So I already wrote about meeting vaults and the structure within the meetings but not the overall size, cadence, involvement of it and how it fits within our overall OS. Meetings are only a way to communicate. And should be the primary method of communication when things need organization and time to be resolved / there are lots of things to resolve. But how do you ensure that the right people are in that conversation? I might be overthinking it but it's just all the people that need to be Informed of something.
So right now, we're going to have Senior Leadership Level meetings, Leadership level meetings, Objective team level meetings, Functional team level meetings, project-level team meetings, and 1x1s. And that's only some of the internal recurring ones. How do we have time to get anything else done? The thing is these meetings contain both organizationally-sliced meetings as well as functionally-sliced meetings. There's going to be redundancy.
How do you reduce the number of meetings (thereby increasing focused work time) while simultaneously increasing effective communication? Communication is just the means to an end of getting something done. When is it valuable to have org-sliced meetings vs functionally-sliced meetings?
What my intuition keeps emerging is an hour in the morning and perhaps time in the afternoon that's blocked off everyone's calendars. It's basically a free for all for addressing anything you have with others.
So we make progress on things in the scope of projects. In the objective / company level meetings, we use that time to discuss the progress of projects. But is that the most efficient?
(see image on Pg 1 for quick chart)
Organizationally sliced:
Senior leadership - 3 people
Leadership - 7 people
1x1s - All people
Action-sliced:
Objective team - All
Functional team - 4
Project / KR - 3
Hmm, that is an interesting pattern there.
So right now, it's sliced horizontally and vertically, with redundancy.
(see image on Pg 2 for charts)
Is there a combination of this that eliminated this redundancy? What is it? What's coming to mind then is Amazon's single threaded leaders teams. You have this section of the org chart who can complete a KR. We don't ask ourselves "Which functions, people, resources, tools, or technology will we need to accomplish this KR 100%?" Then we have a bunch of KR teams. That is the autonomy we need to create. Some KR teams may go all the way to the CEO, some may only go to 1 level at the bottom. But if that's all you need to achieve that KR, then that's all you need. So then you don't need the functional level meetings. You actually don't even need the Objective level meeting.
OH! Here it is. All the people that are either R,A, or C in RACI are in the KR team. Anyone in the I is informed about it without taking up their time. This can be done in a video / audio update and disseminated in email / Slack depending on what it is. If there are questions, they should be asked within the context of that update in Slack / email / Asana. Then the leadership meetings are instead the highest node on the thread for each of the KRs, since they should theoretically know what's going on within that KR. That way, there are actually no gaps in talking about progress on the KRs. And you still probably get the equivalent of who's on the leadership teams without having explicit leadership teams.
CAV
Increased focused meetings on progress of KRs
Incorporation of RACI into OKR
Same / better communication within teams
FAV
Integration of frameworks → increased value for liquidation
Scalable
CRF
Fewer meetings → increased work time
Blocks addressed within meetings
Version of this works at Amazon so novelty shouldn't be too daunting
FRF
Can scale easily because it's on a micro autonomous scale
CRV
Will this even work here?
Learning curve to get ramped up
FRV
Will this work?
Too many KR teams?
People overwhelmed?
CAF
Lots of overlap right now with KR teams
Goes against leadership and senior leadership teams newly formed
New style to get used to
FAF
Onboarding new hire - something else to introduce to them
Other question is how often do you meet / communicate? How often do 1x1s need to happen? How do we measure this? We need to do a meeting audit.
So let's say 12 people in company (represented by letters). 10 KRs.
KR 1: ABC
KR 2: DEFG
KR 3: BGH
KR 4: JK
KR 5: AL
KR 6: DIJKL
KR 7: CIL
KR 8: DFHKL
KR 9: EHK
KR 10: CFG
So you're not gonna have 10 standups, that's not scalable. If you had a meeting every 2-3 business days, it can handle multiple conversations at the same time. The point of this meeting wouldn't be to inform the larger group. It would be to make decisions and take progressive actions for the KR. This way you increase communication by actually reducing meeting time. You have more conversations going on at the same time. Digitally, this is having breakout rooms by KR. You'll have to have teams that don't have overlapped members. If you do, it's actually a sign of a bottleneck. Well if we say that you can't have more than 5 KRs (or certain number of KR points), then there shouldn't really be more than 5 slots or sections within that meeting time. Bidaily standups that technically include everyone but with the breakout rooms you have the ability to have convos for bigger KRs. Is this even reasonable?
[5 min thinkitation]
We need to have priorities for the KRs like we had this quarter. Except we haven't really used it. Here you structure these Bidaily Breakouts by priority of the KR. That way we're actually building it into our system to be accomplishing tasks related to our top priorities. Longer discussions can naturally happen if needed for the priority items. And if we don't get to the lower priority, then that's okay because they're lower priority anyways. If people aren't in a breakout room or they're done with all their KRs, then they can either sit in on others' or leave and get to work. There should be the main meeting room where they can hang out in if they want. So if we have it every other day, then it would be M-W-F-T-Th-M. The Mondays would be the Sprint Planning sessions and would contain everyone. That's where people are informed of what's going on. And we have T@2 for bigger stuff as well. This also reduced the amount of time that people sit in meetings doing other stuff, either because of a lack of focus or because it doesn't pertain to them.
So this is an investment of 1.5 hour sprint planning + 4*(1 hour sessions) / sprint = 5.5 hours / sprint. As opposed to currently 1.5 hour sprint planning + 30 min*(9 standups) + any functional team meetings. So it's the same / less amount of meeting time for better communication, focus, productivity, and alignment. Idk why we wouldn't try this.
By having this, you also reduce the need for 1x1s or the amount of time in them because lot of the time spent in them is discussing tactical stuff would be covered in the Bidaily Breakouts. 1x1s then become just more administrative and conversational in nature.
The tangential topic here is KPIs. The results KPIs, instead of being distilled down from Board to Senior Leadership to Leadership to Functions would be modified to distill down through the OKR framework. The KRs are already measured. So why add more KPIs if those KRs are the ones we deem as important?
Actually then, we have the process backwards. We need to identify the KPIs first. Then build the KRs around those. That way we can focus in on only those key metrics. That's another way to build a system that naturally enhances focus on only the top priorities. We need to add that to the planning template / framework then. Have objectives, have metrics, build KRs around those, build the KR teams around those, then execute!
This also knocks out us leaning more into metric-driven approaches. Then the KR teams are judged by how much progress they've made on the metric. By having this structure, here is when you allow autonomy by allowing the KR teams to come up with whatever initiatives to make progress on the KPI. So yes, I'd be reintroducing the initiative level, but in actuality, each KR team should only be limited to 1 initiative.
So then the planning process should allow teams to follow a more robust process if they want or a more qualitative approach; the autonomy. It's available to use something like the initiatives prioritization sheet that I'd created or if everyone is already in agreement, then no need for it.
You don't even need a leadership team that meets because it would be redundant. The important thing in this process then is the actual creation of the KPIs. They have to be selected astutely, and have to be leading indicators. Here's the thing. What we may think of as leading KPIs now may in actuality be lagging. But we don't know that until we select some initial ones and operate under those assumptions. What we're basically saying is that "We believe these metrics have the most leverage in our overall success."
If this goes as I envision, then the Senior Leadership team only needs to meet once / month then or something. Because all the vision and alignment will have been established at the beginning of the quarter. All we're doing then is executing. All the blocks and KR based progress and topics would be getting discussed and resolved in those BBs (Bidaily Breakouts). It actually also increases focused participation because then you're not stuck with just one convo. You can choose which convo you want to be a part of after all your KRs are done being discussed. That decreases distraction and increases self-persuasion and choice.
I think it caters to both the easily distracted person as well as the focused person. The former because you can go from topic to topic, KR to KR within an hour. The latter because you have an agenda you follow within each KR breakout and can follow that to resolve anything.
Ok, now I need people to poke holes in this. I was initially thinking about unveiling my OS methodically over the course of 2022 to potentially implement in 2023 organizationally. But I think I'm actually at a point where I can finish this up in the next couple weeks and propose to the decision makers to implement this OS going into 2022. In that case, these Thanksgiving holidays are coming at a perfect time. More time for me to think deeply!
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