From greenfield to Green-light
We’ve been working on some very meaty cross-functional and multi-geo projects that have required us to connect a lot of dots across the company that hadn’t previously existed. We knew where we needed to get to: new sources of revenue and better sales productivity to combat the headwinds of the property market downturn. But, we had no idea how we were going to get there.
Over the past two quarters, this has involved many dozens of calls with leaders across the business … and then usually doubling back for follow-up meetings to weave together new learnings, draw similarities and flag regional nuances.
The initial conversations started at a very macro level. We intentionally went in without a specific rubric of questions. We wanted to see what the functional subject matter experts and regional leaders were both forthcoming with and what sprung to mind as a critical, top priority or most relevant to the topic at hand: improving retention across our affiliate network and unlocking new sources of growth in our largest and most competitive markets.
It’s fascinating to observe how and what people share in a greenfield setting. Some immediately go narrow and deep on a topic. Others stay wide and general. Neither is right or wrong but what ends up happening when you run a structured yet open-ended exploration at the start of a project (also known as “Upstream Work” in Atif Rafiq’s book Decision Sprint) is that you uncover many of the unknown unknowns that will influence the future results of your “downstream” work.
By starting high level, we were able to create a map and identify where we had key gaps in knowledge from specific areas of the business. It unlocked a whole new set of questions and avenues to explore that we hadn’t even considered. Had we kicked off the exploration by framing the discussion with a rigid set of questions versus a thematic topic, we would have created (subconscious) limits around the kind of information gathered.
In the early days of a new initiative, when you are still trying to figure how to get from A to B, consider dedicating a certain amount of time at the start to broad discovery or explanation work. Cast a wide net and see what you catch. It won’t all be relevant but I guarantee it will open your eyes to additional considerations, context and questions to steer you forward. It will inform the potentially problematic areas that you’ll need to solve for downstream and it will bring teams together to work through the unknowns - topics that, if not uncovered and addressed early on, are likely to be the areas that will delay or derail the project down the line.
And, the added bonus with this approach? By engaging with and listening to leaders across the organisation before jumping blindly into an action plan, you will almost always generate goodwill and build trust more quickly. This will ultimately unlock more collaboration, alignment and speed of execution.
As Atiq says in his book: “Progress within a team halts when people don’t see unknowns with some common understanding.”
