TiER1 Performance We’ve heard many successful people say that writing down daily, weekly, or monthly intentions are a crucial part of setting yourself up for achieving, but we can also apply intention setting at the beginning of a project to help ensure its success.
Let’s start by answering two questions: What is intention, and how is it different from goal setting? Intention is a broader, more directional aspect of goal setting, while goals are what will help you meet an intention. For example, you may have the intention of inspiring leadership in your company, while one goal could be creating a leadership program for your top performers.
Setting intention is a great way to start a project. It begins with clearly understanding and framing the problem that you are trying to solve. This helps your team avoid veering off course onto side projects. Intention setting also requires true collaboration, where everyone impacted will have a chance to speak and be heard. It’s that type of deep collaboration that takes time in the planning stages but pays off when it comes to creating ideas and solving problems.
Here are some ways we’ve found helpful in starting a project with intention.
Do you have both decision makers and stakeholders at the table? Those considerations can have a positive impact on engagement and buy-in as it progresses. For us, it is critical that the stakeholders represent the audience and the decision makers.
Co-create a plan such as a blueprint or a tangible plan/graphic artifact that can serve as a guide for the months to come. When we truly start with a multi-level, cross-functional team, adoption happens the moment people see their ideas in the blueprint. That doesn’t mean everything is adopted in the blueprint, but in this process deep alignment occurs, which results in buy-in.
Finally, focus on what is going well when setting intention. It can be easy to focus on what is going wrong, but building solutions on elements that are working provides an easier way to build momentum and create additional buy-in.
There is an adage that says work takes as long as the time given for completion. When it comes to a project start, time can be a valuable asset in creating the space for focus on a project. Constricting the time spent on starting a project can make it better by spurring creativity and limiting outside distractions.
Consider blocking time for deep collaboration and avoid the 1-hour per week meeting trap. Deep collaboration often happens in hours and days, not in weeks and months. Think about the type of collaboration that occurs when a group is in a room together for a few hours, versus in one meeting a week for 8 to 12 weeks. For us, the impact of meeting in person over a longer period doesn’t match meeting in short bursts. Why? Because momentum is a big factor in successful collaboration.
While it may seem trite, open-mindedness is essential. Starting and keeping an open mind can be hard because we are human and have opinions, and our brains are full of cognitive biases. So, keeping our minds open for every voice and piece of data is essential. It’s something we must work at throughout the collaborative process, and the first step is awareness of its importance.
Embracing progress, not perfection, is also crucial when you realize the challenges we face don’t have a single, perfect answer. They’re often multi-variant. Seeking perfection can actually hold back a start or keep a project from ever getting off the ground. Complex challenges are hard to meet in a vacuum. Getting an idea or concept out to test is vital, and doing it quickly is even better. We always look for ways to quickly test and pilot ideas. Then when we hear from the market—a client, a consumer, an employee, or a teammate—it’s much easier to incorporate their feedback and make the idea even better.
Here are a couple of very tangible ways we’ve found to quickly jumpstart initiatives with intention: the Igniter and the D3 Accelerator. The Igniter is a very short, focused burst of activity with a variety of stakeholders. Its purpose is to provide lift and direction. Because an Igniter is brief—it doesn’t exceed two days—if we don’t like where we land, we haven’t lost a lot of time. It helps us test how well our problem has been framed and also starts to test the feasibility of our idea.
With its goal to discover, define, and design, our D3 Igniter enables us to discover possibilities, define success measures and guardrails, and then iterate through the design of a project start blueprint. Sometimes as a blueprint comes to life, we revisit the discovery and define stages. Our D3 process, which lasts four weeks, is iterative and fractal, both of which are immensely important for the comprehensiveness and the speed in which we can progress. Both of these methods rely on deep collaboration, a highly skilled facilitator, and the two critical mindsets mentioned earlier.
Whether you start with a framework or pave your own way, taking the time to identify your intention will go a long way in bringing your initiative to life.
To find out more about how you can leverage the power of an intentional start through a D3 Accelerator or Igniter, fill out the Let’s Talk form below and let us know what initiative you’d like to accelerate.