Toolkits – Faster Than 20

Announcing DIY Strategy / Culture v2.0

After many months of hard work, I am pleased to announce version 2.0 of the DIY Strategy / Culture toolkits, available now! My design partner, Amy Wu of Duende, and I have done a thorough update of all of the toolkits based on feedback from many of you as well as lessons learned from using them ourselves.

The goal of these toolkits are to help anyone and everyone get better at doing strategy and culture work for their groups, regardless of experience or role. We’ve put these toolkits into the public domain in order to support this goal. In this vein, it’s been humbling and gratifying to see these tools spread and to hear stories about how you’re using them, what you’re learning, and how we might make them better.

The new toolkits are cleaner and clearer overall. We’ve also updated the web pages about them, offering tips and tricks, making it easier to purchase, and even including a new video.

Changes include:

Re-designing the paper toolkits to make them more sticky note-friendly and to emphasize certain design elements. Plus, they’re now in color!
Updating all of the instructions, including best practices for many of the toolkits
The Mindset Cards now come with printed (color!) instructions and a box
A new toolkit for developing group Working Agreements
Convenient links to buy printed versions of all of our toolkits via Duende. (But remember, you can download them for free!)

These tools were modeled after balance bikes. Using them repeatedly should help you strengthen your collaboration muscles. In this vein, we’re experimenting with other ways to support the practice of using these tools.

For example, Amy and I created a self-guided, online video tutorial that walks you through using the Goals + Success Spectrum.

I’m also offering online peer coaching for the Goals + Success Spectrum starting in September. (Registration deadline is August 10, 2018.) It’s based on several pilots I ran earlier this year.

I am humbled by all the things we’ve learned about these toolkits from all of you, as well as the growing word of mouth about these tools. Please continue to share with folks and groups who might benefit from them, and please continue to share stories with us about how you’re using them!

Using the Goals + Success Spectrum Skillfully with Groups

This past year, I facilitated a number of workshops on the Goals + Success Spectrum, the tool I use to help groups get clear, specific, and aligned around objectives and metrics. It’s essentially a guided brainstorming activity (using sticky notes or Google Docs) where you categorize your goals across a spectrum — from Minimum to Target to Epic.

I’ve been focusing on doing trainings for this tool rather than my others, because it’s a low-overhead, high-leverage way to get groups aligned and practicing, which are critical steps toward achieving high performance. It’s useful for individuals and for groups, and people generally recognize its utility immediately, even without the benefit of a workshop.

In my workshops, I focus on helping participants experience the mechanics of the tool. They practice using it as individuals, then spend time reviewing each other’s spectrums in pairs and giving each other feedback. I offer no other guidance about using it with groups other than to follow the exact same instructions.

In practice, of course, using the tool with groups is harder than with an individual. Multiple people mean more ideas, and you have to figure out how to consolidate them. That requires critical thinking, communication, conflict, and convergence — all things that make collaboration hard in the first place.

My stated reasons for not offering additional guidance for groups are:

The tool itself is designed to address some of these collaboration challenges
I want groups to learn how to work through the harder challenges by trusting their own skills, by using the tool repeatedly, and learning and adjusting as they go. That’s ultimately the point of all of my tools — to help people develop strong collaboration muscles and habits through practice.

While these are true, I also just find it hard to offer simple advice about how to facilitate this with groups. Any tactical advice I might have is deeply intertwingled with my philosophy about collaboration, groups, and the design of my tools in general. I can’t talk about one without the other.

All that said, many participants in my workshops have asked thoughtful questions about how to use the Goals + Success Spectrum with groups, so I’m going to attempt to articulate the relevant aspects of my philosophy and answer their questions here.

My Beliefs About Groups

I believe that:

Most of the challenges that groups face stem from not talking with each other enough about the right things.
People are generally smarter than we give them credit for. If we give people the space and opportunity to be at their best, then we can tap into a group’s collective wisdom, which is greater than the sum of its individual parts.
Collaboration is a craft. You will be bad at it at first, but with enough practice, you will eventually get better.

At their core, all of my tools — including the Goals + Success Spectrum — are designed to do three things:

1. Remind you to think about critical, foundational questions. These questions are easy to take for granted, but in our day-to-day grind, we often forget to think about them. In the case of the Goals + Success Spectrum, the questions are:

What would the spectrum of success look like for your project, from Minimum to Target to Epic?
What would failure look like for your project?

2. Encourage you to write down your answers so that you and others can see them. Forcing you to make the implicit explicit and specific helps you get clear individually and is a critical step helping groups align.

3. Make it easy to practice over and over again. My tools were designed to help you practice and develop strong muscles and habits around group process. The tools themselves aren’t as important as your group continuing to develop and use the right muscles.

My basic approach to using all of my tools with groups is to just use them. Get people in a room, run through the instructions, and see what happens. Groups often are more capable than they themselves believe. This is the best way to demonstrate that.

At best, the tool will encourage everyone to stretch their thinking, de-personalize the ideas, and help people feel heard, which will lead to safer, more constructive conversations. This, along with incorporating a greater diversity of perspectives, will improve the overall quality of and lead to greater collective ownership over the final outcome.

At worst, everybody will get to see what each other thinks, and you’ll learn something from doing the exercise. Make some adjustments based on what you learn, and try it again. And again. People will learn how to set better targets and how to navigate difficult conversations with each other. It’s like learning to speak a language or play an instrument. Failure is both inevitable and okay, as long as you continue to try and learn.

Facilitation Tactics for the Goals + Success Spectrum

Given all this, here are some of the questions people in my workshop asked about how to use the Goals + Success Spectrum, along with my thoughts.

Who in your group should use the Goals + Success spectrum?

Everyone. Talking through goals and success should always be a group exercise, not an individual one. Deciding on goals and metrics doesn’t have to be a consensus activity (and you should be clear about how decisions will be made up front), but coming up with good ones benefits from everyone’s voice.

That said, with larger groups, it may not be practical to bring everyone into the room for the whole process. In these cases, you should aim to have a representative cross-section of the group participate (which means it should not just be the leadership team), with entry points for everyone else to review and give feedback.

How does having groups use the Goals + Success Spectrum work in practice?

There are two constraints: space and time. Larger (simultaneous) groups require more physical space, both to be in a room together and to capture their thinking. It doesn’t necessarily require significantly more time to capture and read everyone’s ideas, because that’s happening in parallel, but it definitely takes more time to work through hard questions and conflict and ultimately converge and align.

I generally find that groups do not allocate enough time for to thinking through goals and success (the “what” and the “why”), instead preferring to rush to the “how.” Alignment is hard, but the payoff is enormous. It doesn’t help if everyone in a boat quickly starts to row if they’re not all rowing in the same direction. Agreeing on where to go might take time, but it will make the subsequent rowing a lot easier.

Why does alignment take so long? Because people’s perspectives are often rooted in deeply held beliefs, and understanding and reconciling those beliefs can take time. Again, groups don’t have to decide on goals and success by consensus. However, alignment is much more likely if people understand the underlying reasons behind a decision and if they feel others understand the reasons for their objections.

You can accelerate alignment through the tool in two ways. First, explore different scenarios before getting into arguments. Second, continuously synthesize and edit the spectrum so that areas of alignment and misalignment are sharpened. I often joke that using these tools with groups is ultimately an exercise in sticky note management, but it’s true. The more you can help keep it clean, the more the group will be able to focus on the important challenges.

While the tools are designed to support a healthy group conversation, they are not a panacea. Any time you’re having a group discussion, group dynamics come into play. By giving everyone an opportunity to fill out and share their ideas on stickies, the tool encourages inclusion. However, once people start talking about the ideas, the tool can’t prevent the voices of a few from drowning out everyone else’s, for example. If this is a frequent problem, you may want to consider appointing a facilitator from either inside or outside of your group.

How would you use the Goals + Success Spectrum across multiple groups within a larger organization or group (e.g. cross-functionally)?

One of the reasons I love doing the Goals + Success workshop is that it’s a great way to build community, because looking at a filled-out spectrum is a great way to get to know another person or group quickly and more deeply. Knowing that your group works on housing issues tells me a little bit. Knowing that your group is trying to create housing for 10,000 people in one year tells me a lot more.

Similarly, the Goals + Success Spectrum can be a powerful way to help de-silo an organization or network. I would have each sub-group do their own spectrums first, then bring all the groups together to gut check each other’s spectrums. Celebrate where the different spectrums complement each other, discuss where they conflict and why, and make adjustments in the respective spectrums.

Most importantly, put the completed spectrums somewhere so that everyone can easily find and see each other’s.

How do you use the Goals + Success Spectrum to assess success or failure afterward?

I start every debrief by asking everyone to review each column of the Goals + Success Spectrum and to mark the ones we achieved and the ones we missed. (I use this debrief template to guide the process.) If there are differences in opinion as to whether or not we hit a mark, that’s both an opportunity to make meaning of what happened and to come up with a more specific and objective metric for next time.

If the group has missed marks in the Minimum column, then the project is technically a failure. This is an opportunity to discuss whether or not you had the right minimum targets and to make adjustments for next time.

Aligning around success is a craft. If you do it repeatedly, you will get better at it over time. Use your spectrums to help you with your assessments, but also recognize that the assessments will help you create better spectrums next time.

Do-It-Yourself Strategy and Culture

In 2009, I was asked by the Wikimedia Foundation to design and lead a movement-wide strategic planning process. The goal was to create a high-quality, five-year strategic plan the same way that Wikipedia was created — by creating a space where anyone in the world who cared could come and literally co-author the plan.

We had two fundamental challenges. First, it wasn’t enough to simply have a plan. It had to be a good plan that some significant percentage of the movement both understood and felt ownership over.

Second, we were asking people in the community to develop a strategy, but most people had no idea what strategy was. (This, frankly, is true of people in general, even in business.) It was different from Wikipedia in that most people already have a mental model of what an encyclopedia is. We had to be more concrete about what it was that we were asking people to do.

I explained that strategic planning, when done well, consists of collectively exploring four basic questions:

Where are we now?
Where do we want to go? Why?
How do we get there?

I further explained that we were going to create a website with these questions, we were going to get as many people as possible to explore these questions on that website, and by the end of the year, we would have our movement-wide, five-year strategic plan.

And that’s essentially what we did.

Get the right people to explore core questions together. Where are we now? Where do we want to go, and why? How do we get there? Provide the space and the support to help these people have the most effective conversation possible. Trust that something good will emerge and that those who created it will feel ownership over it.

This is how I’ve always done strategy, regardless of the size or shape of the group. It looks different every time, but the basic principles are always the same. People were intrigued by what we accomplished with Wikimedia, because it was global and primarily online, because we had gaudy results, and because Wikipedia is a sexy project. However, I was simply using the same basic approach that I use when working with small teams and even my own life.

The craft of developing strategy is figuring out how best to explore these core questions. It’s not hard to come up with answers. The challenge is coming up with good answers. To do that, you need to give the right people the opportunity and the space to struggle over these questions. That process doesn’t just result in better answers. It results in greater ownership over those answers.

Breakfast and Culture

What’s your strategy for eating breakfast in the morning?

Are you a grab-and-run person, either from your own kitchen or from a coffee shop near your office? Eating breakfast at home is cheaper than eating out, but eating out might be faster. Are you optimizing for time or money? Why?

Maybe you have kids, and you value the ritual of kicking off the day eating together? Maybe you’re a night owl, and you’d rather get an extra 30-minutes of sleep than worry about eating at all in the morning.

Where do you want to go? Why? How do you get there? These are key strategic questions, but you can’t answer them without also considering culture — your patterns of behavior, your values, your mindsets, your identity. Choosing to cook your own meals is as much a cultural decision as it is a strategic one.

In my past life as a collaboration consultant, groups would hire me to help with either strategy or culture, but never both. I realized fairly quickly that trying to separate those two processes was largely artificial, that you couldn’t explore one without inevitably colliding with the other.

Peter Drucker famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” He did not intend to say that one was more important than the other, but that both were necessarily intertwined. Or, as my friend, Jeff Hwang, has more accurately put it, “Saying culture eats strategy for breakfast is like saying your left foot eats your right foot for breakfast. You need both.”

As with strategy, culture work is a process of collective inquiry, except instead of focusing on action (where do you want to go?), the questions are centered around identity:

Who are we now?
Who do we want to be, and why?
How do we get there?

The key to effective culture work is to explore these questions yourself, to struggle over them together as a group, and to constantly revisit them as you try things and learn.

DIY Strategy and Culture

Toward the end of 2013, Dharmishta Rood, who was then managing Code for America’s startups program, asked me if I would mentor one of its incubator companies, which was having some challenges around communication and decision-making. I had been toying with some ideas for a do-it-yourself toolkit that would help groups develop better collaborative habits on their own, and I suggested that we start there.

We immediately ran into problems. The toolkit assumed that the group was already aligned around a core strategy, but with this group, that wasn’t the case. They had been going, going, going without stopping to step back and ask themselves what they were trying to accomplish, how they wanted to accomplish those things, and why. (This is very typical with startups.)

This group needed space to do some core work around strategy and culture. I threw out my old toolkit and created a new one designed to help groups have strategy and culture conversations continuously and productively on their own. The revised toolkit was based on the key questions underlying strategy and culture depicted as two cyclical loops:

While most strategy or culture processes are progressively staged, in practice, inquiry is never linear, nor should it be. Spending time on one question surfaces new insights into the other questions, and vice-versa. Where you start and the order in which you go are not important. What matters is that you get to all of the questions eventually and that you revisit them constantly — hence the two cycles. My colleague, Kate Wing, recently noted the resemblance of the diagram to bicycle wheels, which is why we now call it the Strategy-Culture Bicycle.

Dharmishta and I saw the Bicycle pay immediate dividends with this group. People were able to wade through the complexity and overwhelm, notice and celebrate what they had already accomplished, and identify high-priority questions that needed further discussion. Furthermore, the process was simple enough that it did not require a third-party’s assistance. They were able to do it fine on their own, and they would get better at it as they practiced.

Pleased and a bit surprised by its effectiveness, I asked my long-time colleague, Amy Wu of Duende, to partner with me on these toolkits. We prototyped another version of the toolkit with four of last year’s Code for America accelerator companies, and once again, saw great success.

We’ve gone through eight iterations together, we’ve tested the kit with over a dozen groups and individuals (for personal and professional life planning), and we’ve added some complementary components. A number of practitioners have used the toolkit on their own to help other groups, including me, Dharmishta, Amy, Kate, and Rebecca Petzel.

I’m thrilled by the potential of toolkits like these to help build the capacity of practitioners to act more strategically and to design their aspired culture. As with all of my work, these toolkits are available here and are public domain, meaning that they are freely available and that you can do anything you want with them. You can also purchase pre-printed packages.

Please use them, share them, and share your experiences! Your feedback will help us continuously improve them.