The Question Most Teams Stop Asking by Week 11
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Click to watch (08:46) or scroll down to read more β Last week I wrote about why routines go stale β the "Binder Problem,β if you caught that one. New initiative, new binder, all potential. Then autopilot sets in and nobody notices the wear until it's falling apart. That's a real problem. But it's not the only reason 90-day pushes lose steam. There's a second failure mode, and it shows up right around the same time β week 9, 10, 11 β for a completely different reason. It's not that people stopped paying attention. It's that they stopped being able to answer a simple question: why does this matter? The Motivation Problem Nobody NamesHere's what it might look like from the inside: the tasks are still getting done. Nobody's visibly checked out. But if you asked someone, mid-sprint, "who actually benefits when this ships?" β you'd get a pause. Then something vague. "The roadmap," maybe. Or a shrug. That pause is the tell. Not laziness. Not burnout. People aren't connecting the dots between the work and what it's for. Some leaders might respond to this by trying to re-motivate β a pep talk, a reminder of the mission statement, maybe a slide with the company values on it. That rarely works, because the problem was never a lack of inspiration. It's that the connection between daily work and real impact has gone invisible over nine weeks of heads-down execution. The Experiment: The Invisible Impact MapExperiment #40 from Innovation at Work, The Invisible Impact Map, is designed for exactly this moment. Start with your team's current work β one specific project, not the abstract mission. Then trace it outward: who benefits? What changes because this exists? Go past the obvious answer. What actually does the work is asking the follow-up question: "What impact are we not measuring that we should be?" Include people you wouldn't normally think to name β the person three departments over who never has to deal with a problem because your team already solved it. The customer who never files a support ticket because the thing just worked. Draw it as a map, not a list. Let it branch. Put direct impact in the center, and ripples out from there. Why an Eighteen-Minute Map Actually Moves SomethingVisible impact isn't a nice-to-have β it's the thing that lets people make good trade-off decisions in the first place. A team that can see who benefits from their work makes different calls than a team that's just trying to close the ticket. Not because they're more virtuous. Because they finally have the information to optimize for the right thing. And it costs eighteen minutes. No offsite. No consultant. No pause in the actual work β it runs inside a planning session you're already having. Where I Am With This Right NowI'm currently mid-way through a multi-session engagement with a client team, working through this exact 90-day arc β and I'd bet real money that somewhere around week 9 or 10, this is the conversation that needs to happen. Not because the team's lost the plot. Because nine weeks of execution will quietly disconnect anyone from the "why," no matter how good the "what" is. Try This This Week.Pick one project on your plate right now. Give yourself eighteen minutes. Draw the map β who benefits, what changes, what you're not measuring that you should be. If you want the full 90-day arc β all three phases, all twelve weeks β it's laid out start to finish in Innovation at Work. And if you're a VP or L&D lead sitting on a mandate and wondering how to run this with your actual team instead of just reading about it, that's what the 90-Day Practice engagement is built for. Build Your Innovation Muscle!Want more ready-made experiments to help your team build their innovation muscle? Grab the book! πClick here for more info πClick here for a free preview PDF πClick here to buy now on Amazon πClick here for a special Leadership Edition β available only on my website β which includes an exclusive 5-part βInnovation Leaderβs Edgeβ video series. Everything you need to run your first micro-experiment, get leadership buy-in, and build lasting innovation culture. Creatively yours, P.S. Three ways to go deeper this week: π Grab Innovation at Work β CLICK HEREβ ποΈ Book a free 30-minute Innovation Strategy Session β CLICK HEREβ π¬ Just hit reply and tell me who showed up on your impact map that you didn't expect Did someone forward this email to you? If you'd like more articles like this right in your own inbox, click here to subscribe!ββ |