You can build practically your whole project plan using just Five Verbs: Draft, Review, Revise, Approve, Distribute. Because everything else is not worth documenting, isn’t worth collaboration, isn’t worth approving, and isn’t worth sharing. Everything else is just talk.

In organizing your team’s work (for example in a Project Plan), it’s easy to pay little attention to word choice, including verb choice. In fact, you might be inspired to flex your vast vocabulary and try to get pretty exotic. Don’t. Verb sprawl is noise. The more diverse you get with verb choice, you risk inconsistency, re-inventing the wheel, and misinterpretation. This hurts the team’s speed and relationships. There’s value in standardizing how you organize your innovation deliverables.

Trying to formally govern emails and meetings is a slippery slope into chaos. Limit formal governance to work that is worth documenting, collaboration, approval, and distribution. Most specifically, these Five Verbs can take you everywhere you need to go. Five Verbs is enforced collaboration.

Here is an example of governing a Project Charter, Training Approach, and Training Materials with the Five Verbs.

Draft

Draft is a straightforward first step for every document. Drafting is a great place to assign a junior team member - someone who is not a subject matter expert on the topic and someone who can keep the work in motion.

Review & Revise

Once the drafter is ready to involve others, the drafter gets the document into the hands of other contributors. The Review & Revise period is perfect for diversity, inclusion, and task conflict (instead of personality conflict). Assigning names is the unambiguous way to clarify whose contribution is welcome. Sharing the length of time of the review period is also helpful for clarity.

Approve

At some point, every document has exhausted contributions, and the team is ready to move on. The document is GETMO (“good enough to move on”) or better! One or more pre-designated stakeholders approve the contents of the document.

Distribute

No document should be in a folder in a cabinet — physical or electronic. Once a document is approved, uninvolved but interested and impacted stakeholders need to receive the document.

Conclusion

Verb sprawl is real, and its ambiguity and churn slows teams down. Being mindful and standardizing your team’s work with Five Verbs helps to minimize problems with accountability, inclusion, focus, and simplicity. Word choice upfront reduces time-consuming, never-ending word choices. Five Verbs helps you pay back and avoid methodology debt.