Okay, so today we're going to talk about how we can create a culture of
innovation. We're going to call it shaping up work that matters. Now not all
work matters the same as we know and specifically how do we innovate and do
projects in a way that's most successful. You know there's a thing we've learned
in our own business having done over a hundred projects where not a single one
has been an hour late. That's quite a thing to say especially over a four-year
period. And the reason isn't because we have the best trained project managers
or anything like that. These are just ordinary people who have learned to do
what we're going to talk about right now. So the keys here are four key concepts.
Concept number one is what we measure our projects. When we do a
project, when we do something new, we measure it in how many deep work
sessions we're going to use. And so in a previous training when we went through
deep work sessions we warned up front this is going to be the building block
for our innovation coming. Well here's the moment where we're doing exactly
that. So deep work is and if we got at least one deep work session a week or
four hours we know that deep work is when we work on something new. So we know
everybody has time to innovate. Why? Because everybody has a deep work
session. Well I don't have a deep work session. Well that's easy to fix. Start
tomorrow. Simple enough. So the idea is that the reason why you have a deep work
session once a week is because you as an individual are investing in your own
growth. You're starting to hone your contribution to the organization. This is
what gives you unique value in the business. And what you're doing is
this is your contribution to the world. If all you're ever doing is doing
current work and you're trying to focus on it, well that's what's called focused
work. Or all you're ever doing or mostly doing is general work which is teamwork
and shallow work. Email meetings and that sort of thing. It has to happen. Get that.
But it doesn't have to be the priority and it doesn't have to be the thing
that sets your schedule or your allocation of your time. We've gone
through how to do the the buckets where you've got four hours in the morning, four
hours in the afternoon. That's two buckets. You get ten buckets a week. Then
one of those buckets has to be a deep work session. So we're talking now about
this unit for project innovation. So what do you actually do in those four hours?
And that's what we're getting into today. So that's the first big concept is that
the way we're going to our unit of measure is how many deep work sessions
is this project going to take? And that will then translate to week. So if
you're doing two deep work sessions a week and you know it's going to take
four deep work sessions, obviously that's two weeks. If you're doing one a week is
going to take four weeks. So we translate the number of deep work sessions into
weeks to know how long a project will take. That's the first big idea. The
second big idea goes around what we call shaping up work. So the way we shape up
this project. How do you approach a project? Most projects are hard to think
about because they're new. And more specifically they're new to you.
They're new to us. We're looking at them for the first time. And so we're saying
well I don't even know what it is. Well that's why it's a new project to you. You
don't know how it works yet. You don't necessarily understand the
interconnectedness of all the elements you're thinking about. And so you say
well I don't know how to think about innovation. Well innovation can be in
every area of the business. Literally every area. It can be in sales, can be in
marketing, can be in product development, can be in customer support, can be in
finance, can be how you're reporting finance. It can be all those elements. And
so there are literally ten areas of innovation. And that means everybody's
involved. So when we are thinking about this area of innovation what you need to
think of is don't think of time. Think of appetite. By this I mean we don't say
okay here's the project. Let's estimate how long the project will take. I think
most of you may have learned it that way. This is the wrong way around of thinking
about projects. What you need to say is I have three deep work sessions. What can I
do? I have one deep work session. What can I do? You start with your appetite. How
much time do I have to do this? Second, as you're thinking about shaping up the
work, how much is this idea worth to the organization? And a good way of
coming to that is ask yourself in my area of responsibility in the business
if I could change one thing that would really make a difference what would it
be? Now here's a surprising thing about asking that question because
almost always the one thing is a small thing. It's rarely like you know reinvent
something. It could be but mostly it isn't. So what's the one small thing that
if I'd
Fix this thing would really help my workflow,
would really help me improve my contribution to the company.
And then we want to hone it down
to what we call the thinnest slice.
So think of taking a loaf of bread.
We've used this example before.
Don't just cut the loaf in half and try to eat it that way,
which a lot of projects try to do that.
But if you take the thinnest possible slice,
what will happen is with each thin slice, you will learn.
And when you learn, your next slice
will be informed by the previous slice.
By the time you have three or four slices in,
what you started out to do is completely different
because you've been learning.
You've been tracking the learning.
It's tracking the business growth.
And you go, oh, when I started this,
I thought we were going to solve problem A.
But in reality, we were solving problem B.
So as an example of that, when I wanted
to have everybody in the company all know
all the financial information except salaries,
which is our policy, so how would I give them
that information?
Well, I could go to QuickBooks and print out
a weekly report and email it to them,
which would be terrible because it'll carry
way too much information.
Or I could come up with some way in which I just told them.
But I decided to come up with a dashboard,
a simple spreadsheet that went out onto a little dashboard
everyone can have on their phone.
But when I started that, I had no idea how to do that.
So I realized, okay, what's the thinnest possible slice?
The thinnest possible slice is if I can get one piece
of information out of QuickBooks
and put it into a Google Sheet.
That's the first thin slice.
That's all I had to do.
That was my project.
Get it from there to here.
The next question is, how can I organize the information
in the Google Sheet and create a tab next to it
that put together information that would be useful
to our team?
Well, that started me thinking, third thin slice,
what would be actionable information?
I could put a whole bunch of information on a dashboard,
doesn't mean anything.
So I learned, took me a third slice to figure out
what is actionable information.
So I started to ask team members.
So one of my thin slices wasn't engineering.
It was sitting down, asking people,
what one piece of information do you need to know
on a daily basis or a weekly basis
that would really help you take action?
Not just be fun to know.
I'm not interested in what people are fun to know.
We're not doing that.
What I wanted to know is what's actionable.
If you had this, what one piece of information?
By the way, it took several people a lot of thinking
to answer that question.
Not as easy as it sounds.
Once I'd got a couple of core feedbacks
that if I had these three pieces of information,
we could take a lot more action.
So then the next question is, how do I present it?
Then I found out there's a product called Looker
at that time.
I think it was called Google Data Studio.
How do I go from a spreadsheet and present it?
And it was really bad.
It was ugly, hacked together,
but the information was there and it was in real time.
It was being updated every few minutes.
So it was ugly, but it worked.
And then the last thin slice was I got a designer in
to lay it out and make it actually look like
something you wanted to look at.
So I've run through that example to explain
that that's what happens when you take
a series of thin slices.
Now imagine if I did it the old fashioned way
called boil the ocean.
I sat down with everybody and said,
okay everybody, what do we need on a dashboard?
And I end up with a 20 book list of stuff and things.
Nobody's asking, is it actionable?
Nobody knows the technology.
How will we deliver it?
Who's gonna support it?
How's it gonna work?
When will we have it?
And by the time we build the whole thing
because we boiled the whole ocean,
we end up delivering and 70% of what we deliver
will be useless.
By the way, that's sort of the standard stat
for trying to build everything up front.
But if you build as you go, you also learn as you go
and you start to delete the unnecessary
so you can focus on the stuff that actually
moves the needle forward for the organization.
Okay, so that's idea number two.
Shaping up work, starting with the appetite,
not with boil the ocean.
What's the thinnest slice?
Number three, we then target risk.
Where will I get stuck?
If I'm doing this thin slice, where will I get stuck?
What could bog me down?
And what rabbit holes could I end up going chasing
that would be a complete waste of time?
And therefore, we build a culture
of delivering projects without excuse.
Wow, what would it be like in your organization
if you always and everyone in the team
always delivered the project exactly
when they said they would
and did exactly what we expected it to do?
That turns out to be a whole lot easier than you might think.
So let me break this up for you.
When you're putting this together, we've got a template that will help you put the
whole structure together.
And in that template, we can help you go through three phases.
Phase one, I started talking a bit about it, called shaping up.
So what we do here is this is where we set the appetite.
So we start off with, I'm going to do two deep work sessions.
Now if you think it's going to take two, add a third, because we always add margin.
Right?
Always.
So we don't write it right on the edge.
We always do it.
Because remember, we have to deliver it without excuse.
There can never be...
So in our case, if you miss a deadline, which we haven't done, if you do miss a deadline,
you can't touch that project for six months.
And so this is to create the culture of trust with each other.
When I say I'm going to deliver this, I'm going to present this to the team.
When I come to deliver it, they must be expecting what I said I was going to do.
If that kicks in, your innovation level as an organization will skyrocket.
And remember, the one who innovates the fastest wins.
So we're going to set the appetite, two deep work sessions.
Then you write a quick pitch.
Now this pitch is very simple to do.
All we're going to do is just high level, what problem are we solving?
Then we're going to ask a very simple question next, and that is, what does it include?
What does it not include?
And what's the actual deliverable?
Is it a document?
Is it a piece of software?
Is it something that's a working prototype?
Is it research on where the three best vendors are to help us with our new finance system?
What is it?
What is the physical deliverable?
Once we know what that is, then the last piece we're going to look at, if the project
goes well, what will I include?
If the project goes poorly, what will I cut out?
Notice I've up front told everybody in the team what's going to happen.
So that's step one.
I shaped this up.
The next thing is we want to know is pitch your team.
So now we go to the team and we pitch it to the team.
In our company, every Wednesday, we have pitch day.
So for one hour, people come and do their pitches, and we walk them through the pitch.
I'm spending two deep work sessions.
This is what's included.
This is what's not included.
Here's what I'm going to deliver.
If it goes well, I'm going to do this.
If it goes poorly, I'm going to do that.
And that's why you get to a point where you can have over 100 projects delivered always
on time, because you've set the expectations.
You've got their input.
Everybody knows what you're working on, and sometimes you need some of your team members'
help to do it.
Everybody commits to it up front.
It's all there, and we're in the game.
And then the last step, which is the fun step, is you come back a few Wednesdays from now,
because we do pitches and presentations on the same day.
Pitches when you start a project.
Presentation when you finish it.
Now we come and present.
Here's my deliverable.
That's as simple as it is.
As you're going through this, we've got a template for you to work out.
When you're putting a pitch together, when you're shaping up the work, it shouldn't take
you more than 20 minutes.
If it takes you more than 20 minutes, you're overdoing it.
You're starting to work on the solution already.
Don't do that.
Remember, we're thinking about the project.
This is my appetite.
This is the problem I'm solving.
Here's what I'm delivering.
Here's where if it goes well, I'm going to do this.
If it goes poorly, I'm going to do that.
You're building in all your contingencies, all your risks managed, and then you pitch
it to your team.
I hope you have a lot of fun becoming an innovator.