First, Agree on the Size of the Boat

I mentioned learning some things from Paul Hutchinson in Paul Hutchinson and The Truth Behind "It Depends". Another gem was "First, agree on the size of the boat".

Paul is a sailor and such metaphors pepper his talks. This gem dealt with organizing groups to achieve some purpose and their expectation of resources necessary to achieve that purpose.

Most people coming together in a group know what they want to achieve by taking part in the group. There's an expectation around what's mutually known, how the process works, ... They're all sailors on the same boat, so to speak.

Sometimes these goals are shared but the context is not the same. Example: We want to save the whales. Nice goal to share, but person A wants to do it by buying media time on all the networks for a half-hour spot on the sins of whale harvesting and person B wants to do it via a bakesale for GreenPeace. Same goal, wildly different contexts.

Something similar occurs when someone attends multiple meetings in one day. Let's say you'll be in meetings with people who want to increase profits. The morning meetings are with people who don't blanche at dropping several hundred thousand dollars to achieve a goal, the afternoon meetings are with people who carefully count pennies before going out to lunch.

Both groups want to increase profits and unless you retune before your afternoon meetings, you're out the door without knowing why. It's the same business problem with the same objective but the morning and afternoon groups have different resource pools and whether they realize it or not, different strategies are required.

So first get everybody to agree on the size of the boat, meaning make sure

• The strategy fits the resources,
• Everybody's using the same strategy,
• Everybody has the same goals for that strategy,
• Everybody is clear on the objective of that strategy,
• Everybody agrees on the available resources and
• Everybody agrees on how to allocate those resources to achieve the goal.

Well, yes, I did. But I never let my knowing something get in the way of learning more about it, or learning it at a deeper level. Getting everyone to agree on the size of the boat is something I do automatically and (literally) without thinking (someone phoned me after a meeting to congratulate me on how well I did this. I had to have them explain exactly what it was they thought I did). It's such a part of what I do that I no longer think of what I'm doing when I do it, which translates into "How come everybody doesn't already get this?" which translates into frustration when things mung up.

Paul's lesson was to bring this gem back into consciousness, giving me more flexibility and awareness in applying it.

Thankee, Paul.

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