Replace Infinite Activity With Finite Productivity™.

Typical teams have a loose definition of "done." Typical teams drive their work via Infinite Activity.

Finite Productivity™ defines the finite set of decisions, expectations, and work required for repeatable success.

Too Many Verbs. Too Little Progress.

There Is a Time and Place for Exotic Vocabulary. Your Project Plan Is Not That Place.

Excessive verb variety in a project plan signals excessive improvisation, weak standardization, and micromanagement. It reinvents work instead of repeating success. Dozens of ambiguous verbs constitute Verb Sprawl™ in congested project plans. Coordinating this work becomes cumbersome, arbitrary, and prone to surprises.

Elegance converts Decision Traffic Jams into Decision Symphonies.

Teams often experience communication bottlenecks, hidden interdependencies, and stalled decision-making.

Teams have been encouraged to be fast and frequent. Decision Symphony™ helps teams make coordinated, timely, and dependable decisions.

The RACI matrix almost got it right but still harbors too much ambiguity. In your team’s formal planning, govern only what is worth documenting outside email, and nothing else. Govern with just Five Verbs: Draft, Review, Revise, Approve, Distribute.

Manage your team like a factory because you want discipline, predictability, rhythm. Manage like a factory because you care about speed, quality, and waste.

Surely some activities in your organization are important to measure. A scorecard captures the “Metrics That Matter” - Leading and Lagging. Historical, Current, and Target values.

Although your innovation team is not literally a symphony, you should manage it like one because you want all the same things: accountability, clarity, harmony, attention to detail, synchronization, forgiveness, and a great performance. The language, habits, and culture of making music form a Graceful Factory.

Verb Sprawl is a real problem that slows teams down. In planning your team’s work, instead of governing meetings or emails, govern what is worth documenting outside email. Govern with just Five Verbs: Draft, Review, Revise, Approve, Distribute.

Which of your culture traits can you trace to impacting your speed? Consider trust, ambiguity, interruptions, fatigue, burnout, bottlenecks, egos, hero mentality, simplicity, complexity, silos, bureaucracy, meeting gridlock, and email overload. Fix your culture. Fix your Speed.

Your organization might not literally be a factory, but you should manage it like one. You care about all the same things: speed, quality, waste, and more! Avoid abandonment and chaos. Pursue movement and rhythm in your methodology and culture.

Use Five Verbs to pace, synchronize, and assign building your project’s Asset Portfolio.

Every week, every team member should share a snapshot of their recent accomplishments and their near-future plans. “Manage up” without “kissing up.”