Good rework / bad rework

Change the conversation, not the "mindset"

There are (at least) two types of rework: one that we want, and one that we don’t.

We want iteration

When you make something meaningful, you and your team can learn from it. Often you can use what you learn to rework the work – to make it simpler, more effective, clearer, better, ...

We don’t want to fix misunderstandings

On the other hand, when you misunderstand what your team is collectively trying to do, you can end up making something that’s incoherent. The only thing you can learn is that there was a misunderstanding. Then you have to rework the work so it’s what you needed to do in the first place.

“FFS, I’ve gone off track and now I’ve gotta carry this all the way back again.”

When I started leading teams, that meant sitting in “Progress Update” style meetings.

I sat through too many meetings that were a firehose of technical nitty gritty. It sure sounded like everyone knew what they were doing. Then, later, I would hear that some people had spent days (or longer!) spinning their wheels doing pointless work. It turned out they’d misunderstood what the team was even trying to do, but nobody could tell.

A common approach for managers faced with this kind of situation is to spend their days getting down into all the details of what everyone’s doing. Can you say micromanagement?

I realised there was an alternative. I realised that I don’t need to know everything you’re doing. I only need to know that you know what you’re doing.

So I changed the format of my teams’ progress updates. (Did you know you can just do that?)

No more “what are you working on?” and “any blockers?”.

Instead, I asked everyone to give a mini-pitch. In one minute, tell us:

• What’s the main challenge your team is tackling right now?

• What approach are you using to help your team tackle it?

• What are you looking for to tell you if your approach is working?

• And what are you looking for to tell you if your approach isn’t working?

I designed this to follow a key complexity principle: don’t try to change people, instead change their interactions. I designed this particular interaction to be a kind of ‘intuition-pump’ that could indirectly generate beneficial effects. And it did.

Here are five cool things it ended up doing:

1. Everyone on my team got to practise pitching their work so that it would make sense to others and not only to themselves. This is a valuable skill in business. It took some repetitions to get this working, but we started live in low pressure small groups to lower the barrier and enable people to learn from each other. We could choose to switch to asynchronous written pitches when the ritual was stable.

2. In order to figure out a pitch, each person had to understand why they were doing what they were doing for themselves. People started to develop a sense for different shapes and contexts of work, rather than sticking to one tool or process.

3. I could instantly tell when someone was confused about what they were doing because their pitch either didn’t add up internally or didn’t cohere with the team’s strategy. We could grab time right then and there to figure it out together – before they’d spent days on pointless stuff. And this happened less over time.

4. We started to enjoy the progress updates. I’ll use a food analogy. Before the change to the meeting format, it felt like we had to sit through people droning on about their food shopping lists. Afterwards, we got to hear chefs inspiring us with the delicious meals they were preparing.

5. And folks on different teams started to actually understand what their colleagues were working on. This meant fewer complaints about not having enough visibility, and much more spontaneous collaboration.

If you’d like to hear more of the story, and some other interactions we tried, we talked about it in episode 11 of Trigger Strategy Podcast.

Tom x