Are you ready?

PURPOSE

• Craft a clear and compelling purpose for the organization or team
• Craft a clear and compelling purpose for every team and every role
• Ask teams to share their strategy for the next 6 - 24 months
• Clarify the metrics that matter and use them to steer
• Replace "Is it perfect?" with "Is it safe to try?"

• Clarify the decision rights held by teams and roles
• Use the concept of a "waterline" to create guardrails around team and individual autonomy
• Crowdsource and eliminate policies and processes that no longer make sense
• Start by stopping a meeting, process, or habit that is holding us back
• Define spending thresholds below which no approval or advice is necessary

• Replace the permission process with a robust "advice" process
• For SLAM teams (Self-managing, Lean, Audacious, Multi-Disciplinary) around critical initiatives
• Decentralize some of the work of central functions to teams at the edge for greater context and speed
• Abandon singular job titles and descriptions for modular roles and role mixes
• Develop and define the roles and accountabilities inside every team

• Invite teams to create and edit their own roles
• Allow people to hold multiple roles on multiple teams
• Move from static to dynamic teaming; a marketplace of roles, teams, and projects
• Create a skills database to help teams find knowledge and mastery across the organization
• Ensure our project and investment portfolio contains sure things and wild swings

• Trade "perfect" execution for constant learning and iteration
• Use even-over statements (speed even over quality) to make strategic priorities and tradeoffs explicit
• Move from an annual budget to a dynamic budget
• Start each period with a zero-based budget and virtual investment to capture the wisdom of the crowd
• Set aside funds every quarter to be allocated by the team using participatory budgeting

• Invite everyone to spend 20% of their time working on whatever inspires them
• Break the work into sprints to learn faster and reduce risk
• Limit work in progress to a specific number of projects, initiatives, or tasks
• Eliminate all status updates, project reviews, and other bureaucratic theater
• Eliminate or repurpose 1-on-1s that gravitate toward permission or politics

CLARITY

• Hold regular governance meetings to update agreements, rules, policies, roles, and structures
• Elect a facilitator and scribe on every team to keep meetings productive and documented
• Use a meeting moratorium to rebuild our operating rhythm from scratch
• Learn and leverage proven meeting structures that consistently move the work forward
• Hold regular retrospectives to build learning into every team, project, and initiative

• Begin meetings with a chance to get present and check in as human beings
• End meetings by observing what we as a team can do better next time
• Take turns or speak in rounds to hear all voices during meetings and calls
• Give up preplanned agendas and start building them on the fly
• Create dashboards that make team activity and performance visible

• Make organization and team financials transparent and accessible
• Make compensation transparent to everyone in the organization
• Work in public by making workflow and work in progress visible to other teams
• Stop sharing files and switch to software that supports real-time collaboration
• Ensure that all agreements, rules, policies, roles, and structures are transparent, documented, and governable

• Phase out internal email and move to Slack, Teams, or Workplace
• Institute a regular ask-me-anything meeting that's open to everyone
• Prioritize generative difference when hiring and forming teams
• Create a team charter for every team, project, or initiative
• Create a "user manual" for every member of the team

• Make time for gratitude, recognition, and celebration
• Replace annual performance reviews with continuous feedback
• Share a round of instant feedback after every sprint, event, or milestone
• Create communities of practice for knowledge sharing and development
• Transition from individual rewards to collective rewards

• Conduct a "start, stop, continue" exercise on our portfolio of projects and initiatives
• Offer peer-to-peer masterclasses taught by team members
• Use videoconferencing to increase emotional intelligence during remote meetings and calls
• Limit teams and committees to fewer than 9 people
• Develop a conflict resolution process and highlight productive conflict

Some additional helpful questions might be these:
*What problem are you actually trying to solve?
*What would it look like if it was easy?

Having the courage to run the experiment is part of your leadership and an essential part of your growth journey. Lead on!