I lead teams at the intersection of strategy and design. Autodidact. Polymath. Barbecue acolyte. I start fires (the good kind).
steering metrics should, in fact, result in steering. You’re looking for quantitative and qualitative signals that will help you sense and respond. If you aren’t making decisions and taking action based on your metrics, you’re doing it wrong.
Aaron Dignan in Brave New Work
If you’re hungry for more, liberatingstructures.com is a fantastic resource for anyone ready to move beyond conventional meetings to something more inclusive and generative. The website, app, and the book that inspired them provide a menu of thirty-three methods for activities such as brainstorming, problem solving, and sensemaking, complete with instructions for how to facilitate them.
Aaron Dignan in Brave New Work
Data is not information. Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not mastery. Mastery is not wisdom.
Aaron Dignan in Brave New Work
Speak and participate in rounds. When we want to prioritize speed and inclusion, we’ll go around the table and give everyone one chance to provide updates, ask questions, offer feedback, or give consent, depending on the type of meeting we’re holding. Everyone else is invited to listen respectfully and wait for their turn to speak.
Aaron Dignan in Brave New Work
Build an agenda on the fly. Rather than predict what will matter most tomorrow or next week, we’ll choose and prioritize our topics once we get in the room. If we don’t get to it, we don’t save it. Someone will bring it up next time if it’s still important.
Aaron Dignan in Brave New Work
Meeting Moratorium. Sometimes the only way to see things clearly is to stop the madness. Instead of trying to fix all the meetings in your current operating rhythm while they’re in flight, see if your team is open to canceling all meetings for two weeks. At first blush, this sounds impossible, irresponsible even. But it can be done. One leadership team coached by The Ready had amassed an average of forty-five hours of meetings per week. Their calendars looked like a game of Tetris they were quickly losing. So we tried pressing pause on all recurring meetings. The questions we wanted them to answer? What do we miss? What do we need that we’re not getting from informal interactions? Based on what we heard, we rebuilt the meeting rhythm one meeting at a time, ensuring that each one had a clear purpose and matching structure. We tweaked these formats iteratively, based on feedback, until we had something that worked.
Aaron Dignan in Brave New Work