forty-five hours of meetings per week. Their calendars looked like a game of Tetris they were quickly losing. So we tried pressing pause on all recurring meetings. The questions we wanted them to answer? What do we miss? What do we need that we’re not getting from informal interactions? Based on what we heard, we rebuilt the meeting rhythm one meeting at a time, ensuring that each one had a clear purpose and matching structure. We tweaked these formats iteratively, based on feedback, until we had something that worked. Gone were the needless reviews, cross-functional one-on-ones to negotiate and back-channel, and long-recurring meetings that no one could remember the impetus for. What used to take forty-five hours now only took eighteen
. If you’re overwhelmed, try your own meeting moratorium and discover the difference between what you have and what you really need.
Retrospectives. If you were to chart the most valuable but least practiced meetings, the hands-down winner would be something called a retrospective. A retro is simply a chance for any team to stop, notice, and learn. After a big push of work, or ideally on a regular interval, the team will gather for an hour or two and share their perspectives on what happened, what stood out to them, and what they ultimately learned. The goal is simple: to do better next time. Many forms of retrospective exist, ranging from the simple (mapping highs and lows over the time line of the project) to the more complex (four Ls: liked, learned, lacked, longed for). The best kind of retrospective? The one that happens. Most teams have an abysmal track record of protecting the time for these sessions. Moving on to the next thing is too tempting. It’s up to you to make sure that your team looks back and takes the time to learn regularly. It’s also important to make sure that retros are a place where participants can say what needs to be said. If everyone holds back, the value of the meeting drops enormously.
Meeting Moves. While most organizations would benefit from fewer meetings, many would also do well to employ a wider variety of meeting structures. The vast majority of corporate meetings are a meandering mess, jumping from monologue to decision to idea to jest, wherever our stream of collective consciousness takes us. Instead, take the time to learn and employ proven meeting moves, which can be combined into meeting structures for unblocking the work, making decisions, providing advice, generating ideas, and so much more. Here are a few meeting moves that have added tremendous value to our meetings at The Ready.
