Draw Strategy Through the Middle
Teams need to clearly see how their daily work is connected to the bigger picture to have a chance at achieving the best outcomes. When the underlying drivers are explicit teams are more empowered to make better decisions and tradeoffs. Within lengthy cross-department collaborations it's helpful to regularly see exactly what your work today is adding up to and how other parts of the organization are rallying behind and contributing to the shared effort.
You probably understand what you're working on today and why because it's on your board and in your backlog. The organization as a whole probably has a focus this year in a deck somewhere. Can you draw a straight line between your work today and that annual slide? What about projecting out 2-9 months from now?
Strategy sliced at different timescales allows that clear line to be drawn. I like John Cutler's 1s and 3s exercise.
- 1-3 hours
- 1-3 days
- 1-3 weeks
- 1-3 months
- 1-3 quarters
- 1-3 years
- 1-3 decades
Articulate what's happening in every range, especially the fuzzier middle ranges of months and quarters, and understand how they feed up.
Rough, Contrived Example:
- 1-3h: Research how we've been storing transaction types
- 1-3d: Adding new transaction type autocomplete logic
- 1-3w: Less error-prone transaction classification
- 1-3m: Improve worfklow efficiency for bookkeepers (>15 person teams, high transaction volume, multi-currency)
- 1-3q: Addressing challenges of larger bookkeeping teams
- 1-3y: Expand sales opportunities with larger, multi-national orgs