Your innovation team is a factory. Hopefully not just a factory of meetings and emails. Hopefully not just a software factory. Your collaborative team is an expectation factory.

The RACI matrix almost got it right but still harbors too much ambiguity. In your team’s formal planning, govern only what is worth documenting outside email, and nothing else. Govern with just Five Verbs: Draft, Review, Revise, Approve, Distribute.

Documentation is unpopular to build, but once you have it, it’s valuable to your current and future teams. Documentation is valuable for so long, it qualifies as an Asset Portfolio.

Manage your team like a factory because you want discipline, predictability, rhythm. Manage like a factory because you care about speed, quality, and waste.

A script is a simple, raw, unambiguous format to get the sequence of actions on paper, primed for a Future State Process Flow.

Visual representation of the customer journey or employee experience - sequence of actions, primary path, and peripheral paths.

Surely some activities in your organization are important to measure. A scorecard captures the “Metrics That Matter” - Leading and Lagging. Historical, Current, and Target values.

Legacy methodologies emphasize software. That’s not what makes innovation difficult. Elegance is a methodology that shapes how people interact, collaborate, and govern. Elegance is a combination of discipline and empathy - ruthlessness and grace.

Your innovation team is a factory. Hopefully not just a factory of meetings and emails. Hopefully not just a software factory. Your collaborative team is an agreement factory.

Verb Sprawl is a real problem that slows teams down. In planning your team’s work, instead of governing meetings or emails, govern what is worth documenting outside email. Govern with just Five Verbs: Draft, Review, Revise, Approve, Distribute.

Three metaphors give structure to the book. The metaphor of a factory shapes the Why. The metaphor of an Asset Portfolio - a documentation inventory forms the What. The metaphor of the Performing Arts shapes the How of the Innovation Factory.

What is worth documenting inside your organization? For starters, ALL these. Execution’s best two friends are simplicity and transparency. These documents ruthlessly keep you simple and transparent. These are valuable for months, YEARS, elevating documentation to a title of ASSETS. Building and maintaining these in your innovation work ensures a healthy, Ruthless Asset Factory.