Several years ago I worked on a small team doing a critical project. All at once, we multiplied to three separate teams covering adjacent areas in non-adjacent spaces.
The governing decisions lived on a whiteboard. Someone photographed that board and sent the pictures out to the teams that didn’t share the room.
Low rent, and the decisions held their ground.
I’ve thought about that whiteboard a lot since. It was the cheapest thing in the room, and it did the job that usually fails when a team multiplies.
Where the durability came from
Those were good people. I’d say that first, and if you have an initiative running well right now, the people on it are a major part of why.
The larger part of why the decisions remained intact is that they had somewhere to live.
When one team becomes three, the governing decisions are the first thing to go. The new teams weren’t in the room when the choice got made. They inherit the decisions without the reasoning behind them. The first time a decision is inconvenient, someone reopens it in good faith. Then the work carries two different answers to the same question, and the person who has to reconcile them is you.
A photo of a whiteboard closed the gap. Any team could look at the list and see what had been settled.
The decisions governed teams that had no part in making them, which is the whole trick, and it cost a group message with photos.
One initiative is the evidence that travels
If you’re running seven pieces of work and one of them doesn’t need you to hold its context, that one is your argument for the other six.
It’s better than a case study, because it’s happening to you. Same constraints, same calendar, same people who are busy. Nobody in your organization can tell you it wouldn’t work in your environment.
The objection you’ll hear is that the one running well has an unusually strong person on it. Sometimes Often true. It still doesn’t get you out of the question, because the strong person is doing something specific, and what they’re doing is writing decisions down where the other people can reach them without asking. That part is not a talent.
What to look at in the one that’s running well
Pick the initiative you worry about least. Not the highest profile one. The one you go three weeks without thinking about, and it delivers anyway.
Ask the person running it where its decisions live. You want a specific answer: a page, a board, a pinned message, a document everyone opens. If the answer is a person’s name, you’ve found what makes it fragile, and you’ve found it while things are going well, which is the cheapest time to find it.
Copy the mechanism, not the initiative. The initiative isn’t repeatable. The place its decisions live is, and it will be less impressive than you expect.
Then ask yourself a question: what would it take for the initiative you worry about most to have the same thing?
The whiteboard didn’t make anyone smarter. It let three teams build on decisions the first team had already made. That’s portable, and it’s the reason one initiative running well is worth studying instead of just enjoying.
Leaders: if you want this written to your own initiative, four questions and I’ll send you a brief on that one.