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.

A project charter is pretty common. But rigor varies widely. A rigorous template ensures your ensemble asks and answers the right questions early.

In a fast-moving world, you need a simple framework for weekly reflection. Your colleagues don’t have to finish and share every sentence every week, but everyone must be thoughtful of these every week. Own your praise. Own your critique. Own your silence.

Don’t rely on HR to define and govern feedback. Own it. Conduct it yourself. Be approachable. Groom it in others. Isolate feedback into three communication channels: email etiquette, meeting etiquette, and deliverable contribution. Neutralize personality conflict. Ask and negotiate “What do you want me to do differently?”

A culture of reflection, honesty, and humility leads to healthy organizational improvements. Asking the two questions, “What did we do well?” and “What could we improve?” is lazy. These breed mediocrity and fail to bring out people’s best ideas. There is a pattern in the problems. Micro-mentor yourself monthly using constructive language. Make your success inevitable.

Your organization might be caught in meeting gridlock and email overload. You cannot just talk and email your way to success. You must document things outside email. It’s dry, sterile, unforgiving, and ruthless. But documentation keeps its value. A ruthless factory results in a valuable Asset Portfolio.

Use Five Verbs to pace, synchronize, and assign building your project’s Asset Portfolio.

The lifecycle and journey of the human-centered experience.

No asset exists in isolation. Within every asset, no specification exists in isolation. A Traceability Matrix minimizes orphans.

Details of your Current State that help you determine the most compelling innovations to pursue.

High-level and detailed names of how your customer experiences your products and services, in their language and through their lens.

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