Flashcard: Dream. Decide. Do.

Name what you're here to accomplish

If I schedule a meeting for 7am and I’m in Seattle and you’re in New York, and we both show up at 7am we’re not going to be in the right place at the right time.

We all know how to adjust for different time zones – we ask. Are you Pacific or Mountain Time? Are you in London or Mumbai? Most calendar programs do this adjustment automatically.

And yet we don’t do this when we are working on a project. We don’t ask what project time zone are we in. It’s a simple enough solution – ask.

There are generally three time zones in a project. First, is Dream. Then Decide or Discuss, depending on your company culture and structure. And the last is Do.

I’ve talked before about having agendas and setting expectations for effective meetings. But if you can name what kind of a meeting you are having, or what project time zone you are in, you can limit tension between people with roles and skill sets that would otherwise conflict.

Let me give you some examples.

I work primarily with creatives.  Many of them make advertising, some of them make software or consumer electronics. Creatives come up with ideas for cool shit.

I sit in lots of meetings with creatives, designers and founders. When I work with teams, there are also people in the room who are tasked with taking the ideas the creatives come up with and making them happen. They are the producers, project managers, engineers, business leads. Their job is to build the cool shit and make sure it gets done on time and on budget and, if there is a client involved, that the client is heard and happy.

Often in team meetings there is a disconnect in the conversation. On one side, the creatives are ideating. This is their happy place, throwing around ideas in whatever way they like best; whiteboards, notebooks, sticky notes. They want an open space and enough oxygen to make flame out of a spark of an idea.

But then a person who is responsible for building the things the creatives are imagining will call out an objection. You can’t actually rent a jet pack and not go over budget, a producer might say. Account people and project managers are in another frame of mind. They want to get to specifics and schedules and deliverables. They want to harness the flame of an idea before it burns down the entire budget or schedule.

Too often, you have a dynamic where the inventors feel hemmed in by limitations and extraneous details, and the builders are frustrated because they aren’t getting the information they need to do their jobs. But because there isn’t language or a framework in many work cultures for this disconnect, it just simmers there, like a pot left on the stove that is permeating the whole house with a bad smell.

If you don’t already have a framework, you can start with this one and adapt it to the specific needs of your organization. It doesn’t matter which terms you use, what matters is that you name that different meetings have different objectives, and people with different roles and skill sets are going to like some of these topics better than others.

Dream. A dreaming meeting is where the creatives like to live. It’s about ideation, brainstorming, noodling, figuring out. It is open, unstructured, fluid with a focus on possibilities and creativity.

Decide or Discuss. This meeting is to hash it all out. This is for the strategists, business leads, and account people. The Dream meeting has generated some possibilities and a team needs to decide on their relative merits. Budget implications are explored, but only to buttress an argument for one idea over the other. This meeting will use some facilitation tools or structure to make sure that everyone is heard, and the key arguments are captured. The goal is to decide on a course of action.

Do. This is where you get practical and specific about how to make the course of action you decided on come to life. This is for the project managers and producers. Spreadsheets come out, staffing is debated, obstacles and limitations are discussed and planned for, and people are assigned specific roles to get the shit done. This meeting ends with a project plan, timelines, deliverables, and clear owners for the different tasks.

If it is a Dream meeting, then the project managers should know not to show up with spreadsheets yet. If it is a Do meeting, the creatives should know not to reconcept when the shoot details are being finalized.

The kind of swift irritation that flows through a conference room or video call when one of these time zone transgressions take place can, over time, corrode good working relationships between teams. And it’s not necessary if you’re just clear about what time zone the project plan is in.

We all know that a smooth collaboration between the people who come up with the concepts and the people who make them into reality and get them into the world makes the work – and the end product – so much better.

You remember that kid, or sibling, who didn’t like different foods touching each other? Who would hate it if the salad dressing leaked onto the rice on his plate? Channel that person and keep your meetings and the tasks and skills that each highlights clearly separated.