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.

Which of your culture traits can you trace to impacting your waste? Consider whiplash, noise, inauthenticity, idle work, idle worker, Reply All’s, Backlog, last-minute cancellations, too many cooks, unused talent, and mismatched collaboration and competition. Fix your culture. Fix your Waste.

Which of your culture traits can you trace to impacting your quality? Consider purpose, defects, favoritism, loyalty, fairness, fear, franticness, task conflict, personality conflict, career security, job security, optimizing globally, optimizing locally. Fix your culture. Fix your Quality.

Which of your culture traits can you trace to impacting your speed? Consider trust, ambiguity, interruptions, fatigue, burnout, bottlenecks, egos, hero mentality, simplicity, complexity, silos, bureaucracy, meeting gridlock, and email overload. Fix your culture. Fix your Speed.

Innovation, methodology, projects, processes, documentation … organizations don’t pursue these things for the sake of themselves. Organizations pursue them for the sake of customer value and sustainable profitability. The Economics of Innovation has some common decisions and common mistakes. This blog post explains the most common.

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.

Your organization might not literally be a factory, but you should manage it like one. You care about all the same things: speed, quality, waste, and more! Avoid abandonment and chaos. Pursue movement and rhythm in your methodology and culture.

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

The lifecycle and journey of the human-centered experience.