Vary Your Perspective
Why you should look at your team in different ways
Hey there 👋
My name is Conor. I’m helping shape how teams work at Hugo, bringing together your meetings, notes, and tasks all in one place.
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We call our most important team meeting at Hugo a "HiLo. It’s short for high + low (Australians love to abbreviate things). We named the meeting this as a reminder to regularly look at the business from a lens of both high-level strategy and in-the-weeds detail. In short, we take a look at our organization from a variety of perspectives.
The format of the HiLo emphasizes an important point in planning and perspective: Your long-range vision should influence your quarterly goals, which in turn influence your weekly goals, and so on. It goes the other way too. What you do on any given day impacts and is impacted by what you do in a week. What you do in a week impacts your orientation for a month.
Here are a few other techniques you can implement to ensure your perspective is properly varied.
💀 Use a decaying plan
One strategy you may find useful in varying your perspective is to use a decaying plan. Don’t worry — it’s nowhere near as bad as it sounds.
When we’re planning for twelve months, for example, the first ninety days is well-defined. We have clear ideas, tactics, and experiments figured out. We outline the resources required and the outcomes we’re aiming for.
Our six-month plan, though, is about half as detailed. We know where we are headed — that’s necessary to continue where our ninety-day plan leaves off — but how we’re going to get there isn’t as clearly defined. It’s a vision at a lower level of fidelity. Then our twelve-month plan and beyond is primarily simply vision and direction. For smaller companies like us, twelve months is an eternity.
Ask yourself: Does your organization’s planning have the right level of fidelity for each time frame?
If not, you could be at a disadvantage — either spending too much time over-planning or putting yourself in a weak position for the future by under-planning.
🏡 Change your environment
Sometimes there’s no better way to change your perspective than to look at the same situation from a different physical position. Get away. Go for a walk. Take the team outside. Suddenly, you’ll see things very differently. There’s a psychological reason for this that has to do with habits and associations.
When you remain in the same environment, you are primed to think the same way and revert to habits that you have practiced in that environment.
But by shifting your body to something less familiar, you allow those habits to recede. The cues and contexts that normally influence your behavior are no longer present. Neither are your routines. This unlocks the brain and allows you to approach your thinking from a fresher perspective.
🌏 Leverage the diversity of your team
Varying your perspective isn’t necessarily only a function of whether you’re looking at things strategically, tactically, or in the details. It also has to do with whose perspective is being captured. Consider leveraging the roomful of perspectives that you have available to you more often.
🧠 Understand your perspective is limited
At times, you’ll need to challenge the facts and premises that have created your situation. What is actually a fact, and what is a belief? When you start to break down what you truly know, and what you think you know, the answers may be right in front of you.
Treating an assumption as fact can be a zero-multiplier in any situation. Everything that follows is premised on that “fake fact.” Acknowledge this and own it. If you don’t question or challenge your beliefs, they can disrupt your entire thought process.
Perhaps the most important perspective of all is the customer. Legend has it that at Amazon, there’s a rule that every meeting must have one empty chair. That chair embodies the customer. It serves as a constant reminder of the importance of looking at every decision from the customer’s point of view. If you have an extra chair (real or virtual) lying around, give it a go.
📚 Reads of the week
Learning, and Doing, Strategy
I enjoyed reading this post from my former colleague, Andrew Bartholomew on how to instill and reinforce strategic thinking in organizations. The top-down vs. bottoms-up paradigm is a useful way to think about things.
Hiring Your First Head of Marketing
This post from Helen Min is excellent, and a lot of the principles extend beyond marketing. Be patient with hiring a “Head of X” until you think deeply about some of these points.
Insist on Focus
Not a read, but worth sharing: Peter Thiel used to require employees to focus on one project, to the extent that he would only talk to them about that one thing. Without this focus, Rabois argues that we subconsciously substitute easier, yet less important problems and work on those instead.
Thanks for reading Future of Teamwork this week! Did anything stand out? I’d love to hear about it. Reply to this email or tweet at me and let’s chat 😁
Until next time,
Conor