Weaving it together

As information flows and bounces around, back and forth between people in a team, how are you helping to weave it all together?

These interlacing and interconnected threads of data, opinions, ideas and decisions need to be brought together. Not everyone sees what is obvious and not everyone is able to make the connections of information that help us make progress.

A key role for leaders in times of uncertainty and change is to make sense of what the heck is going on. Taking seemingly disparate threads and finding links, relevance and connections among and between them is part of that role of leadership.

Don’t let it happen via hope. accident or default. Because it may not happen at all.

Things can become more confusing and ambiguous when you believe it will just weave itself. Take an active role to thread, weave and connect information ... even if you think it’s obvious.

It helps ease the stress and uncertainty people may be feeling as it relieves a weight from our mind ... and our shoulders.

Summaries are super

In our overwhelm of information, meetings, emotions and the impact of change, to summarise ...is to care. We can’t possibly be listening as well as we might usually.

So don’t just finish your meeting, call or session. Make time to recap and summarise and bring it all together. Spend just a minute, or 3 or 5, summarising what happened, where we are at, what is next. 

It’s ok to repeat stuff. 

We don’t do it enough in ’normal times’, so it’s needed even more in these new normal times. As you bring things together, tying up lose ends for people, reminding and recapping, you’ll help them release some of the mental cognitive load they’ve been carrying.

You help do some of the sorting and storing work for them and their brain. It’s just a smart, leader-y thing to do. 

And it’s a caring thing to do, considering the emotional weights that can fill our mind. A synopsis, a digest ... a nutshell. 

Their brain will say ‘thank you’ even if they don’t. It’s a service most certainly worth the time and effort.

Adapt your messaging

It's a very good time to check your default. 

What are the default messages, responses and funnels you've got set up that usually just 'run'?

What do you have that is automated, that will do 'this' if 'that' happens? 

You'll need to change something, most certainly. 

We are seeing and hearing marketing, customer, advertising and communications messaging that is not adapting.

It's time to PULL or PAUSE your canned, pre-written and pre-scheduled content that was done in the motive of 'productivity'. 

It was created in another time. Those images and words were made for another era. 

The language, pace, imagery, message (and metaphors) could be tone deaf, way out of alignment and not a good match for these times.

Check on it ... and then adapt it to these times and tones. 

And soon, you'll probably need to change it again. 

Map the steps

When you’re doing some new things with a team or project, it’s worth mapping out the steps so people get a sense of what’s going to happen.

This isn’t a table or list or spreadsheet - although they may hold some useful data about what needs to be done or supporting information that helps with decision making.

Sensemaking when things are unclear, unknown, uncertain or just new for people, requires us to do more than just write a few words, send a few emails or type a few messages.

All those words! Our brains are full already.

Just as a Google map shows us where we are and where we want to get to, we can use a map like that too. Include a few points like:

Here....

The path or steps to ...

There.

Add a few notes about what’s planned as you guide the team from one place... getting to that other place.

If you’ve got more of your team working remotely at the moment, don’t just rely on all the words or talking heads.

Show them a map they can keep referring back to ... later ... when they need to, when the words get lost and the talking heads are offline.

Collect plenty of ideas

Not just one idea or three, but plenty. You never know when you’ll need them.

Many people ask me about my blogs and posts.

They ask:

- How do you post everyday?

- How do you come up with ideas?

- Tell me/show me how you do it...

The key things you need are to be able to generate content, to deliver value via that content and then to execute on the idea ... among that is to have a wad of ideas. (I don’t know how many a wad is!)

I focus on ‘curating’ my ideas; collecting them as I think of them. I don’t ’sit down to have a good idea’. I grab them when they arrive. Once collected in an Evernote file, I wander through that file each day and think, ‘which of these ideas is buzzing for me?’ (Singing, buzzing, humming, glowing - whatever the verb, it’s about the idea that I react to.)

That’s the one I pick ... and then I write.

I don't stockpile pre-canned posts.

I don't copy and paste from the past.

It's more like I’m riffing from an idea I collected, likely a while ago - days, weeks, months.

You can do it too… to share your thinking, ideas, thoughts and value.

Become what I call a ‘Leader of Value’. So to get started, collect plenty of ideas.