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.
Instead of enforcing standards, think about proven practices as defaults. Defaults are exactly like standards with one exception: you don’t have to use them. A default says: If you don’t know what you’re doing, do this. If you don’t have time to think, try it our way. But if you’ve achieved some level of mastery in an area and you think you see a better way, feel free. Let us all know how it goes, because either you’ll generate further proof that our default is sound or you’ll sow the seeds for a new default that we can all benefit from. In the case of my firm, we maintain a default fee structure for our services. If an experienced member wants to try something different—a price premium, a discount, an equity swap—there are no rules against that, but we want to learn from it. Our members know they can take a risk and go their own way, but only when they think that we all stand to benefit.
Job titles mask the complexity of the roles we hold, and they limit our ability to shape them and step in and out of them freely. Instead, think of the organization as a rich network of roles that can be filled and shaped by anyone. Don’t limit yourself (or anyone else) to one static job description. Recognize that you already hold many roles in many places. Claim them.
Facilitators and Scribes. One of the best ways to increase meeting effectiveness is to ensure that someone is responsible for the structure, flow, and output of every meeting. Two roles that we have found to be particularly effective are facilitator and scribe. The facilitator role keeps the meeting on track, enforcing whatever format and ground rules the team has agreed upon. That could include cutting off conversational tangents, noticing when some people need to step up or step back, and even pointing out when the leader isn’t playing by the rules. The scribe role captures any actions or outputs created throughout the meeting and leverages any tools or interfaces required by the work.
Recognize that people are inherently creative given the right conditions. Trust them to sense opportunity and pursue it fluidly. A true culture of innovation is one where we can’t tell the difference between operations and invention.
Retrospectives. If you were to chart the most valuable but least practiced meetings, the hands-down winner would be something called a retrospective. A retro is simply a chance for any team to stop, notice, and learn. After a big push of work, or ideally on a regular interval, the team will gather for an hour or two and share their perspectives on what happened, what stood out to them, and what they ultimately learned. The goal is simple: to do better next time. Many forms of retrospective exist, ranging from the simple (mapping highs and lows over the time line of the project) to the more complex (four Ls: liked, learned, lacked, longed for).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Percolate, a content-marketing platform used by some of the biggest brands in the world, it built a tool called Barista that allowed anyone in the company to ask a question and route it to people who might know the answer. Completed questions were tagged, saved, and searchable by everyone else. Instead of trying to drown a new employee in pushed information, Percolate let them find what they needed when they needed it.
The idea that we should all share everything all the time seems crazy. But that’s only because we misunderstand how to share information—the difference between push and pull. Legacy information sharing is “push,” meaning that the information is delivered to us without our consent. When information is pushed, we have to wade through it and separate the signal (what we need) from the noise (what we don’t). But when information is abundant, a “pull”-based system where information is tagged, stored, and ready to search is far superior.
in a complex system, the interactions matter more than the parts. A bench full of star players does not automatically produce a winning team. Relationships define our collective potential. And our approach to membership creates the foundation for relationships to flourish or flounder. Everything we do, from the moment we meet prospective candidates to the moment they depart as alumni, shapes their membership experience, and with it the very fabric of our network.
Legacy Organizations think about membership as binary—as a legal status or something that’s conferred upon you. But membership isn’t binary. Not every employee feels the same level of loyalty, or inclusion, or participation. No, membership is really a social status. It’s an identity. It’s a living agreement.
We practice a wide variety of rituals at The Ready, but one of my favorites is how we recognize team members who are leaving the firm for a new chapter in their career. We gather our team to mark the occasion, and anyone who feels compelled can share their gratitude for their departing colleague. A week later, our alumnus receives a globe selected just for them—a token of our appreciation and a reminder that we hope they’ll change the way the world works wherever they go.
