Project pinboards

Structuring Communication

What should you do if internal comms in your business feel like a free for all?

This problem has come up several times recently. And the simple answer is: you need to structure your communication more. All the things you can think of (like meetings, or dashboards, or metrics, or project planning tools like Asana) are really ways of adding more structure to communication. They put guard-rails on conversations, and make the agenda and purpose and attendance a bit more constrained.

In general, this is a good thing. Freeform meetings where anybody can say anything are great in very small teams. But with 10+ people they can be hellish.

My top tip for adding structure to meetings is borrowed from Holacracy: have everyone at the meeting maintain a very simple, high level visualsisation of their projects. (This could be a physical set of post it notes, or a free Trello board). Then make space at the start of the meeting for anyone who wants to give a short update on one of their projects to do so - and also allow anyone to ask for a short update from someone else.

It can take a little while to get good at this. You don't want to hear every detail about every project. But what you are trying to learn, as a team, is what are the details that are pertinent for other people to hear about.