Combat the Culture of Meeting Gridlock and Email Overload
“Execution’s two best friends are simplicity and transparency.”
If you’re like most innovation professionals, email and meetings are your comfort zone and your security blanket. You have a love-hate relationship with them - possibly a hate-hate relationships with them.
You cannot email and talk your way to success. An organization that suffers from meeting gridlock and email overload fosters tribal knowledge. Combat this culture. Shift your emphasis toward a disciplined factory - culture disguised as a factory.
Many organizations are caught in meeting gridlock and email overload, with no clear path out. Meetings and email are wonderful servants, but they are horrible masters. Over-relying on meetings and email results in a culture of fatigue, ambiguity, and single points of failure. Instead, you must ruthlessly focus on all the things in your business worth documenting, in a collaborative manner, outside email.
The generic output of a meeting is meeting minutes. The generic output of email is the last person who typed AT someone else. The value of these outputs steeply depreciates within days and weeks. The output of this documentation outside email is valuable for months and years. Each document is an asset. Together, these documents form an Asset Portfolio.
“Little hinges swing big doors.”
Adopting this Ruthless Factory sounds administrative, simple, and superficial. Don’t mistake simple for significant. As you adopt 2, 4, 10, 20 and more of these valuable assets, more profound layers of value appear. This Agreement Factory and Asset Portfolio are culture-changing.
Convert personality conflict into task conflict
Convert demonization into disagreement
Convert competition of people into competition of ideas and collaboration of people
Convert bad friction into good friction
This Asset Portfolio outlives your current ensemble. The portfolio reduces the cost of onboarding new stakeholders and enhances the organization’s ability to weave talent in and out as it sees fit. The Asset Portfolio defines your Customer Experience and your Employee Experience. The Asset Portfolio makes you agile. Agility is not free.
Building the right assets in the right order is equivalent to answering questions in the right order. Neglecting assets is equivalent to ignoring questions. Those questions don’t simply go away. The neglect in answering just results in assumptions, ambiguity, blind spots, and negative surprises. The neglect is not worth it, especially when the best path is so ruthlessly straightforward.
Anything less than robust documentation puts your organization in a remedial, self-absorbed state, behind your innovation frontier, in a state of methodology debt. Instead, a robust asset factory puts your organization at your frontier of Innovation, unable to slide backward, unable to lose progress, and unable to fail. A ruthless asset factory brings your organization freedom to explore, listen, experiment, focus on others (customers and stakeholders), and fulfill your organization’s purpose. Once at your frontier, you can play. You can perform.
A ruthless factory is dry, sterile, and unforgiving. But it’s gloriously disciplined and valuable. A ruthless factory makes your success inevitable.