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Objective Prioritization is Impossible

The prioritization of anything complex must be a collaborative process.

According to Dictionary.com, the first two definitions of priority are listed as:

  1. The state or quality of being earlier in time, occurrence, etc.
  2. The right to precede others in order, rank, privilege, etc.; precedence.

We use the term a little differently in the software development industry.

In our world, prioritization is –

The art of combining everything we think we know about the past with the fixed resources we have right now to predict the order in which to do things to improve our collective future.

It is complicated, imperfect, and messy. The most powerful prioritization schemes are those which align our teams and empower them to make better decisions.

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Great Visions Unlock Human Potential

Getting the Vision Right is Hard Work – But It’s Vital to Team Success

A great vision is one that unlocks human potential and creativity by painting a clear picture of what is possible. Stewarding, adapting, and continuously refining the product vision is the top priority of successful leaders because it is a key driver of the organization’s strategy.

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Where Are The Innovations?

In this blog, ITX EVP of Innovation Sean Flaherty explores where innovation comes from, obstacles that stand in its way, and a simple technique you can share with your teams today for capturing ideas that lead to more innovations.

This blog is a refreshed version of the original, which was first published February 15, 2022, on Medium.

 

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When Teams Celebrate Constructive Feedback, They Win

I was recently given some amazing feedback on a talk that I gave to a group of CEOs in Oklahoma. I took too long and added too many details to my opening story before I explained the context and reason for the story. The CEO who provided the feedback was lost and found himself wondering where I was going. He found himself wandering off. I sometimes get lost in the story when I am speaking and often lose track of my audience. It is not good.

That feedback caused me to seriously revamp the opening of my speech, starting with some direct context early on in the speech. The last couple of talks I gave since the revamp were markedly better and gained more powerful, early engagement from the CEO groups. I was able to turn that feedback into gold immediately. In my early business career, that would not have been the case for me. This is the result of learning how to celebrate feedback when I get it. (p.s. I sent the CEO a small gift to thank him in this case.)

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Setting Objective Measurements Growth

One day, I had a good friend call my cell and say, “I need a team that can pick up the pieces from another vendor. I need help getting these small features out the door in three months or I’m going to lose my job. Can you help me?” For context, the teams I work with have been building software products for two and a half decades and this has happened on more than a few occasions. This time, my team had worked on this technology platform before, and, represented confidently that they would be able to knock the project “out of the park.” Everyone on my team expressed confidence that this was a no-brainer. You might guess where this is going next.

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The Relationship Ladder

On the island of Oahu in Hawai’i is a beautiful, dormant volcanic mountain with a huge crater called Koko Head. On the South slope of the mountain is a challenging hike called the “Stairs of Doom.” The trail is made up of a series of railroad ties from the base of the cone, at almost sea level, that ascends to 885 feet at the summit. It was built to be a short military cog railway for moving munitions and people to the top of the crater to defend Hawai’i during World War II. When you get to the top of what feels like a giant ladder, no matter how good of shape you are in, you are sweating buckets from the hard work. It pays off, however, in a magnificent 360 degree collection of spectacular vistas. To the East, you can see Hawai’i Kai. It includes a bay with cerulean blue water and looking South, the equally impressive Hanauma Bay crater lies below. Inside the Koko Head crater to the North is a botanical garden with spectacular fauna. Relationships are similar; They take work, purposeful investment, and they are built one step at a time.

Building Relationships

If you are fortunate, you have formed a handful of brilliant, life-long relationships with people in your life. My best friend from elementary school is a trusted advisor to me whenever I need a little honest kick-in-the-butt or have some good news about my life to share. While months may go by without seeing each other, when we do get together, we don’t miss a beat. It feels as though we were hanging out just yesterday. Consider your own friendships for a moment. How did those relationships form? Sometimes there is immediate chemistry, but in my experience, the real power in the relationship came after a long period of time that included many serial experiences. Strong, resilient relationships have ups and downs and take some amount of conflict with the commensurate resolution to become strong. All relationships, good and bad, are formed, over time and through steps.

 

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5 Dysfunctions of Using Profit As Your Only North Star Metric

A Momentum-Based Mathematical Tool To Assess Your Blindspots.

A Momentum-Based Mathematical Tool To Assess Your Blindspots. The best teams, who perform with precision, purpose, and efficiency emanate vitality and optimism. These teams universally have great clarity of vision, intrinsic motivation, confidence in the competence of their team, and the proficiency that comes from their ability to execute well together. I call this combination of four leadership levers (vision, motivation, execution, and capabilities), The Momentum Framework. It is represented by a bounded four-quadrant model that represents an organization’s inputs, outputs on the horizontal, and its strategy and tactics on the vertical. When a team is firing on all four of these cylinders, pulling on all four of these levers, it manifests in clarity, creativity, adaptability, and proficiency (represented in the diagram by the orange arrows).

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Diagnosing Leadership

A Momentum-Based Mathematical Tool To Assess Your Blindspots.

A Momentum-Based Mathematical Tool To Assess Your Blindspots. The best teams, who perform with precision, purpose, and efficiency emanate vitality and optimism. These teams universally have great clarity of vision, intrinsic motivation, confidence in the competence of their team, and the proficiency that comes from their ability to execute well together. I call this combination of four leadership levers (vision, motivation, execution, and capabilities), The Momentum Framework. It is represented by a bounded four-quadrant model that represents an organization’s inputs, outputs on the horizontal, and its strategy and tactics on the vertical. When a team is firing on all four of these cylinders, pulling on all four of these levers, it manifests in clarity, creativity, adaptability, and proficiency (represented in the diagram by the orange arrows).

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Optimize for Team Flow To Spark Creativity

Authentic, self-determined loyalty only occurs after hard-earned, authentic trust is well established. This is true for interpersonal relationships just as it is for the relationships between customers and firms or between employees and firms. Trust is always a fundamental prerequisite to loyalty. If you are serious about earning sustainable and authentic loyalty, you must have established an authentic and thorough foundation of trust.

Once you have gained trust, the next natural step in your customer relationships is loyalty. The “buy 12 cups of coffee and get the 13th cup free” type of loyalty behaviors some companies use to bribe through discounts or freebies are not sustainable. You have to keep giving the discounts to continue to get the behaviors. The type of blind loyalty demanded by drug warlords or mafia boss “leaders” who use fear, manipulation or outright bribery is generally feigned as well. When a more powerful, more frightening or higher paying leader comes along, loyalty is quickly questioned.

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Teams That Grow Together, Flow Together

One of the greatest teams I ever worked with delivered some amazing, impactful software for a small scrappy startup. We were building something amazing for the world and we knew it. Some of the technologies we worked with were cutting edge. Very few people in the world, at the time, had experience with some of these technologies and documentation was scarce. Our team had to figure a lot of things out and many mistakes were made. Additionally, when we started, we were working in a domain that we knew nothing about. We had to acquire both a tremendous amount of domain knowledge and the requisite technical skills in order to succeed together. The team had many ups and downs and overcame some incredible challenges. In the end, the company was successfully acquired by a multi-national, multi-billion dollar enterprise and their services were incorporated into their offerings.

The team learned at an incredible rate and was able to accomplish what felt like super-human things that none of us could have possibly accomplished on our own. If you have had this type of experience in your career, you know what a feeling it is to be a part of a team like this. It is amazing. Looking back, you will reflect on these experiences as the best working experiences of your life. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls these peak experiences for individuals “flow.” This concept of flow extends to high-performing teams. When a team of competent people “flow” together, creativity emerges and they thrive.

Your teams want to produce great things together. They want to build things that will change the world. Change that is worthwhile requires the coordination of many competent minds, communicating and cooperating at scale. Most teams that accomplish worthwhile things, however, don’t start out with all the knowledge required to succeed — they have to figure out how to get it. When equipped with a motivating, worthwhile vision and some initial skills and knowledge, teams learn together and innovate and deliver amazing things. The more they learn, the more they realize how much knowledge is out there that they will never know, but this shared quest is a powerful, creative force for change.

When you have the right people on your team, those who care deeply about solving the problems you intend to solve, they will crave the kind of work environment that pushes the limits of their creativity.

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