One of my most valuable lessons in communications came from a graduate course in philosophy. Each week we had to read the major writing of a medieval philosopher. These were weighty tomes, sometimes running to a thousand or more pages. And each week we had to write a two page paper that summarized the work.

I would start by writing fifteen or twenty pages, then cut those pages down to ten, then reduce those to five, until I finally succeeded in writing two pages that captured the core ideas. In the process of reading I had absorbed much. It was in the process of reflecting and writing that I truly began to comprehend. And it was in the process of distillation – of choosing what to leave in and what to leave out – that I actually learned something that made an impact. That process of absorption, comprehension, distillation was time-consuming and difficult, but it taught me an incredibly important skill that I have continued to hone, practice and rely upon all my life. I learned how to render the fat out of a bloated body of words and ideas, how to untangle a jumble of facts and opinions, how to extract from too much information something meaningful and memorable.

“For the first time in human history, any person can get ahold of almost any piece of information they want at a time and place of their choosing. The world is becoming much more Digital, Mobile, Virtual, Personal. DMVP.

Everything physical and analog is becoming digital. Everything can connect to a mobile device. What was once done in person can now be done virtually. The individual decides what, when, who and how in this newly personal world. Each of us has more information, greater control and higher expectations.”

-Carly Fiorina (circa 2001)

“Culture” is often a loaded term and means many different things to different people in different contexts. In an organizational or team context, “culture” is often diminished as something for the HR team to worry about. Or perhaps it’s viewed as very important, as in the focus on building diverse, equitable and inclusive cultures. Here’s the truth: no matter how people view the term, as unimportant or all-important, and no matter how people interpret the word in their context, an organization’s or team’s “culture” is defined by the realities of “what’s it like to work around here.”

What’s it like to work around here? Who gets promoted? Who gets listened to? Who sits at the table? Who does most of the talking? How do decisions get made? Who makes them? How do people communicate? With whom and when? What happens when someone makes a mistake? What happens when something goes wrong? What, and who, gets celebrated? How do people interact?

If you’ve read the last three newsletters, you have learned about three critical pitfalls that prevent people and organizations from getting it done.

To avoid the last pitfall, you will have to get real about all that you are trying to get done. If you’ve chosen your goals well and articulated your future state effectively, you and your team are probably excited about what you’re trying to achieve. That’s a great thing because enthusiasm and excitement are motivational; they can yield greater productivity. However, it’s also true that, when people get excited and enthusiastic, they can also get unrealistic.

They forget that people are human; that they aren’t always performing at their peak; that unforeseen events may cause them to have to deviate from their plans; that other things may be going on.

So far, we’ve discussed two pitfalls that prevent organizations and people from getting things done – first, they get stuck in the status quo. They get trapped in “how we’ve always done things.” Or second, they manage to break through the status quo, but they get so excited about all the different opportunities to change things for the better that they try to do too many things all at once.

If you manage to shake yourself and your team loose from the status quo and you prioritize your most important tasks, you’re halfway there. But this is where we sometimes fall into pitfall #3 – we don’t approach our most important goals systematically. We don’t take the time to think through our strategy to achieve each goal, who should be responsible for what, or how we will know if we’re making progress.

If this sounds familiar to you, you’ve probably been introduced to the Leadership Framework. The Leadership Framework is a tool I’ve used in many settings throughout my career to avoid this pitfall of incompleteness – of missing things.

The second pitfall to getting things done is that people try and do too much at once; they don’t undertake the discipline of prioritization and they get overwhelmed making a little bit of progress on a whole bunch of different things – instead of making a lot of progress on a few, key things.

When you try and do too much, you don’t actually get anything done well. 

First, in last week’s newsletter we discussed how to avoid getting stuck in the status quo and one key was to envision the future state and create a list of your goals. Now, for just a moment look back at your list of goals in your future state. If you were limited to just three goals that you would pursue today, which three would you choose? 

Take a moment to write those three goals down.