When I was a first-time founder, I was always focused on relentlessly moving forward. But I would often forget to pause and take stock. I later hired a more experienced executive to run a part of the business for me and he essentially became my chief of staff. For far too long, he would have to remind me at the end of meetings to do the steps below.
Here is the habit. Five minutes before a meeting ends, stop the agenda and ask three questions out loud.
- What did we decide? One sentence per decision. If the room can't agree on the sentence, it wasn't decided yet, and that's worth knowing before everyone leaves.
- Who owns each piece? One name per piece. "The team" is not an owner, and neither is "we".
- By when? A date, not "soon" or "next sprint".
If you're using a meeting notetaker, these get captured and recorded automatically. But if you're still operating analog, write the answers as three lines per decision and read them back before anyone stands up. Then send them by email or chat within the hour to everyone who was there, and to anyone who owns a piece but wasn't in the room. A line with no owner or no date is an open question, so send it as one rather than leaving it to drift.
It takes about five minutes at the end of the meeting and two minutes after it. The hard part is asking the second question out loud when it's awkward, which is usually when it matters most.
If you use Brief, it finds each commitment in that email or chat with its owner and date, and tells you when one goes quiet.
–Clint
What's on Larry's mind
The third Executive Intelligence Paper is called The Operator's Case.
It's about one person in your company. Sometimes they carry the title, and often they don't. They know what the leadership team decided last month, who took each piece, and which pieces have gone quiet. Most companies depend on that person and have never given them a system.
This year we asked a lot of executives, and the people who support them, to tell us about a commitment that slipped. Very few of the stories were dramatic. Most were an ordinary week: a call everyone assumed had landed, two reminders for one piece of work, and a question the team had settled coming back months later. Laid side by side, those weeks start to look like one week.
The essay walks through that week, and through the trackers these people build to survive it. Why those systems wear out is the part I'll leave for the essay.
Read The Operator's Case. If you're that person, or you work for one, I wrote it for you.
–Larry
Try this today: a Friday check on your team
Here's a question worth asking every Friday: what did each person on your team say they'd do, and what hasn't landed? Brief can ask it for you, on a schedule, and it takes one sentence to set up.
Open chat in Brief and send this, with your own team's names in it:
Every Friday at 2 PM, tell me what Dana, Marcus and Priya each committed to, one list per person, with what's still open at the top.
Brief turns that into an agent and shows it to you as a draft. Say yes and it starts running every Friday at 2 PM, your time. Unless you choose otherwise, the report arrives in your next daily brief. An agent can also report as its own email or as a push notification.
To change the day, the time or the wording later, open Agents and pick the agent. The pencil next to Trigger changes the schedule, and the one next to Prompt changes the question.
Several of you told us that clearing a long list one item at a time took too long, so we built a way to do it in one pass. If the report lists work you know is finished, open Commitments, Questions or Decisions, check the rows you're done with (shift-click selects a range), then choose Mark done for open commitments or Dismiss for anything you don't need to track. If some of the rows can't take that action, Brief shows how many. One Undo puts them all back.
–Zac
What did your first Friday check turn up?