Change Work Is Strategic Work

How much time do you spend each week working through the important, deep, and future-building work? How much time could have been spent on the significant, strategic change work that often gets lost — either in routines or in the swirl of urgent items that seem to appear out of nowhere?

Take a minute to look back at your schedule over the last few weeks if you really want to get a clear picture.

Chances are you’ve been caught up in a strategic-routine-urgent logjam. 

If you’re seeing this play out on your schedule, consider the compound effect of this playing out across your team – those four to eight people you spend 80% of your working time with.

When you look at teamwork, you’ll find that collaboration mostly falls into one of three buckets: 

Strategic work: work that is longer term and catalytic for an important objective or issue

Routine work: tasks that pop up regularly, such as weekly reports

Urgent work: time-sensitive and important tasks

We can’t control the urgent things that come up, and hopefully the routines we have in place are set up to support those moments when they arise. Where things tend to get slippery though is how we spend the time we have (or think we have) for that important, future-building strategic work.

Why “Two Weeks From Now” is Closer Than You Think

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the “father of flow,” once wrote about how, if you look at your schedule from two weeks ago, unless you make specific, instrumental changes during your week, your schedule two weeks from now is probably going to look the same. 

We have this myth in our brains that two weeks from now is wide open. That we don’t have to worry about it now because in the future we’ll have the time.

Except… it’s not really that open, not when you think about it. 

At the team level, you’re rolling in routine stuff, things you know are just gonna happen, but they still take up time to do. And there’s probably going to be something that’s urgent, right?

And that’s not even counting meetings, which usually fall into the routine bucket, but require urgency every so often. 

So how much time do you actually have for the future building work? Time to:

• dream up the next product offering?
• dig into that deep problem or question that’s been nagging you?
• plan an approach to that opportunity you’re trying to advance?

When I’m consulting on strategic planning with a client, one of the first things I’ll come in and say is, “What’s our actual capacity for change here?” 

I’m not talking about the emotional capacity, which is also important, but what is the actual capacity on schedules? 

Prioritization and the People it Impacts

This is where the disconnect often comes in on teams. Managers and leaders expect a lot more of the strategic future building work to happen. That’s natural — we (hopefully) take pride in our roles and company vision, aiming to elevate what we stand for, and push our boundaries beyond the limits of success.

However, most managers and leaders don’t have a firm grasp of how the routine tasks and the urgent stuff dominates the team structure.

If the routine tasks and urgent work items are taking up 110% of people’s time, we have to do something different.

We can’t just assume that we’re going to put more units of stuff in a bag that’s already overfilled. 

I was recently talking to a CEO who was frustrated that an important project didn’t seem to be getting the attention it deserved. I pointed out that prioritizing the project meant there is work that will need to live on someone’s schedule. 

Which led me to ask “Is there any room for this to go on their schedule?” 

And followed by:

Are there enough focus blocks to move this strategic work forward?

And if not, what are we gonna do about that? 

This is where on the individual side, the five projects rule is super helpful. It’s the sort of thing that it’s really a gauge for what you can fit in and what your capacity really equals out to be. Projects have to move out before new ones can be moved in. 

And at a team level, it’s especially important for managers and leaders, but it’s really all of us at a certain point. You have to honor that you’re not going to get everything done, and that something either has to be dropped or pushed forward in an imperfect state. 

Where’s Your Capacity for Strategic Work?

Understanding your capacity for change starts with understanding how much room in your (your team’s) schedule there is to take on strategic work. If it’s just filled with urgent and recurring work, take a look at all the routine tasks and projects and ask yourself the following: 

• Can I/we eliminate it? Would it make any difference if we did? 
• Can I/we continue intentionally deferring recurring tasks without causing urgent or strategic harm? 
• Can I/we outsource the task or offload it to another team or function? 
• Can I/we be smarter and more efficient about the task?

From here, you’ll be able to build in space for strategic thinking that will expand you, your company, your team and more, to the next level of success — without compromising the essence of what makes you flow.

Team Habits is coming this August and now available for pre-order at your favorite bookseller. And if you’re curious about identifying your team’s strength areas, growth areas, and challenge areas, take our Team Habits Quiz, a free, customized report to help you understand how your team works best together and how together your team does its best work.

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Using Focus Blocks To Boost Your Team’s Capacity

If you’ve been overwhelmed by trying to figure out how much capacity your team has, and whether they’re focused on what matters most, here’s my take: looking at project lists or time sheets is not really going to help the situation.

This conversation came up recently with one of my clients managing an M&A. It revolved around the difference between capacity vs. utilization. Visionary/expansive execs tend to think that increasing capacity automatically increases utilization, but, if you’ve run an operation, you know that’s not true.

He was getting bogged down with wanting improved visibility on what his team had been working on. He thought if he could get a full Asana setup up and running, that would ensure or provide that line of sight.

But that wasn’t what he really cared about. What he cared about was the team’s capacity and utilization for doing the important strategic work.

That, friends, is an entirely different conversation and need — than whether your team’s Asana ought to be built out more extensively.

Instead of spending months building and tweaking Asana, I suggested something simpler and more relevant: Put the focus on how many focus blocks your team has available.

Understand that most strategic projects require at least three focus blocks per project, per week, to get any real traction on them.

The concept of focus blocks and the principle of three focus blocks per week, per project, comes straight from Start Finishing. A focus block is 90 to 120 minutes of time dedicated to a single project. You can also think of these as deep work blocks, if that phrasing resonates with you.

If a teammate has six focus blocks open per week, the team may have a need for those blocks to be devoted to a single project to get it done faster — or other times there’s a need to spread that teammate’s focus between two different projects for a balanced portfolio.

(Again, for those in the back, at least three blocks per week are needed to find momentum.)

When in doubt, choose to focus on getting one project to the finish line. The real goal is project throughput – or the the amount of material or items passing through a system or process – not project load.

In a team setting, project load amounts to a lot of status/update conversations, shuffling, and emotional labor that makes work suck more.

Putting the spotlight on focus blocks does the real work of showing what your team’s true capacity and utilization is. That’s much better than looking at how projects are laid out in any tool.

It’ll help you see that most likely up to 50-80% of your team’s time is filled up with meetings, routines, admin, and comms.

Seeing this allows y’all to make different choices. Do you just accept that you have, at best, 20% of your team’s time available to do deep/important/strategic work — and use that information to prioritize what deep/important/strategic work can be done?

Or do you work on your team habits in order to create more space in your team’s schedule for the important/strategic work?

But Can’t We Just Hire People to Increase Capacity?

Another takeaway: Avoid the “we can just hire someone to do that other stuff” trap.

(Spoiler alert.) Hiring doesn’t necessarily save team time, or free up capacity for the higher level work. Someone has to hire, integrate, and train the new person—in other words, it becomes a project that cuts into the focus blocks you were already short on.

The new person won’t immediately be able to do the work, so you won’t feel the increase in capacity and utilization for a few months.

And if your team – including the managers and leaders who coordinate and allocate resources – is already at 100% utilization and can’t keep up, additional capacity amounts to waste, unmet expectations, and, typically, debt that then sucks away at resources you could use to increase utilization.

My typical approach when it comes to engagements is actually to cut or punt the non-critical “strategic priorities and projects” first.

Most clients don’t want to make cuts on ongoing projects until we walk through the cost of the status quo and how adding capacity (if you take the hiring route) is going to decrease utilization for a quarter or two. In 80% of the cases, we can keep all the people we have and deploy them more effectively and sanely, so it’s not the layoff/fire conversation leaders fear.

With the state of global burnout we’re in, leaders are far more likely to lose teammates as a result of burnout and disengagement — simply because they’re not cutting back to a level of work that normal humans can actually do.

I share more on using focus blocks in a team setting in my forthcoming book, Team Habits. Try using the concept I’ve shared today, but in the meantime sign up to receive more updates about Team Habits, coming this August and now available for pre-order at your favorite bookseller.

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