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Getting Things Done
Ep. 299: GTD with Others
00:27:33
David Allen and Ed Lamont talk about the Team book, and doing GTD with other people, whether in a professional or personal setting. You can watch a video version of this conversation from November 2024 at . -- This audio is one of many available at...
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Transcript34 lines
- [00:10]
A
So getting things done has been around for. For quite a long time, and it's helped people like me. But now you guys are focusing on getting teams of people to work together in that GTD environment. And I really like how you built on the principles of GTD and really made the book special because it wasn't just talking about getting people to work together, but employing the concepts that we know work. So people have been working in groups for a really long time. Has that environment all 300,000 years, by.
- [00:47]
B
The way, as we know from the Neanderthals.
- [00:51]
A
So it may catch on. So what's been the obstacle for. For teams working successfully together?
- [01:00]
B
That's a really good question, Ed.
- [01:03]
C
I think the. The mostly it kind of works. It really only becomes obvious to us when it doesn't. Right. So one of the things that. That occurred to me, I don't know, when it was weeks, a couple of months ago, was that humans working together, it is as natural as us sitting around a fire chatting about the day's events, right? Like that. There's something that's really very, very comfortable about that. Like, we need to do it right. We don't thrive alone as humans. So a lot of the time it does work. I think part of it is just that the environments in which we are now collaborating are much more pressured than they've ever been before. So, you know, if you're moving slowly through the savannah and you're, you know, solving occasional small problems as you do that with your teammates, tribe mates, whatever, that's one thing. If you're doing that under, you know, tremendous pressure for quarterly targets, it's a different thing altogether. And so it's a bit like in David's first book. I mean, if you've read the book, obviously, and you've seen that we did build on the first book because the first book was built on principles, so it made sense to continue to do that. In David's first book was this idea that people don't even go looking for something like GTD unless they're moving fast. And that's probably true for teams, too, is that the people who need what's in this book most are the ones who are trying to move fast and finding that they're doing stupid things that are getting in the way.
- [03:00]
B
And they don't know they're stupid. So that's the biggest hindrance is the fact that people are just in their comfort zone about how they work with other people, especially in the team context. And so there's a big issue there about Wait, how do you change that? Is it optimal? And many of them, I don't know. I'm, I'm going to give an intuitive guess here. 90% of teams are suboptimal in terms of what they could be doing if they had the right principles. And I'll be bold enough to say what Ed and I produced is a manual that has never been done before about what are all the best practices of high performance healthy teams. Not just high performance teams, but teams that are healthy, that are not burning people out. They're reproducible, they're sustainable in terms of their practices, in terms of what they're doing. But that's an, that's, that's a new need now because of all of the stuff that's changed in the world in the last decade or so.
- [04:12]
A
Well, you both are very successful in working with groups and teaching people how to work better together and be more productive. But how did you come to this knowledge? I mean, when you set forth to write this book, I mean, what were the principles that you wanted to emphasize and how did you know they were going to work for teams?
- [04:36]
B
I'll, I'll hand this to Ed. I'll toot his horn for a little bit because he's probably in the last decade been much more involved than I have with senior teams who have had some experience with GTD and the basic principles of that, and then watched how osmotically that affected their culture. And, you know, we had not been able to objectify or identify that. And Ed came along and, you know, I said, you know, come on, Ed. Actually, he told me, he said, look, David, I think we need to codify what actually is working here as opposed to just having it be ad hoc and, and whatever. So Ed, fill in the blanks on that.
- [05:24]
C
Sure. So, I mean, this is not something that we have, have invented again, Right. This is, we've gone into the world and gone what's working and, and tried to distill that in a way that makes it easy for people to do their own version of it. Right. So what if you. I haven't read. If you're listening to this and you haven't read the book, what you won't find is a recipe which says, you know, you need to do two parts of X and three parts of Y and then stir and you'll get exactly. It's. It's more like, here are some things that you need to consider and you need to develop your own version of that because that version will be much more sticky for you. And your teammates than if we try and impose an alien structure onto your team. Right. You as a team can make decisions that will stick much longer than if David and I throw in some ideas from consultants who live on the other side of the planet. So that was the process. The process was to go out into the world and to ask questions. What is working on your team? What are the principles behind what's working on your team? And then using those principles and examples to illustrate, we've tried to create a menu of options that people can go through and look at. Well, know what isn't working worst. What, what is working worst on our team? Where do we want to start first in terms of trying to make things work a little bit better? Because if you try to do everything, you'll probably break your team. Yeah, that's just not smart. You want to pick, you know, two or three things that are, you know, the major pain points, try to ameliorate them, gain some speed, and then move on to the next things.
- [07:20]
B
The problem is, Dave, and you can speak from your own experience, you've been on many teams, is that most teams think the way they're doing, what they're doing is just the way things are done. And they just don't know that there's a whole nother avenue or opportunity, you know, for them to do things differently. So they're in their comfort zone that people are, are okay to come to meetings late. They're okay to have, you know, 14, you know, digital products in the middle of the room as opposed to focusing on what's going on, you know, and, and having a non clear purpose about the meeting and having no discussion about what we just decided who's doing it. So these are like duh kind of stuff. But there are a lot of teams that just do that because that's what they've always done. And they just assume that's way it is. And then they hate going to meetings.
- [08:21]
A
Right. And, and meetings get a bad rap because of that. And. But let me go back to something you said earlier, David. I mean, if people are, you use the word stupid. If people don't understand that there is a better way short of discovering this book. I mean, like if, if I brought you in to meet with my team, you might see things so differently, Ed, as you pointed out, than, than the reality of knowing what makes things work better. I mean, how do you start, how do you begin to convince people that there is a better way?
- [08:55]
C
I mean, it, it's, it's challenging. I think you, you if you were going to go into the principles of the book, that would form probably part of, of some process of building a mission vision and starting to articulate, well, what do we want here? Analysis of, you know, what is making you extremely frustrated on this team. So it's a combination, I always think in any developmental process, it's a combination of increasing the pain of what's not working by, by increasing awareness. Right. Because you can go for a long time, as David says, doing the wrong things, thinking that's just the way that it needs to be, and then increasing the pain again by creating some vision of what we think is possible. And if you're stuck in the middle there, that's not comfortable anymore. So people are going to want to start to move. It was very, very surprising to me when I started my, my journey as a, a baby consultant back in the day that I couldn't just walk in and make things better. Right. We, we kind of have to walk in, make things worse, at least to increase the perception of how bad things are in order for anybody to want to do anything differently. When you, when you asked earlier about the kind of, the main obstacles, I think there's, there's two that are, are quite meta. David's just articulated one which is, you know, this is just the way it is and it can't get any better. Just like, you know, someone who's become very out of shape, like, this is just the way I am. Right. But that's not to say that they can't get into shape. That's, that's all, all to play for. The other thing that I think is, is a real obstacle to, to change in, in, in, in a team is respect. And it's, you know, meetings are a really great example. Right. Because the only way that you can allow your meetings to be bad time after time after time is if you have a lack of respect for your own time and you have a lack of respect for everybody else in the room. Time. Right. If that changes and you get a heightened awareness of the cost of your time and what it means to waste it, then you will stop. Almost, you know, naturally stop. You will start to bang your fist a little bit to not in a bad way, but in a good way to demand a higher standard from the people that you're interacting with.
- [11:35]
A
Yeah. And I know of some cultures where meetings become the only way anything can get done. I mean, and inappropriate meetings, I mean, somebody will call a meeting and there's no agenda or, or, you know, a lot of what is being accomplished in that meeting could have been done in an email. And, and so I think that that kind of push and pull also enters into it, doesn't it?
- [12:02]
C
For sure, for sure. If, I mean, I've worked, done some work with the government here. The departments will remain nameless, but it literally was the only way that they could get things done because people weren't paying attention to their email. So they would have to call meetings with 15 or 20 people in order to make decisions. And you know, most of those people didn't really need to be in the meeting, but they didn't want to miss the meeting. And the people who were calling the meeting didn't want to make anybody angry by not inviting them. It was, and this was hour after hour, which of course leads back into being unable to handle your email because you're always in a meeting. I mean, it was. Yeah.
- [12:50]
A
So since COVID more and more teams are meeting like we are via Zoom, which I think adds a whole new set of challenges for getting teams to work together for. Or is it the same concept or opportunities, actually. Okay, explain that.
- [13:14]
B
Well, we, we're all online right now and on screen, so you can't sort of hide and you can't sort of deny or, or ignore a, a key question that's brought up and they're asking, hey, Ed, what do you think about this? Hey Dave, you know, come on, tell me, give me your point of view about this. So the fact that in a way it more democratized, in a way, meetings and, and people's contribution in it now, that's kind of rare where that really works well, because for all the other reasons you guys have mentioned, but it is possible. So you can't, you can't deny the tech, the, the, the improvement the technology has, has given us. Come on, if you know what you're doing, it's a great time to be alive that we can do this. You know, Dave, you're in the Midwest, Ed's in London, I'm in Amsterdam. The fact that we can even have this conversation, it, you know, was not possible really 20 years ago.
- [14:26]
A
Right.
- [14:26]
B
So, so, so we have the opportunity as a team, as a group to, to really focus on what we need to do. But somebody needs to be managing this. Somebody needs to have some idea of what even why are we here, what are we trying to do and so forth. So what the technology has done is really bring to the fore the necessity for a lot of these principles that Ed and I put, put in the book. What's the purpose? What's the purpose of the meeting, you know, can we, in the end, the meeting with clear agendas, clear outcomes, clear decisions about what we need to do. So it, it, it's made things more transparent, but it's also made some of the unconscious stuff more transparent too.
- [15:18]
C
I mean, I think, I think there is a huge opportunity once one starts to look for the opportunity in the technology and not to consider it as the only technology. It's building on the shoulders of various other technologies, none of which necessarily have to disappear, but each of which has a specific use. And this is one where, you know, this geographical transparency for us to put our brains together is an amazing thing. I think if you're a team and you're working with a dispersed workforce, then the principles that are, you know, we've articulated in the book are even more important than they are if you're sitting together. Because when you sit together there's a lot of things that, that kind of happen naturally, organically, in the way that they have for 300,000 years. Right. Whereas if you are not conscious of those things and what might be missing, it'll be much more glaringly obvious, particularly around things like how do I build a culture with a group of people who are living in geographically disparate locations? Because they never come together, they don't sit together, they don't get to have that chit chat thing that goes on. They need to be much more conscious about how they build the way that they do things together because the feedback loops are, you know, non existent unless you make sure that they, they exist.
- [16:58]
B
So yeah, there are some cultures where speaking up, you know, sort of in contrast to the authority, it's just not appropriate. They won't do it. So, you know, you're, you're going to have to deal with a lot of the new world is that that virtuality and that globality of, of what people are trying to deal with brings up a lot of subtle stuff that makes it difficult to implement the, these best practice principles.
- [17:31]
A
So does the success of a team rest solely, or maybe solely isn't the right word. Does it rest more heavily on the leader of that team than the members of the team?
- [17:46]
C
No, I don't think so. I think the leader in what we've described, the leader needs to be on board, but the leader doesn't necessarily need to lead. They need to, you know, kind of be okay with the team beginning to articulate. I mean, let's just say if, if we talk about culture again, because I think that that's one of the things. One of the big things that you're playing for when you. You have a hybrid or geographically dispersed team is, you know, how do we build a culture? Because as David's noted, you know, the, the culture of doing various things in Mexico is very different than in America, is very different than in Africa. And if you've got people who are from all those locations on your team, then the team actually needs to articulate for itself how are we going to do that? And the more detail that's there, the better, actually. So that people can. They just know. They join the team and they know how to perform on the team. Yeah, I think that that's important. And then the kind of the default setting is that while the leader has to police everything, and that's just a bad idea because then the leader becomes kind of like daddy or mommy. And what's actually needed is for the team itself to say, look, we agreed. Now that's going to require the leader to actually walk the talk on what those agreements were, because they don't want to get. No one will bust them if they don't do it, because everybody's got, you know, their little, you know, what, whatever that power dynamic thing going on. But if they're walking the talk and somebody else doesn't, it's not up to them to bust them. It's up to the team to say, hey, we didn't agree that.
- [19:39]
A
But, but, but some members of a team might be very uncomfortable with raising that concern. I mean, if you're, if you're a member of a team that you perceive as largely dysfunctional, I mean, how do you handle that?
- [19:55]
C
That's the subject of another book that David and I will not be writing.
- [20:01]
B
Well, that has a lot. Yeah, Dave, that has a lot to do with sort of interpersonal dynamics, you know, and charisma and collaboration and whatever. And that's not our. That's. That's not what we chose to address. We chose to address the mechanics, actually, the relatively simple mechanics of how teams communicate, work together, make agreements, et cetera. That if that's not handled well, that creates all kinds of confusion and all kinds of. Of junk, you know, in terms of the team focusing on what it really ought to be focused on. So we tried to handle the mechanics. And when I say the mechanics, that's not a simple thing. You know, as. As Ed and I have said that, look, this is not easy. It's simple, but it's not easy to make sure your meetings start on time, that nobody brings more than one digital device to the meeting, if any. You know, those are, those are simple standards that a team leader must then model hold as a standard, whatever. So it's not about anyway, so it's, it's, it's more subtle and simple than you would think.
- [21:27]
C
And I think if you do these things, you'll have less team dynamics to worry about. Right, but, but frankly, there is no accounting for a psychopath on your team.
- [21:41]
A
Right?
- [21:43]
C
There is a certain percentage of humanity that are psychopaths and they're, they're out there, they walk among us. They're not all serial killers, but if you've got one on your team, then we're not the, you know, we think our stuff will help you, but you may need to get other resources involved at that point.
- [22:02]
B
And if you don't know what the purpose of your team is, your team was created two years ago and it's not needed anymore. But they're still meeting every Monday.
- [22:11]
A
Oh yeah.
- [22:12]
B
Like, why? So, so there are a whole lot of, you know, simple ideas and simple directions and simple focuses that could make a huge difference in terms of whether a team should exist, how it should exist, and how it could be successful.
- [22:30]
A
So if we are a new team and we're meeting here on Zoom for the very first time, what are those agreements? What's the first step of our conversation to ensure that we will be successful?
- [22:45]
C
I think, you know, if, if we wanted to move fast, then I would suggest we just get rolling with some of those things that are, we've lined out in the book. We've outlined in the book, you know, what's our purpose? These are, these are conversations that I think we want to iterate over time and not try to do, you know, the two to three day off site as, you know, we've done, I think all of us have probably done at some point in the past where we try and come up with some perfect formulation. But just need, we need a starter set of, of things that look like purpose, that look like, where are we going? How are we going to do what we decided we wanted to do together? We need it, you know, we need at least a sketch of that. We need to get a sketch of. You're doing this, I'm doing that, he's doing this, she's doing the other. And then we go and then, you know, regularly. Some teams choose to do it in every meeting. Some teams choose to do it, you know, monthly or quarterly. We need to examine how we're performing and have some kind of learning loop around. Well, this, this Worked, this didn't. Why did this work? What can we replicate? What do we need to document about that so that we don't have to learn it again? What didn't go so well? Is there anything we need to clean up about that? And now that we know why it didn't work, how can we document that so that when all of us are gone and there's a whole bunch of new recruits in, they can learn from our experience? I mean, this is, this is the stuff that gets missed because we're moving too fast to simply, you know, take whatever it is, two to five minutes to make some record of what it was that we decided and why so that other people can profit from our experience.
- [24:47]
D
I'd like to give a short message to those of you who've been participating and playing with GTD Connect for a while and sort of remind you that all of us with this GTD methodology and this set of practices go through cycles. You know, I still go through cycles myself initially. There's, there's kind of the inspiration and, and there's a lot of material to ingest and to get familiar with. And so people oftentimes, when they first come onto Connect, are just potentially overwhelmed by how much information there is. In a way, it's just a huge library where we've been able to archive so much different information from so many different perspectives and people and points of view and so understood that it's like walking into a library going, gee, where do I start? So that's oftentimes the initial phase of this and many people after a year or two, you know, probably get on some level or some plateau where they go, well, I kind of got it now, I've got my system set up and everything's fine and I'm fine tuning. And you may find yourself at that point also finding yourself saying, gee, I'm now becoming a resource of this methodology for people around me, you know, people asking me for assistance and help in this. And we've seen in the forums a number of people now sharing ideas about how to get your teams more involved or families more involved with this information. So some of that information is in there as well. But I think you'll find yourself going through cycles of this and you may find that much like if you've ever read a software manual. I remember when I read, when I learned Microsoft Word to begin with, for instance, I read the manual, wow, this is really cool. And I started to use the tool and didn't need the manual anymore. As a matter of fact, A good example of that right here. The manual for this camera that's taking this picture right now. Initially, I read this, Got it all set up. That's really cool, and that's really fine. And so pretty much everything was onto cruise control. I didn't need to go back to my library to make this really work. And then, of course, as I started to get more sophisticated in terms of the stuff I wanted to do, got more inspired about some things I saw other people are doing. I go, how do I do that? Went back to the manual. Oh, God, I didn't realize I could do that. I didn't realize I could do that. And I remember at least two or three iterations of going back to Microsoft Word back in the days when there actually was a manual for that, as opposed to just all online and realizing, oh, my God, I didn't realize that. Oh, I could do that now. I could do that now. And I think that's what you might find with Connect, too, is that it's a gold mine of stuff. Well, many people have read getting things done, you know, more than three or four times, and every time they read it, they get something new out of it. So I think you may find Connect the same way and probably even easier, because, hey, it doesn't take much to just click on, surf around, see what might be new or what might be of interest to you, and pay attention. You know, there's more than meets the eye in there.