A (3:49)

Yeah. To give a little bit more specific of an answer than my first one, I do think what is worth figuring out or establishing very early on are the, the operating rhythm that allows you to channel tension into new things. So I would get your, your default operating rhythm up and running immediately. You know, some, some sort of cadence, regular cadence strategy conversations, a regular cadence on retros. To the extent that there's a group of people working on shared work together, which maybe if you're a very small new company, maybe it's just yourself, you know, doing like an action meeting for yourself every week where you're getting really clear on the work to get done. That rhythm in that basic form will serve you really well as you start to bump up against the pain of a growing organization.

B (4:37)

Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, you know, I'm obviously like operating Ride or Die. The three things that I don't understand how companies live without are some kind of Kanban board. Dude. When I'm in a company, when I'm working in a team, like especially like a leadership team and they don't have like a Kanban board to visualize their work, I'm like, how do you live your life? Like, I feel like I'm on a lot of teams between client teams and ready teams. And like the Kanban board is home. It's where I go to be like, what do we do now in this meeting? Like, what do we talk about here? And if we didn't have those things, not just for my own work, because frankly at this point in my career I have fewer projects on all of those boards than Everybody else, but, like, just to not lose the plot on context switching. I don't understand how people function without a Kanban board. Just like, make one. Just make one. Also, I can't live without a backlog, you guys. I could. We could talk about this forever, but got to have an opera them.

A (5:44)

Dangerous. Getting dangerously close to like a therapy session for you right now, Rodney.

B (5:48)

I know. I just. I can't stand it. I just can't stand. Makes me unwell. It makes me feel unwell. So you got to have a board. You got to have an opera them. And I think the lightest possible method for experimentation and probably the lightest possible method is some kind of proposal template. We talked about that in like, a very recent episode and I think we linked to one, a very light proposal template. Some way of the team consenting to those proposals. And like one column in that Kanban board where you're tracking live experiments so that you're not letting them become zombies. I think if you do three things, it should be those three things for like six months. Because I would tell you I have rushed to do strategy clarification with teams and found at the beginning they're so overwhelmed with the amount of work that they have going on that they can't do the strategy thing yet. Like, they don't have enough clarity and coherence as a group to name things. And we just have to sort of like get the house in order before we decide, like, what town we might want to move to and start looking at new houses.

A (7:04)

Yeah, I know I have strategy here as one of my points that I was going to make. And I actually agree with you because I think what I am referencing when I. When I say that strategy is worth kind of being a place where you do some initial work if you're using kind of the OS canvas as a lens, is that I think it's really important to build the muscle early that we're looking at the sky and that we're talking about it. So I think the incredibly detailed strategy work that a lot of organizations do by default or people have experience by default, especially early in an organization, not worth it. It's just. It's just fiction. But the practice of, like looking up at the sky and understanding what's going on and making sense of it and maybe making some hypotheses about how things are going to be affected, that I think should start as early as possible. And your organization.

B (7:51)

I totally agree. And even if it's, you know, we've talked about sky sensing before on this show, I was just in a Sky session yesterday at the Ready with the State of the Biz crew. And the thing that's so important about doing that work, about really looking at externalities and trying to sense the future, is, like, if you don't do it, you'll never get good at it. And, like, Mia is, like, really smart about how she designs and facilitates those sessions for us, our chief of staff. And one of the principles of those sessions is, like, us learning to become futurists. Like, of course, it's about sensing the market and understanding and adapting our strategy as a result of real data and trends. We're noticing and having a diversity of perspectives. But also the call to doing that work is get good at noticing what the fuck is going on and what's coming. And yesterday she had us, like, look back at sort of last month's trends and be like, how close were we? Where did we really miss? What did we really not see? I'm saying this just to double down on your point, Sam, that, like, people want to start with the plan, but actually getting really good at talking about the environment makes the planning a lot, a lot easier.

A (9:11)

Well, and the fact, too, that planning and strategy work are two different things in different conversations, which also, that, though.

B (9:18)

That I would say is not broadly understood.

A (9:20)

No, no, of course not. Yeah, I'm right there with you. And if you have been listening to the last three minutes and you're like, sky, what the hell are they talking about? You should go back and listen to the depth finding miniseries where we talk about depth finding and sky being the layer at the very top where all of the external stuff lives.

B (9:37)

Also, if you are someone who needs help with this, you should just hire us to do just a Sky session. Like, it's such a good. Everybody wants us to come and do a strategy session for them. And I get why. It's because they want an asset at the end that feels like now we're in control of our destiny. But actually, like, the sky thing is not that easy to do, especially if it's an atrophied muscle in your leadership team. Yeah. So, like, call us and let's do that.

A (10:03)

All right, that is it for this mini. If you've got a question of your own, hit us up@podcasttheready.com we will see.

B (10:11)

You back next week for a full episode of At Work with the Ready. Thank you for being a listener.