The Agreement Factory
Your organization might not feel like a factory, but you should manage it like one because you care about all the same things. If your team fights a lot, it’s a disagreement factory. If your team works well together, you’re an Agreement Factory.
You might produce pizzas, patients, or baseball games. Your e-commerce business might churn out overnight stays, ride shares, or electronic payments. Whatever you produce, you care about speed, quality, waste, variability, automation, autonomy – all aspects of a factory.
Not only are your operations a factory – your innovation team is a kind of factory. The speed, quality, waste in your innovation work matter, too. Instead of pizzas, what does your innovation team continually produce?
Your team has a lot of meetings, so you might feel like a meeting factory. Your team has a lot of email, so you might feel like an email factory. But 1-2 years from now, what is not going to be valuable are simple, thoughtless outputs of meeting gridlock and email overload:
Memories of what was said in a meeting
Meeting minutes
Email threads where team members are typing at each other
Meeting and email factories promote tribal knowledge and unsustainable communication patterns. Meetings and emails aren’t going away, but they aren’t the factory you want to emphasize.
Are you a software factory? Surely you make software changes with some frequency, so yes, you are a software factory. In fact, if your innovation team follows the Agile Manifesto religiously, you favor working software over comprehensive documentation. You de-emphasize documentation upstream from code. This also promotes tribal knowledge, undermining the future team.
Although documentation has fallen out-of-favor over the past couple decades, there is a robust argument to defend documentation. But this blog post proceeds with the understanding that documentation is a good thing. Once you know what to document, agreeing on the contents of the documentation is a good thing. In fact, this is the factory we need to embrace. Everything you do and collaborate warrants documentation.
If you disagree, instead of contributing to documentation, you might be assigned to just talk to yourself alone in a corner, and no one is ever going to stop you. Don’t lower your value like that. Everything you do and contribute to is worth putting on paper, and it’s worth the team’s collaboration. This documentation is outside email. The team, maybe with a tiebreaker’s help, is called the Agreement Factory.
Your innovation team produces agreements. You agree on priorities, features, processes, training materials, assignments, and numerous things. A healthy team is an agreement factory. A dysfunctional team is a disagreement factory.
This agreement factory is a kind of conveyer belt. The conveyer belt has four stations and Five Verbs. With the discipline in language, you could refer to it as The Ruthless Factory. The outputs of the Ruthless Factory comprise your Asset Portfolio.