The Why

Teaching others is the best way to confirm that you actually know something. It’s also a great way to re-cement a skill for yourself. Approaching a topic in a deliberate, thoughtful manner, with enough focus and detail to be able to equip someone else with that knowledge, can have a profound effect on your own ability to do that thing. And, if you find yourself unable to instruct, it’s a good indicator that you’re not as familiar with the topic as you think. Teaching helps you to approach something that you already know well with a fresh set of “beginner’s eyes.” Some instruction models work better than others. I discovered my favorite instruction model at an IHOP.

The What

Several years ago, when my kids were much younger, their babysitter got a summer job as a waitress at an IHOP. On her first day of full waitressing, we went there for breakfast, to see her at her new job. After our meal, she mentioned that she was really excited to be “fully” in to the job and through the training. I asked her, “So, Meghan, how do you learn how to be a waitress here?” And she said “Well, first there’s a classroom session you have to do. Then you follow another waitress around while she works, and she explains what she’s doing and why. Then, she follows you around while you work, and gives you feedback. Then, after all that, you get to go do it without anybody looking over your shoulder.”

I left from breakfast that morning a changed man. It dawned on me that this was a GREAT process for teaching anything –

• Take them through the information from top to bottom

• Have them observe someone doing the activity directly

• Closely monitor while they do the job with supervision

• Determine when they’ve mastered the process enough to do it themselves and then let them go do it.

I started using this at work. It would go like this:

• Explain how to run a project progress meeting

• Have someone observe me doing one, then debrief afterwards on specific things I did during the meeting and why.

• Give the new person a chance to do it with me in the room. Give feedback afterwards. Repeat as needed

• Let them start running project progress meetings solo.

I called it, for lack of a better name, “The waitress model.”

A few years down the road, my older son graduated from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts. One of his earliest advancement requirements was to use something called the “EDGE method” to teach someone else how to tie a square knot. I had no idea what the “EDGE method” was, so I looked it up in his handbook.

AND THERE WAS THE WAITRESS MODEL!

EDGE stands for:

• Explain

• Demonstrate

• Guide

• Enable

I think you can make the connection between the steps I laid out above, and this mnemonic. This is the framework in which ALL instruction happens inside of Scouts, whether it’s the scouts doing the instruction, an adult leader, or even to other adults during leader training.

Any time you want to teach somebody a new skill, this is an invaluable framework to use, for a few reasons –

1. Training isn’t complete until somebody can show they can do the skill independently.

2. It forces you, as the instructor, to think through the entire process — and not only to explain it, but to do it with mastery yourself.

3. The student can be confident that they’re doing it right, because they can compare what they’re doing to not just what they’ve been told, but what they’ve seen and done themselves.

So, I started referring to this as the EDGE method at work, because that sounded more professional than “the waitress model”. But, really, it’s the same thing.

From EDGE to WEDGE

More recently, I’ve realized that there was a piece missing at the beginning of this framework, because it starts with Explain, which is really the “What” portion of training. But in a lot of cases, the reason for developing the skill or mastering the content gets left out. Sometimes the instructor is so deep in the topic at hand they forget that not everybody loves it as much as they do — whether it’s dutch oven cooking (Why? because you can make more interesting camping meals than on a stovetop!) or react.js (Why? Because it simplifies the interaction and predictability of DOM and code interactions, and is easier to scale and grow than two-way binding frameworks are). This led me to start adding a zero step to my instruction, which I called “Why” — as in, “Make sure the students know why this skillset is valuable and worth mastering.”

So now it’s the WEDGE method –

• Why

• Explain

• Demonstrate

• Guide

• Enable

I tell my scouts it means “I’m going to wedge this information into your brain so you can’t possibly forget it.” Sometimes they laugh at that. Sometimes.

Opportunities

The places where you can use this are virtually endless — you can apply this framework anytime you need to convey a repeatable skill to someone else.

I’ve made use of it to teach:

• How to give a presentation

• How to write a professional email

• How to extend a job offer

• How to conduct an interview

• How to probe a client for their unexpressed needs

• How to set up a project plan

• How to set up a Visual Studio solution

• How to refactor code to reduce dependencies

• How to consume and publish NuGet packages

• How to make estimates

• How to close a project out

• How to tie a figure eight on a bight with a double half-fisherman stopper knot

• And lots of other things too.

Application

The next time you need to teach someone else a skill, use this framework to help you put your material and plan together. Walk through the components, and confirm you can actually do what you want to teach them. Teach yourself how to do it in a mirror. Verbalize every step as you walk through it, as though someone were following along with you. It sounds silly, but it works. If you’re prepared, as an instructor, and can take people through all five phases, you’ll have truly set them up for success in the future.

If you’re around my age, you might remember Phil Hartman’s “Anal Retentive” character from the ’80’s and ’90’s. He had a classic skit called “The Anal Retentive Chef” that spawned a whole series — “Anal Retentive Carpenter,” “Anal Retentive Fishing,” and the like.

The joke was always the same — he starts off with a great goal, like “Today we’re going to make a pepper steak!” but then he has to back up a step because something’s “not right”, like the bell peppers aren’t chopped evenly, and then THAT’s not right, so he has to back up again, and by the end, instead of making a pepper steak, he’s cleaning the kitchen cabinets.

His intentions are good — “wanting to get things right,” but he gets lost in a near-fractal descent of tasks in the pursuit of “perfection.” He’s traded away accuracy for precision, and an inability to declare that something is “Good Enough” keeps him from ever actually making anything.

Hi, I’m Glenn, and I’m Overly Meticulous

I do this ALL THE TIME. I did it this morning — I needed to schedule an interview for the Director of Engineering position. So I open the email and read the list of available times. I want to schedule this interview, but first I need to…..open up Greenhouse and confirm that the candidate’s in the right stage. But it’d be better to use Greenhouse’s internal confirmation workflow for the interview, so I need to bring that up. But I don’t like how the template email reads, so I make some edits. Which gets me thinking about how we should really refresh all the email template messaging. Which gets me thinking how I’m not really happy with the interview workflow in general for this role, and I should re-work THAT so the new email templates will align with it better. Which gets me thinking how I don’t like the way Greenhouse keeps interview kits in small, fragmented pieces, and I REALLY want to have a comprehensive end-to-end definition of the interview process for each job in a readable format, so maybe Confluence is the right place for that. Which gets me thinking how the Recruiting/HR/People space in Confluence has grown a lot of weeds and dead content, and could use a good sprucing up, which gets me thinking how there’s probably a few other spaces in Confluence that need attention….

….What was I supposed to be doing, again? Right — book an interview. Now it’s 11:30. What happened?

All those other things are good and valuable, but they’re not THE MOST IMPORTANT THING RIGHT NOW. Sometimes, I need to shut off all the “Keep things neat and tidy/If it’s not a right angle it’s a wrong angle” thinking that runs in my head all the time, and just DO the value-adding task in front of me.

In software development, this phenomenon is has a name – we call it “yak shaving”. Seth Godin has a great post about it.

Permission to Forget

So what do I do when I get myself bogged down like this? Well the first step is to get real explicit about what has to get done, and what could get done. Then I write them down in separate lists, and check off all the items in the “Have to” list. Then I take a look at the “Could” list, and ask myself if I have time to do it now. If not, I give myself permission to forget — and I can do that, because, even if I forget, my notes haven’t. So when the need comes back up again, or when I get back to my next planning cycle, I can look at all the “Could” plans, and start deciding which of them need to be done.

Balancing M&O

My Dad was a logistics officer in the Marine Corps, and he would remind me often of one his favorite maxims from when he ran the motor pool — “There’s a balance between maintenance and operations, and it isn’t always the same.”

Operations are all those things you have to do now to get things done.

Maintenance is all those things you need to do soon, so that you can get things done in the future.

Dad’s point was — you can’t just run Operations full-tilt all the time, and you can’t spend all your time doing Maintenance. You have to do an appropriate amount of both, and you’ll do each of them better if you separate them to clear, separate times and activities. So I try to keep clear, when I’m about to shave a yak — is this M time, or O time, and which one did I mean for it to be?

(And yes, I wrote this up instead of booking that stupid interview. I’m going right back to it, I swear.)

The first time I saw the phrase “Up-Front contract,” I assumed, like a lot of people do, that it had to do with how you develop the initial version of a written contract, like a statement of work for an engagement. Of course, I was wrong. An Up-Front Contract isa mutually-agreed upon charter for an interaction with another party. You can use them in emails, on phone calls, one on one meetings, multi-person group meetings, and really anywhere involving a group of people interacting with the goal of getting something done. Understanding this technique and mastering it was the first step I took in raising the quality of my communication with my clients, and it’s one of the most valuable tools in my communication toolbox.

The Why

Up-Front Contracts provide you, as a party in a communication, with three things:

1. Set a mutually-agreed-upon agenda for a meeting

2. Take control of the session

3. Lower other parties’ defenses

Having a mutually agreed upon agenda is critical to any meeting or communication — without it, you and the other party don’t know if you got anything done or not. With it, you can be sure you’re all aiming for the same result. That also gives you the ability to steer the meeting back to its original purpose when it gets off course, and park any conversations that don’t further that original purpose.

By being the one to establish the Up-Front Contract, you take the reins of the meeting. It becomes your meeting. This is an especially useful tool any time you’re being brought in to troubleshoot a problem, or to address a crisis scenario — think production issues, customer satisfaction escalations, and the like.

And lastly, a strong up-front contract lowers the other person’s defenses — meaning that it puts them in a position of voluntarily handing you control of the meeting, and gets them saying “yes” to you right out the gate. It puts them in a more agreeable frame of mind. Moving them to a more following-based, more “yes”-oriented mindset is especially important in uncomfortable or difficult situations, but is valuable to you no matter what their default stance is at the beginning.

The What

An Up-Front Contract consists of the following components:

Appreciation, Purpose, Time, Their Role, Your Role, Outcomes, Permission

Just reading those, you can see the idea here:

• Start with validating the other person and showing interest in them.

• Establish why you’re having the meeting and how it’s going to be conducted, when it’s going to happen and when it’s going to be complete, who’s doing what during the meeting, and what you’re going to accomplish. (Where tends to be obvious and not necessary to establish.)

• Finally, secure their permission to proceed with the plan you’ve laid out, and invite them to contribute to it.

In practice, an up front contract might go something like this:

“Joe, I really appreciate you taking the time to meet with me today. Obviously, this is our regular weekly progress meeting, and I’m going to take you through everything we’ve accomplished in the last week, as well as lay out our proposed set of deliverables for next week. We’re booked here for an hour, though of course if we wrap up early like we typically do I’ll be glad to give you a little bit of your day back. Naturally, there are a few things I’m going to need from you and your team over the next week so we can hit these dates for you, and I’ll be laying those out as well as I take you through our progress. If there’s anything that catches your eye or that’s not clear today, of course we’ll make sure to leave time to address those. From here, we’ll take all your feedback and I’ll send the complete set of results and follow on tasks as soon as I’m back at the office. With that, Joe, unless you’ve got anything you’d like to add, and with your permission, I’m going to jump right in — we’ve got a lot to cover today!”

Read through that example and look for the seven components. Now — think about other times you’ve seen someone kick off a meeting, either internal or external. Can you spot the up-front contract? How strong was it? How would you improve it?

Counter Example

The same meeting, done poorly, might start something like this instead:

So, I wanted to start today with bug UD-372, which we have some questions for you about.

I’ve been in countless meetings that begin along those veins, usually because the person running the meeting hasn’t thought through their goals in the interaction themself. They’re just “showing up and throwing up.” From there, who knows where you’ll end up, or what kind of responses you’ll get from your client, how long you’ll be there, or how you’ll know if you’re done!

Helper Words — ANOT

An up-front contract can sound stilted or mechanical if you’re not careful. ANOT is a helpful mnemonic for some words that help soften an up-front contract and help it flow more conversationally:

• A — Appreciate

• N — Naturally

• O — Obviously

• T — Typically

These words reassure the other party that you’re familiar with this kind of engagement, and help guide them to feeling “OK” about proceeding with the contract you’ve established. It’s hard to argue against things that are obvious, natural, and typical, and that come with a high level of appreciation, after all!

Opportunities

If your goal is to convene with other human beings with the purpose of getting something done, there is nothing more valuable than an up-front contract to ensure that you actually accomplish that. Think for a moment of all the various types of communication we engage in as consultants:

• Project progress meetings (the most obvious)

• Kickoffs

• Closeouts

• Prospecting calls

• Contract negotiations

• 1:1’s, career development, and performance reviews

• Emails requesting aid from someone

• Bug reports

• Production issues

• Client escalations

• and the list goes on

Application

Make it a habit to practice your up front contract before any scheduled meeting. Work on “micro contracts” you can incorporate into your emails, even your instant messages. Practice working the ANOT helper words in to your up-front contract vocabulary. Watch for how the other party responds to specific wording and turns of phrase that you use. Make your contracts fluid and easy sounding, so you don’t sound like Sgt. Friday on Dragnet going through “just the facts.” Spend a day keeping track of how many up-front contracts you can establish in various interactions. Challenge your team members and help them rehearse — you get much, much better at this the more you practice it!

The Emotional Pendulum is a mental model I’ve found useful when interacting with clients, especially in situations where things aren’t going as well as we’d like (or as they’dlike), or when we need to deliver bad news. Those situations are as much about how we communicate with the client as about what we do for them. It’s a really simple concept, but can have great effects when applied consistently.

The Why

Envision your client’s feelings about a situation as a pendulum. On the left end is “You’re fired”. On the right end is “I’m calling your boss to tell him to give you a raise. By the way, we’d like to pay a 15% premium on top of the original price.” Your client’s current state of mind is probably somewhere in between. Delivering a successful project requires a high quality product of work that does what we claim, and equally requires your client to believe the work product is rock solid and ready to go. A component of that convincing is getting them to swing their emotional pendulum further over to the right.

The What

Recognizing where your client is on the pendulum is the first step. Look for what they’re expressing — Grave concern? Anger? Mild disinterest? Elation? Figure out where they are right now on the pendulum.

Now — here’s the important part –

When you talk to the client about the project, always be a little bit behind them on the emotional pendulum.

If they say “This is the best software in the whole wide world!” your position should be “Yeah, I agree, it’s pretty good.”

If they say “This is pretty good software!” your position should be “It is, isn’t it. We’re going to make it even better in the next release.”

If they say “I’m a little disappointed we didn’t get everything in this sprint” your position should be “I hear you, and I really feel like we let you down. Here’s what I’m going to do so this never happens again.”

Think of it like The Chicago Way in reverse — instead of escalating up, you’re moving back a little each time.

This sounds backwards

It does. I agree. But here’s the thing — it’s in human nature to want people to be as optimistic as you are. When you’re just a little behind the client on the pendulum, and they sense that, their inclination is to pull you up to their level of excitement and enthusiasm. They’ll respond by telling you how things are better than you think they are. And in that process, they’ll actually push themselves even higher up the pendulum — and at the same time, putting themselves in a position to be more prone to giving you goodwill and support.

By comparison — ever try to cheer someone up who’s feeling down? How often does it actually work? When you tell them “It’s not so bad!” do they ever look at you and say “Wow, you’re right. It’s not. I’m all better!” Of course not. But if you recognize their feelings, acknowledge them with empathy, they’re more likely to say, “Thanks for hearing me. I feel a lot better now.” Similar interplay is at work in client communications — especially in those “bad news” situations. You can’t push a client up the pendulum, but you can get them to pull you.

This still sounds backwards

“But, ” I hear you ask – “Shouldn’t we be more confident than our clients about project success? Shouldn’t we be out ahead of them? How do you lead them if you’re going negative all the time?“

Absolutely. This is a paradox of leadership and persuasion. You have to do both at the same time. Don’t confuse “getting behind them on the pendulum” with “worry”. If the client says “I’m worried about the delivery dates” The right response isn’t “don’t worry, we’ve got this” (getting ahead of them on the pendulum,) nor is it “Me too. I’m SUPER worried and I don’t see how we’re even going to get this done!” (which is definitely behind them on the pendulum, but will pull them further down.) The right response is “I hear you. I’ve had some similar concerns around that final date as well — in fact I spent a few hours this morning putting together a remediation plan to get us a few days aheadof the original schedule, so we’ve got some breathing room. I feel terrible you even had to worry about that for a single minute, and I’m going to do everything in my power to ensure that you never have to wonder about hitting a date again.”

That puts you slightly behind them on the pendulum, shows that you’re ahead of them in owning the situation, and also conveys that you care about the impact this has on them (that’s the empathy part). Their natural instinct is to say something like “Well I really don’t want you to worry about it too much. I appreciate your concern. Let’s take a look at that plan.” You’re taking a position of concern, behind them on the pendulum, but still staying firmly in the driver seat. John C. Maxwell, in his book “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership,” refers to this as “Faith and Fact” — Navigating with faith that the future is going to be as it should and can be, coupled with facing and accepting the facts of the situation as it is in the present.

What it comes down to is, in all circumstances, good or bad, making sure that the client knows that you’re just a little more committed to making this succeed than they are.

Overdoing this will backfire on you

One mistake I see people make when trying to apply this model is that they get TOO far behind the client on the pendulum, as in “Hey, you were late to our progress meeting yesterday.” responding with “You’re absolutely right. I can’t believe I let you down like that. I’m going to go tender my resignation immediately. My replacement will be on the next call.” Don’t do that.

When you’re too far behind the client, their perception is that you’re either a little unstable, or that you don’t really understand the impacts correctly. You run the risk of being seen as a reactionary, rather than as a leader— and that’s hard to come back from. You’ve got to really be able to read the other person, understand where they are, and then position yourself just a little bit behind them.

Quick categories

I break clients’ emotional range down into these categories in my head:

1. You’re fired

2. I am NOT ok

3. I’m worried

4. I don’t care

5. I’m optimistic

6. This is great, I want more

7. Will you marry me

I like to keep my clients in the 5–6 range as much as possible. When they hit 7, they tend to get irrational in a whole other way, popping champagne corks early, declaring victory too soon, pushing up release dates, adding scope, etc. 5–6 keeps them positive, willing to concede in negotiations later, and still acting as a champion for us and wanting to see the project through.

Example / Counter Example

Let’s say your client calls you and says “I didn’t really like how our meeting went this morning.” How do you respond?

Right Move — just a little behind: “You know, I’m glad you brought that up. I noticed that we pulled the meeting off-topic way too much for my comfort, and I’m sure it was pretty frustrating for you to sit through that. I don’t ever want a meeting with us to be anything less than a valuable use of your time. To that end, I’ve already reminded my team that these are working sessions with a clear purpose, and it’s contingent on us to maintain that focus. I’m personally going to watch for any conversation drift at the next few sessions a lot more closely, so that we do better as a whole team. How’s that sound to you?”

Bad Move #1 — too far behind: “I’m so sorry. I’ve really dropped the ball on this. Getting off topic twice in one meeting is totally inexcusable and unprofessional. I’d completely understand if you fired me right now.”

Bad Move #2 — trying to be ahead: “Really? I thought the meeting went great. Sometimes my team gets a little off topic, but most of the time it produces some really great brainstorming. You’re going to see some great outcomes from those diversions in the project, let me tell you!”

Bad Move #3 — matching too close: “Yeah, I didn’t like it either.”

Remember — you can’t push someone up the emotion pendulum, but you CAN get them to pull you.

Opportunities

Communication techniques like this take practice, and the first 100 or so times you deliberately try to walk yourself through it you’ll feel awkward, stilted, and a little insincere. You can use this mental model in almost any conversation, but it’s most powerful as a part of your toolkit for handling Crucial Conversations — those where stakes are high, there are differences of opinion, and emotions are involved. Crucial Conversations is a longer topic for another day though. (and one of my top-10 must read leadership books, if you haven’t already seen that list.)

Application

The next time you need to have a semi-difficult conversation with a client, whether it’s about team dynamics, budget, scope, timeline, quality, anything at all — think through how you’re going to approach it. Then, when you engage with them, follow these steps:

1. Figure out through tone, words, and body language where they are on the pendulum.

2. Decide where “just a little behind them” is

3. Frame a response that is

• empathetic and acknowledges their concern

• lays out what you’re doing about it

• expresses a level of concern and commitment that slightly exceeds their own

• invites their feedback and buy in

I think you’ll find that if you follow those steps, your clients will be pulling you up the pendulum behind them in no time.

When I was in consulting, one of our firm’s distinguishing characteristics as a provider of professional services to enterprise organizations was that we didn’t deliver with a heavy on-site presence. Where most of our competitors established relationships and maintained “stickiness” with their clients by being omni-present inside their clients’ organizations, we delivered solutions primarily from within our own offices. While this had a ton of upside to it, starting with the fact that we were able to make an environment where great talent had the opportunity to really get things done, our delivery model came with its own set of challenges. One of them was, we weren’t as accessible to our clients on a daily basis, and they weren’t as accessible to us. That meant we had to work harder at client-facing communications than a lot of our competitors, because we couldn’t rely on the “serendipitous collisions” that happen when you’re in the same office. One area where we had to be double alert, because of this model, was in handling escalations and misunderstandings.

The Why

We’ve all experienced the email chain that won’t die, or the Slack discussion that goes on for way too long. If you’ve ever dealt with a support team by email, you’ve seen this in action. You send in a perfectly reasonable request. You get back a link to a knowledge base article you’ve already read. You tell them that doesn’t work. They email back and ask you to try it again. You do. Still nothing. They’re stuck. They tell you to add some indexes to your database or something. You get frustrated, because you already know that’s not the root cause. You tell them. Now they’re frustrated because they’re trying to help you, and from their perspective, you just won’t listen. On it goes.

This happens a lot in our industry when there’s a problem or issue to resolve. We have so many forms of communication available to us, and we all use them, knowingly or not, as a buffer. Email can shield us from uncomfortable situations. Instant messaging apps keeps us from having to confront a difficult employee performance issue because, hey, you‘re not going to write that in Slack!

When dealing with clients, though, sticking to one form of communication can be damaging. It can cause us to have too many delays in execution speed, and it can put us in a situation where we’ve unwittingly made the client believe we just don’t care. The back-and-forth can feel like progress, when really it’s just churn.

The What

Here’s a simple rule to figure out how to handle an escalating issue:

You get one try to resolve the issue. After that, escalate the comm channel.

Different communication forms have different levels of immediacy and connectedness to them. Of all the options available to us, from least to most connected, they run like this:

1. Carrier Pigeon

2. Postal Service

3. Email

4. Instant Messaging App

5. Texting

6. Phone Call

7. Video Conference

8. Face-to-Face meeting

We usually start, and get stuck, at 3— email, especially with clients, because they’re outside our organization. However, we all know from experience that a lot of what passes between people when communicating is non-verbal. It’s tone, pacing, inflection, and body language. The more context you can provide when trying to resolve an issue, the better.

So — try once, then escalate. (It’s The Chicago Way, Again!)

You’re trying to get a feature through QA. You email and let them know that everything’s ready. They email back and say there’s a bug. Your next step? PHONE CALL.

One of the best things you can do, to really master Managing the Emotional Pendulum, is to escalate the communication form before the client does.

“Jami, I just saw your email and I figured it would be best to give you a quick call. (Insert up-front contract here). Let’s get to the bottom of this.”

Escalating communication indicates a sense of urgency and care on your side, because you’re moving the conversation to a more immediate, more connected channel.

I’ve had projects where this kind of escalation has gone from email to text to phone call to getting on a plane in order to stay one step ahead of the client on perceived urgency. Preventing that level of crisis is better than having to dealing with it, but when it does happen…you still have to deal with it.

Knowing what’s OK

A lot of clients are more willing to hear from you than you think — and often times it’s only our own “head trash” around communication that keeps us from escalating to more immediate, more connected forms of communication with them sooner. We justify it as “I don’t want to interrupt them” but really we’re just avoiding the discomfort that we anticipate from a more immediate, connected communication channel.

The best way to know what’s OK is just to ask — “Jami, this is my direct cell. You can call me any time. That said, I don’t want to bother you unnecessarily, but if I need to call you to deal with an issue on the project, what’s the best number and time to reach you?” Asking a simple question like that shows your interest and concern, and also validates that you’re not just making assumptions that you can ring them up any time.

Wrapping Up

To keep it simple, remember:

1. Use the right communication channel based on the need for immediacy and connectivity.

2. As soon as the channel doesn’t produce results, escalate to a more immediate, more connected channel.

3. Escalate before the client does to demonstrate urgency and concern.

Following these three guidelines will help you maintain high quality communication with your clients and your team, reduce misunderstandings, and help you drive issues to resolution faster.

The Why

If you have more than two people involved in making a decision, and it’s not happening on its own, don’t try to get it done by having a series of 1×1 conversations. Get everybody together in one place, looking at one common goal and one complete set of information, and leave with a written agreement of what you’re going to do.

Meetings for the sake of meetings, especially meetings without a strong Up Front Contract, can be a demoralizing waste of time during the work day. Most of what needs to happen during the day can happen faster with short, one-on-one interactions that don’t last more than 10 minutes. A lot of meetings devolve into information sharing sessions, which can usually be handled better with strong written communication followed by a short decision making review.

On the other hand, sometimes you have to get everyone together for a special kind of meeting, which I refer to as “Getting all the liars in one room”. Not that I think everybody’s actually a liar, but everybody does carry around in their head a slightly different version of “the truth.” This is a meeting to collapse “the truths” back down into just one truth.

Summoning the Liars

It’s time to get all the liars in one room when:

1. You find yourself acting as a continued relayer of information on a specific topic between multiple parties

2. You are consistently relying on second hand information from others, e.g. “I talked to Bob, and Bob said that he wants you to change the contract.”

3. You’re trying to reach an outcome requiring the efforts of others, but follow through keeps not happening, e.g. Susie says “I’m still waiting on Bob for that.” and then you say “OK, I’ll go talk to Bob.”

4. You have a decision to make, a lot of involved parties, and no consensus, e.g. “Thanks for the Statement of Work. I need to run it by Bob in finance, and then I’ll share it with Susie in procurement, and then I’ll get back to you.”

In short, any time you’ve got multiple people who all need to be on the same page, and who aren’t trending towards consensus fast enough, you need to get all the liars in one room.

The What

If a communication sequence like any of those occurs more than twice, you need to break the pattern. What’s happening here is, relaying data and requests for decisions between all the involved parties is taking longer than actually acting on the data would. It’s also likely that they all have different sets of data available to them, so they’re all making decisions and prioritizing actions based on different criteria and priorities that don’t make sense to the other parties involved.

All you have to do is this — get everybody together at one time, where you can all talk together in real time, and set the goal for what you’re trying to get done. It’s a lot harder for people to all be on different pages when you tighten up the communication time putting them all on a single call together, or better yet in the same room. It makes it nearly impossible in that situation for slightly different versions of the truth to hold up for very long when everybody involved is able to quickly see the variations and fill in the blanks for each other.

The When

Great times to do this:

1. You’re trying to close a new sale, and your main stakeholder keeps blaming delays on different people within his company, or coming back to you with requests to change terms based on what someone else in the organization is asking him. Gather ALL the decision makers together and make a decision.

2. You’ve had 1×1’s with three different people on a project and they all give you totally different lists of what features are going in the next sprint.

3. You’ve got a team that’s struggling to communicate effectively, and you’re acting as a mediator by having isolated 1×1’s with all parties involved trying to help resolve it.

Some Prescriptive Guidance

For a “let’s all work this out” meeting to be productive, it needs the following:

1. Short timeframe (no more than 30 minutes usually)

2. Single point of control (One person has to steer the conversation and act as a moderator)

3. Start with a VERY strong up-front contract (You’re here to do one thing, and one thing only.)

4. Validate everyone’s positions (assume common cause, recognize that everybody wants the same thing)

5. Decisive ness –  you have to end with a decision

Without these in place, what you’ll end up with is a meeting that runs long, where people have a series of one-to-one conversations while the rest of the parties sit there bored, and then you’ll leave with a bunch of tasks assigned to “keep working on it” that everyone will then forget to do. That’s not what you want.

If miscommunication has been the name of the game up to this point, the other thing you need to do is this  – put the decision in writing, and share it with everyone involved. It’s a lot harder for people to misunderstand things in written vs. spoken communication.

Picking the Right Format

This doesn’t always have to happen with a face to face meeting, though if the stakes are high enough (bad team dynamics, stalled out sale) then you absolutely want to do a face-to-face, or at a minimum a conference call. On the other hand, you can get consensus and clear up misperceptions within a group pretty quickly by replacing 1-to-1 spoken conversations with an instant message session with all parties, or even a shared document that everybody can collaborate on. An online collaborative decision register can help a lot — but if you see the page comments running over long, it’s probably time to get all the liars in a real room!

Summing it up

I’m a big believer in async by default — that is, using less-than-real-time communication methods so that everyon can keep work going at their own pace with minimal interruptions. Getting All the Liars in One Room is for when that’s not working — when decisions are trending away from, rather than towards, conclusion. While these circumstances tend to pop up more when you’re interacting with people outside your own organization, it’s equally possible to need to do this internally. Just make sure that when it’s over, you get back to default async, and don’t fall into the trap of keeping all the liars in one room forever. Nobody has time for that!

This is a common story they tell at Sandler sales training. I’m repeating it here from memory — I might have some of the details wrong.

The Story

A nice young couple walk into a furniture store. They’re looking for a desk. They’re approached by a salesman on the floor. He’s helpful, he’s informed, he asks all the right questions to understand their needs, why they want a desk, where it’s going to go in their house, their budget, their style preference, what they wanted, what they didn’t want, all of it. He knows his products backwards and forwards, and he guides them to the perfect desk. They love it. The wife says “That’s the one. We’ll take it.” SALE!

And then, tragedy strikes. “You’re really going to love this desk.” says the salesman. “See how these drawers pull in and out so smoothly? That’s because they’ve got high-end ball bearings in the guides, so it’s completely frictionless!”

“Stop.” says the husband. “We can’t buy this desk. When I was a kid, my little brother choked on some ball bearings and almost died. I could never have a desk with ball bearings in it in my house.” The couple thanks the salesman for this time and leaves. DEAL LOST.

What Went Wrong?

The salesman in this story was doing everything right, until he actually had the sale. Then he made a mistake that a lot of us make — he kept selling. If you’ve got a deal in hand, it’s time to shut up and do the paperwork. The more you talk, the more chance you have of putting something out there — completely innocently — that derails the whole thing. In this case, it was ball bearings. But you never know what kind of beliefs (rational or irrational) someone might have that could interfere with an opportunity, or cause them to back out. So once you’ve got buy-in and everybody agrees on terms, STOP SELLING.

The more you talk after the close, the more likely you are to lose the opportunity you just won.

Not Just for Sales

This same pattern happens a lot in technical decisions. There’s something inside us that wants everyone to know we’re the expert, that we know this topic inside and out. In the story, the salesman got some internal satisfaction by showing the buyers that he knew every last technical detail about the desk they were buying, right down to those deal-killing ball bearings. We do this all the time:

• Us: “Based on everything we’ve heard from you about performance and responsiveness requirements for this projects, we recommend using react.js on the front end.”

• Client: “OK, do it.”

• Us: “Yeah, it’s going to be great. React’s selective VirtualDOM rendering makes it a lot more responsive, and — “

• Client: “Hold it, selective VirtualDOM rendering? My guys tried building that on-house for us last year. They spent 12 months and had nothing to show for it. I got burned with my boss and I’m still climbing out of that hole. You can’t use react.js. Find something else.”

• Us: “Ummm……..”

vs. how that should have gone:

• Us: “Based on everything we’ve heard from you about performance and responsiveness requirements for this projects, we recommend using react.js on the front end.”

• Client: “OK, do it.”

• Us: “Roger that. We’ll have the first feature set ready for you at the demo next week.”

In Conclusion

Once you have buy-in — whether it’s on a project plan, a feature set, a budget, a contract, whatever — when everybody’s in agreement on what we’re going to do — STOP SELLING. MOVE ON. And please, leave the poor ball bearings out of it!

“The Golden Triangle” is a term I coined several years ago to serve as a counter to the classic “Iron Triangle” of Project Management (scope, cost, schedule). The Golden Triangle serves as a simple guideline for leaders in the organization to help make decisions and to understand what we mean when we talk about providing an environment that allows for autonomy in decision making.

The Why

Once upon a time, I worked at a company where there was a “no vacation policy” policy. The policy was “take time off when you want to or need to.” The net result was, people took very very little voluntary time off, and felt bad every time they did. The general feedback was “I’m afraid I might take too much time off and get in trouble. I mean, there’s got to be a limit, right?” After two years of that, it was clear we had to put some more structure around our time off benefits and how we administrated it, so that we could provide everybody with the appropriate amount of guidance to make their own decisions. Anybody who knows me knows that I will plan and detail things out far past the point of reason, if left to my own devices. There’s a fine line between appropriate guidance and restricting rules. “log the previous day’s work every morning by 9am” is appropriate guidance. “Log your time at the end of every hour” gives us more precise and timely updates, but is overly restrictive.

On a daily basis, everybody at work is called on to make decisions. “Is this candidate hireable?” “Should we work with this company?” “Is this project plan too risky?” “Should I refactor this code or work on another feature?” “Is 6 cups of coffee before 7am too many?” (The answer to that last one is “Maybe for you. I call it “a slow Tuesday”). When making decisions, or to gauge if an idea is reasonable or not, you need a quick and easy framework to apply.

The What

The Golden Triangle is really simple. If you have to make a decision on what to do, ask yourself these three questions:

1. Is it good for the customers?

2. Is it good for the team?

3. Is it good for the company?

If you can answer “yes” to all three, you’ve got a no-brainer on your hands — go do it. And, pretty much anything you want to do that’s a “yes” on all fronts, is something you can go do without having to check in with a whole bunch of other people. The space where those three intersect is your zone of autonomy. Go forth and do great things!

Why the “Golden Triangle”? Because it’s like the “Golden Rule” — Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It’s as simple and universal as possible, and hard to argue with. Unlike the Iron Triangle, which defines project constraints, the Golden Triangle provides you with freedom — inside that space, you can confidently move from decision to decision, knowing that you’re staying within parameters that make it a “good idea.”

Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad (with apologies to Meatloaf)

So what do you do when you can’t get all three? Well, then you’ve got some work to do. I’ll give you an example from my own work history, back when I was leading operations at a consulting company.

We had a period of time in 2012 where we had entered into a number of engagements that were more staff-augmentation in their nature than solution-based delivery. We were on Time and Materials contracts, we were interleaved with existing team members on longer running engagements, and we were struggling mightily with trying to meet client’s expectations. We were having to offer concessions left and right — reduced rates, write-off time for missed expectations, deferred payments, that sort of thing. Our contract and selling structure and our delivery model were not in alignment.

So, we made a short-term shift in our delivery model to get things working, and we decided that we would start deliberately deploying our people out to work on-site at clients’ locations.

Was it good for the clients? Absolutely. The increased face-time improved our quality of delivery and allayed their concerns about what we were doing for them. It tightened up communication between team members and accelerated the pace of delivery.

Was it good for the company? Yes. It stabilized an issue we were having with client engagement which was affecting us financially, and got our financial returns to a healthier place.

Was it good for the team? Not really. People come to work for us because they wanted to work with other talented people. They didn’t work at Headspring to be farmed out and effectively “work” at all kinds of other places around town.

What we had to do next was answer two things, and this is the other valuable part of the Golden Triangle:

• Recognizing that this decision was intrinsically not great for our team, what actions could we take to make it better for them?

• What would we need to change to be able to have a delivery model that did fit inside the Golden Triangle in the future?

The answer to the first one was that, rather than just say “go work on site from now on,” we added the following stipulations, and secured buy-in from our clients:

• Make working off-site as similar as possible to working in our office. — we bought everybody extra monitors, keyboards, and mice to match what they had at Headspring, which was typically way better than the rigs our clients were offering us to use. We sent out boxes of snacks the team liked, and bought mini-fridges and kept them stocked with drinks. We said “yes” to any reasonable request to make working off-site a more comfortable experience.

• Home office Friday — every Headspringer would work from our offices on Friday, to ensure everybody had good face time and a chance to stay connected with the rest of the organization. We had to negotiate this with our clients, and not all of them were in love with the idea, but we insisted on it.

So, that makes things better, but still not a “yes” on all three fronts. We had to do more, and make changes that would require more time. That was the essence of the second part — seeing what we needed to change to be able to have a delivery model that fit inside the Golden Triangle.

The root issue was, our selling approach and our delivery model weren’t in alignment. In the short run, we modified our delivery model to align with what we were selling. But to effect a long term change, and get back inside the Triangle, we had to change how we sold our services. That meant actually changing our messaging — turning our “work from our office, not yours” from a point of contention to a part of our value proposition. Moving off T&M contracts when we could, so we’d have more control of project decisions and less micro-observation by clients. Going back to existing clients at the start of new contracts and re-negotiating engagement terms.

It took about 9 months of active work, chipping away at it contract-by-contract, client-by-client, to get to 100% home-office execution on projects. Then, we could confidently say that our delivery model fit inside the Golden Triangle — good for our clients, good for our team, and good for the company.

Application and Summary

To summarize what I thought was going to be a much shorter article:

Any decision you need to make, large or small, ask yourself:

• Is it good for the client?

• Is it good for the team?

• Is it good for the company?

If the answer to them all is “yes” then you’ve got a winner!

If the answer to any of them is “no”, first consider — have I looked at all the options? Is this the best option of all the ones in front of me? If so, ask yourself the following for each “no”

1. What could I do now make that result better? — this gives you your short term mitigation.

2. What would I have to change to get a solution that’s a firm “yes”? — this gives you your long term improvement plan.

If you bring a plan to the table and you’re prepared to show everybody that it’s the best possible plan, how it’s good for them, recognize where it’s weak, call out the mitigation plan, and also identify a long-term plan to ensure more systemic strength in the future, you’re probably going to have everyone’s buy-in.

How you work is the biggest constraint on what you can accomplish. If your approach to work is chaotic, your results will be chaotic. If you’re inconsistent in your actions, you’ll be inconsistent in your outcomes. I’ve found that if I can get clear on two things - Purpose, and Priority - then my work flows more naturally, my time is better spent, and I’m happier with the outcomes.

Purpose — Know What You’re Trying to Accomplish

I know a lot of people who get lost in their task list, or their inbox, or both. They come to work, sit down, and then just start….doing stuff. That’s a recipe for drift and busy-work filling up your day.

Start every week with a plan — what do you want to accomplish that week, and what do you need to do in order to accomplish that? Write it down.

If you know what you’re trying to get done, then you know what you need to focus on — the things that move you towards those accomplishments.

Priority — Say “No” to a Lot of Things

Getting a lot done is primarily about what you don’t do. There are an infinite number of “good” ways to spend your time. There are only a finite set of things that move you towards what you’re trying to accomplish. Say “no,” or at a minimum, “not now” to those other things.

Keep a running list of everything that comes up that you need to get to “later” that’s not part of your targets for the week. Use that list to decide how to fill any spare time you find during the week, and as a source of planning for the subsequent week.

Moving Things Along

Those two principles — Purpose and Priority — are the two big drivers (for me at least) of getting a lot accomplished in any given week. The weeks I start off without my regular planning rhythm are the weeks that feel really busy but where I look back and think “what’d I get done this week, exactly?”

I usually do my weekly plan on Sunday evening, when I’m the most refreshed from the weekend, and when I have access to everything I need — personal and work-related — to make a good, informed plan for the week.

In addition to those two principles, I have a number of supporting tactics that help me out. Your tactics might vary significantly from mine, but these are the things that personally help me out and give me back time in my day:

Keep a clean inbox, and get it to “empty” at least once a week

Your inbox is not your to-do list, and it’s not your notebook, and it’s not your library. It’s your inbox. By definition, it’s the place for the things that have come in to your work stream that you haven’t inspected yet.That’s what you should use it for. I have three inboxes — work email, personal email, and a physical inbox on my home desk. I try to “clear” my inboxes at least once a day, but sometimes I just can’t get all the way there, and I make a conscious decision to put it off for a day, or only hit the high notes real quick.

Separate your action list from your reference material

Your reference materials could be emails, documents, web sites, wiki pages, or anything else you need to refer to for information to get something done. Your action list should be just that — the list of the things you need to do. A lot of people use their reference materials as “triggers” to remind them about what they need to do. (Especially email). Don’t do that. You can get a deep URL link to any email in your inbox and stick it in your task list. Instead of trying to “work” out of your inbox, work off your action list — and link back to your email (or whatever else you need to get that thing done) as needed. Confusing your action list and your reference material makes you keep the connection between the two in your head, where it’s always bothering you and slowing you down.

Write everything down.

Digital, ink, post-it notes, whatever you have to do — don’t trust your memory. Write down your plan for the week, write down what you’re going to do, write down what other people are going to do for you. Make it durable. Besides just having a durable list to work off of, the act of writing down your action list helps you figure out if you really know what you need to do.

Keep your calendar accurate.

Your calendar should be about the the places you HAVE to be. Your calendar defines the “hard edges” of your day. Set up your calendar as part of your weekly plan, and then stick to it. Don’t miss meetings. Don’t be late. If you’re busy, mark it “busy”. If you’re NOT going to something, take it off your calendar. If you can’t trust your calendar 100%, then you have to keep checking it and trying to remember whether you should go somewhere or not.

Don’t be “on call” to the world.

It’s ok to “go dark” for a while to get things done. Let the voicemail pick up the call. Let some things batch up in your inbox. Let the HipChat notifications go by. Twitter will be there when you get back. Facebook….well, you shouldn’t be on facebook while you’re working, anyway. Mobile devices, and always-connected, push-based social systems have done more harm to productivity than we will ever measure, because they create an environment of constant interruption. Don’t get sucked in — be ok with saying to all your information queues, “I will get to you when I choose to, not when you choose.”

Conclusion

You might find that my tactics don’t work for you - that’s ok. But I suspect that the strategic focus on Purpose and Priority is universal. If you can get clear on those, and find the tactics that will support you, then the time you spend on your work will yield more results, with less effort.