Intentionality and Agile Teams
Intentionality is critical to nearly every complex, valuable, or long-term goal. If you don’t have a detailed understanding of why you’re doing something, you lack a critical decision-making guide and your opportunities to fail begin to multiply. The range of potential pivoting justifications broadens to the point that abandonment becomes an option when things become even slightly difficult.
It’s possible for mature, agile, and otherwise highly functional software engineering teams to operate with surprisingly little intentionality. You can probably think of examples. Maybe your team is an example; however, in nearly every case, intentionality is going to improve the way a team operates, makes decisions, and cultivates a healthy culture. While there are many ways to introduce more intentionality to your work, I firmly believe in one model that promises significant results relative to its degree of implementation effort.
The Franklin Principle: A New Definition of Time Management
Let's start at the very beginning: How would you define Time Management?
Traditionally, Time Management refers to performing tasks in a certain way, in a certain order, and at certain times or within certain time frames in order to get more done in a shorter amount of time, or something of that nature. I’ve always loved a quote by author Charles Richards: “Don’t be fooled by the calendar. There are only as many days in the year as you make use of. One man gets only a week’s value out of a year while another man gets a full year’s value out of a week.”
However, this is only a small part of something larger. Something deeper. Something more human.
Managing Extreme Personal & Professional Complexity
Whether personal, professional, entrepreneurial, or creative, when pursuing a complex, ambitious, or long-term goal, you face several needs, among them:
Understanding your motivations so you can refer back to them when you face challenges
Refining your goal and creating boundaries around it
Managing complexity
This final point is the one I'll be writing about here. In my book, Foundations of Execution, I cite managing complexity as one of the three behaviors that separate those who consistently execute from those who consistently fail. But what does complexity mean in this context?
What is "Foundational Wealth?"
People often associate wealth with money and possessions, but wealth is much more accurately defined as the leverage or power to consistently experience the type of existence you prefer. Money and possessions have come to be associated with wealth because—among other reasons—money is often necessary to participate in the types of activities many people assume they want to experience (leisure and luxury), and possessions are often indicative of a surplus of said money.
However, it could be easily argued that a practicing Buddhist or ascetic could consider themselves enormously wealthy/successful without any money or possessions whatsoever. To highlight this distinction, I like to use the terms Foundational Wealth and Foundational Success instead. I define Foundational Wealth (in pseudo-economics terms) as the currency you value at the deepest level, and Foundational Success as having a strong equity position in said currency.
If you’re honest with yourself about your personal definitions of Foundational Wealth, you can more precisely and consistently trace your motivations to their deeper roots. This will help you to better understand your goals and decisions, and make intentional choices that serve those motivations. This exploration can be both immensely valuable and profoundly humbling.
M-SMART Goals
If you’ve already explored what drives you (Foundational Wealth) and learned how to create Credos, Missions, and Visions around the goals you value, your goals are defined. Now it's time to refine them. That's where M-SMART Goals come in.
Learn Spanish isn’t really a goal because you don’t have any criteria by which you can say you achieved it. Almost everyone in the United States, South and Central America, and Europe technically speaks some Spanish—most people have probably said or at least heard the word “adios.” Furthermore, even highly educated native Spanish speakers realistically speak only part of the language; I doubt many people know every single Spanish word, much like you and I don’t know every single English word. Knowing a language isn’t really a black or white thing.
So, at what point can you say you “learned Spanish?”
The Three-Tool Execution Ecosystem
Managing complexity requires you to answer three questions:
How? — How will you organize your goals?
When? — When will you address your goals?
What? — What tools will you use to record/represent your goals and the time you’ve committed to addressing them?
I talk about How? in Managing Extreme Personal & Professional Complexity and When? in The Franklin Principle. Here, we’ll explore the What? by digging deep into some of the tactics through which you’ll give these principles life.
Tactical Consequences: Accountability's Secret Weapon
If you've read some of my other Perspectives pieces or books, you may be familiar with the first two Foundations of Execution — defining and refining your goals and managing complexity. The final foundation is removing failure from the equation.
At its most basic, this requires Accountability. For many, Accountability points inward — holding oneself accountable for your decisions. When you apply this concept to goals, you're talking about self-discipline.
Bluntly, self-discipline doesn’t work.
Accountability means expanding the scope of failure. It broadens the distress associated with inaction or failure because they cease to be private events; it exposes your desires and progress to others and subjects you to judgment. How do we take it to the next level? What tactics can you use to not just make failure more public, but rather truly takes failure out of the equation?
CMV: Extreme Intentionality
Whether professional, personal, or creative, a well-crafted goal needs to be built on a foundation of Intentionality, and those who consistently execute typically operate with a level of Intentionality often overlooked by others. In this context, Intentionality simply means performing a task or tasks with purpose (as opposed to just performing them). Ben Franklin famously asked himself, What good shall I do this day? each morning, and What good have I done today? each evening. While even such a simple and loose demonstration of Intentionality will provide value, you’re going to take a much more robust approach.
The best way to embrace Intentionality is to define and refine your intentions, and in order to do so properly, you need to understand your goals at two different scales — how they relate to larger, overarching, life-spanning values or motivations, and in a more granular, actionable, goal-specific sense. In doing so, you’ll set yourself up for success in ways you may have never imagined possible.