Tim Noyce Advies

I recently blogged about using GTD in large organisations: it is an ongoing story. I have been working with an IT department and we have been using GTD as a way to ”cascade” the goals of the whole company all the way down to individual projects and next actions.

The key insight is that even the most beautifully crafted strategy is just “stuff” for you until you have made very explicit what you are going to do about it. Hmmm, we know that to do when we want to get clear about dealing with stuff, we use the fundamental thinking process. The way it works in practice is that managers at each level in the organisation look carefully at the vision and goals that they have been handed and use GTD-thinking to “boil them down” for their own area.

Of course when you are a manager many, even most, of your goals will be reached by delegating projects. That means you then need to run a negotiation with your direct reports and hash out exactly how they are going to respond to you: they may surprise you. Our experience so far has shown that people closer to the day-to-day operation have very useful things to say about what customers want and how services can be improved. That may of course mean you want to add some things to your and your boss’s plate, too…

The implication is that you get a chain of negotiation and feedback up and down the organisation. That may sound like a lot of work, but it is absolutely necessary if you want your strategy to actually make a difference to what people do! It is the “due dilligence”. This stuff is not effort-free, but it is wonderfully transparent and genuinely empowering. I rather hate that word, but it is very applicable to this process. I have seen some fairly hardened, cynical people sit down in workshops and come out with a can-do attitude simply because they can now make the link between the “high-falutin” strategy and tasks that they can go out and accomplish.

That is the magic: instead of worthy powerpoints about “being a major player in the dumbly whatsit global thingummy” you can prove to people that if they fix the problem handling process, document the new program release, schedule a regular quality review with the customer or index the database they are actively contributing to the management’s vison and the success of the company.

Everyone has heard the classic managment story. A traveller comes across three men cutting stone blocks and asks each one what he is doing. The first replies, ”I am a stone cutter and I am cutting stones”, the second replies, ”I am a stone cutter and I am working to keep my family secure and well-fed” and the third says, ”I am a stone cutter and I am building a Cathedral!” I strongly believe, influenced of course by Victor Frankl, that pretty much everybody would like to feel like the third man. What we are doing by making link between the work of the day and the vision of the organisation is giving people a view of the cathedral and of where their block of work fits into it.

I illustrate this for people with a dumb example. If I asked you to “make the world better for me” you would be paralysed by indecision. If I tell you that the world would be better for me if someone fetched me a strong espresso (no sugar) then we can at the very least have a useful negotiation as to whether you will do that for me or not.

We started GTD-ing the management processes for the department since the end of 2007 and got lots of concrete actions and some very delightful “quick wins”.  In january, when we started gearing up for the second round of workshops, we first went looking for guidance from top management: we intended to take that vision and translate that down to departmental level and then hand it to the team leaders so that they could get a response from within the scope and expertise of their teams. But there was a slight snag. Though we were off and running, because of some major organisational changes, the strategy we were looking to use was still being formulated and discussed. At the same time the two teams we had coached last year had had a very productive sit-down and presented the team-leaders with their own suggested objectives, based on what thery were experiencing operationally.

It was almost embarassing to find that they were ahead of us. The people we had been working with had taken us very seriously and had set some concrete, achievable but also fairly challenging goals for themselves. They now expected us, quite rightly, to carry those up the tree. So we did just that. We got their input, checked it against the draft policy we had got hold of and started doing Natural Planning with the teams. The team leaders were delighted: everthing their teams had proposed was relevant and addressed cost-control, quality and customer service goals that they would have been setting anyway…

The other thing we realized was that we were in fact defining goals for everyone that they could and should use in their planning meetings with their managers. That did require some decision making: the organisation in question has a classical year-long plan-coach-evaluate process, but the GTD process naturally had people defining results to achieve in a much shorter, 6-12 week timeframe. That meant more work for the team leaders, but it gives them a much closer link to what their teams were actually doing so they agreed immediately. It also eliminates something I hate: that evaluation meeting at the end of the year in which your targets have become irrelevant (due to a changing world or marketplace) and you sit their with your manager trying to negotiate what your performance was with too little common ground. Of course the classical defense against that is to set the kind of broad, vague goals that will be just as irrelevant and uninspiring at the end of the year as they were in the beginning.

Where we are right now, is getting the projects and larger outcomes that the teams have defined into the planning and coaching system. Given the commitment of all parties I am confident that will succeed. Someone said to me recently “culture eats strategy for breakfast” and taking a step back from our process, I am starting to see what we are doing as a culture change. That needs some more thought and of course action, so I think I shall save that for a later post…