A community organization I’m part of has spent a year trying to grow its membership. A committee of volunteers meets once a month to move it forward.
Every meeting opens the same way. Ten or fifteen minutes of “where did we land on the school outreach?” and “did we decide to run the member referral idea, or table it?” Nobody is quite sure. The last conversation was four weeks and a hundred other responsibilities ago.
By the time the picture is rebuilt, the meeting is half gone. The drive has been running a year, and the membership numbers have barely moved.
This is a work design problem.
Why intermittent work starts over
The committee is not short on capable people. They show up, they care, and they do the work in front of them. The commitment is real.
The gap between meetings is also real. Four weeks pass, and everyone’s attention has gone to their jobs, their families, the things they carry every day. The membership drive is not one of those things. So when the committee reconvenes, the whole picture is in no one’s head. It gets rebuilt from the fragments each person happens to remember.
That rebuild is the cost. It happens every time the group comes back, because the work has nowhere to live between the times people are looking at it. Adding another meeting only adds another rebuild.
Your initiatives do the same thing
This is easy to see in a volunteer group, where the gaps are long and no one pretends the work is top of mind. It is harder to see at work, where you are busy the whole time.
The initiative that keeps losing to customer-facing production work moves the same way. A push this month, quiet for six weeks, a push again. Each restart opens with the same re-brief: what did we decide, who owns what, what does done look like. A busy quarter is a real reason the work moves in fragments.
The fragments still have to connect to something, and right now that something is your memory.
Three quarters in, the pieces don’t quite fit. The cause is the same as the community committee’s: work that advances in pieces, with the whole picture living in one person’s memory.
One page the work returns to
The fix is one page the work returns to, written once and kept where everyone can see it. Three things belong on it.
The outcome. What growth actually means here, as a number and a date. “120 members by June,” so everyone returns to the same target instead of re-arguing it each time they meet.
The decisions already made. School outreach is in, paid ads are out, the referral idea is being tested through spring. Written down, the settled questions stay settled, and the meeting stops reopening them.
What done looks like. The point where the drive is finished, not just ongoing. Without it, the work runs indefinitely and no one can tell progress from motion.
For the community committee, one page changes what every meeting starts from. The first fifteen minutes stop going to reconstruction, and the drive moves between meetings instead of resetting at each one. The same page does the same thing for the initiative on your desk.
An initiative that only moves when you’re in the room moves at the speed of your attention. One page changes what the room starts from.
If the initiative you’re picturing is one of yours, the working session sets it up on one page with you, live, in about 90 minutes:
https://amykennedyleadership.com/working-session-initwork