Naomi Gleit: belief

Transcript context

…I love this. If you come into a that you've given that's really gnarly and complex, what do you find are the first couple things you do that make a big dent on helping everyone align and understand what happens, what they should be doing and what they should be prioritizing? A lot of times I'm simplifying. A lot of times there isn't a canonical doc and so I'll go through the process of creating that, but I think that really falls under the simplification thing. I often go into a project, everyone's operating at a PhD level, I'm coming in at a kindergarten level, and so I need to understand... It's almost like all of this complexity we're at a PhD level, I need to create the curriculum, go back to basic building blocks for the kindergarten level, how do I explain that and understand this project at a kindergarten level. It doesn't mean I want to oversimplify, that's not what a simplifier does. They're not oversimplifying, but what they are doing is identifying the most basic building blocks of a complex problem and then unfolding, or revealing or building on top of them additional complexity and details as you go along. And so sometimes I talk about a school pyramid, but I need to establish the kindergarten curriculum and then the elementary school curriculum and then the high school curriculum and then the college curriculum, and then we can operate at the PhD level. But oftentimes people on the project are at really different levels of understanding or complexity. And until we have what we call the school pyramid, the curriculums for every level of the project, it's really hard to make progress. A lot of times that process of simplification will often identify what are the most important things to deal with on the project. And so what I'm hearing is when you come into a project and the way you simplify is you start putting together a doc that describes these things you're talking about, here's the work streams, here's the owners, here's the process, here's our canonical meeting style, and that reveals here's what matters most and where there's confusion.…

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