Plan ahead

This is post number 13 in our 14 week series on the 4 questions and 10 rules of Strategic Doing. Be sure to take a moment to get into the right mindset before tackling this rule.

Plan ahead to look back (and then do it) – that’s the crux of this, the ninth of the ten rules/skills of Strategic Doing/agile leadership. It’s all about having good meetings (yes, that can be a thing!).

If you’ve read the Strategic Doing book, or attended one of our trainings, you’ve probably heard the “origin story” of the discipline; that it’s intentionally patterned after the broad strokes of agile software design. This rule – perhaps more than any of the others – highlights the similarity. In agile software design, it’s the “scrum” or “sprint” meeting. In your office, it might be a “stand up”. In Strategic Doing, we call it a 30/30 (or 7/7, or 60/60…). Whatever you call it, the essence of the concept is that after the team’s decided they’re headed in a particular direction, the team meets together at regular intervals to look at progress and what needs to happen next – preferably in as short a meeting as feasible. If you’re using a Strategic Doing workshop format, setting a date for your first follow-up meeting is the last thing you do together at that first conversation.

(Want help planning an executing a workshop? We’d love to help – reach out for a no-obligation conversation on how can do that).

Why is this rule important?

In the days before our cellphones were in charge of plotting our driving routes, there was no voice giving us the option to “re-route” (or doing it for us). It was the driver’s responsibility to make those decisions, and – critically – to stop and look at the map if needed to make sure that the car was headed in the right direction. The stop also gave us the chance to see if our ETA was more or less on target – and if necessary, to seek out a pay phone to call and let someone know we were delayed.

It’s the same thing with these meetings. They’re a quick “pause” to see where we are, what’s still ahead of us, and to re-route if needed. They’re a form of risk management, as you don’t get too far down the road before you realize you’re headed in the wrong direction. You also get the chance to make sure you’ve got the right people on the team – you find out who you can trust to do what they said they would, and you can identify holes if there are skill sets you still need. But critically, you should decide at the very beginning of your work together that you will stop, and when – if the trip is a long one, you’ll plan to stop several times.

How to use this rule

There are several things you can do when setting up your meetings to ensure they’re valuable and productive.

Decide on a default rhythm. Will you have your check-ins every 30 days? Every 7? We don’t recommend any further apart than 90 days – it’s too easy for people to lose track of what they committed to. You can always change the rhythm when needed. For example, if you’re working on some kind of event, you’ll probably need to meet more frequently. But decide at the beginning what the default is. If possible, go ahead and ask people to hold the dates on their calendars several cycles in advance.

Keep the focus on learning. The corollary to this is “keep it short.” These kinds of meetings don’t need to be more than 45 minutes unless something very unexpected has happened that the team needs to grapple with. That means skipping the narrative of what people have done, and instead reporting on what they have learned (or confirming that any original assumptions were correct). The “here’s what I’ve done” narrative should already be covered with whatever the deliverable was for the task the person committed to (see rule 8 for a refresher on deliverables).

Don’t avoid hard(er) conversations. One of the bad habits that surfaces at these meetings is the temptation to let someone who didn’t finish a task not even report in. We want to help them save face. This is a really a test of whether the team is psychologically safe: in a safe team, someone can admit to that even if it’s embarrassing. It’s NOT that there isn’t accountability – the team then needs to figure out what to do – but it’s out in the open. Over time, a person that consistently doesn’t perform will probably drop out, or the team will stop letting them commit to tasks.

Assess the current direction. Take a quick look at the original plan and decide if you’re still on the right path to success, and if the timing still makes sense. If not, adjust. It may be that you’ve learned something that calls the assumptions into question, or it may be apparent that success will take longer than you thought. Remember that agile leadership is about experimentation and agility. One of the key tasks of a leader at this point is to remind the team that they haven’t failed, they’ve learned.

Re-commit to action. Before the end of the meeting, everyone should have something to do, with a deliverable and a due date. And make sure everyone is clear on when the next meeting is (doing this at the beginning of the meeting – in case someone needs to leave early – is also a good practice).

Document the discussion. If possible, have some kind of form that the team fills out together – there’s something about a form that keeps a team on track. Even a form as simple as a checklist of last meeting’s tasks, and a list of tasks that people are committing to at this meeting is effective.

What’s next?

Take action: there are many small steps based on this rule that you can take to make sure you have good meetings. For example, decide at the beginning of the meeting when you’ll meet next (no more “I’ll reach out to schedule…”). Or, model learning behavior by reporting in by saying it explicitly “Here’s what I learned.” And of course, create a form, however simple.

Learn more: the idea that blank spaces on a form beg to be filled is a manifestation of behavioral economics. The form makes it more likely that people will make the “right” choice. Read more about behavioral economics here.