I observed a team decide to transfer ownership of a shared responsibility to one of the team members. They wrote down the decision but didn’t change any of the processes. The responsibility still lacked a strong owner and everything operated the way it did… as a group project. Nothing changed about the problems that prompted the decision in the first place.
In real life, people miss meetings, get added to teams with work in progress, remember questions that were hashed out months ago and experience changes in dates that have nothing to do with the work.
When the rationale for decisions, the context of the project, and discussion from a meeting are all written down in a recallable place, the cost of sharing it is much less than if all of that lives only in people’s heads.
The Momentum Architecture moves the burden of keeping everything and everyone moving in the same right direction to how the work is set up and away from the people on the team. Running an initiative this way gets to right answers as people decide how to do their work.
The methodology specifies how to keep records so the work itself knows the answers and supports the right behavior. Team members can see, understand, and act on the original intent, material decisions, and progress updates.
When we ask the people to bear the burden of moving a project through time, across distance, and around interruptions, we ask them for behaviors based on discipline.
It’s better if the work itself calls for and supports the behavior it needs.
Seeing the burden shift away from people is visible within days and weeks of setting up the work this way. It doesn’t require a project to cross a finish line to see the benefit.
For the shared responsibility that needed a single owner, writing down the decision wasn’t enough. What they left out was how to behave differently the next day.
Write how behaviors should change in the real world for one initiative and watch how this clarity focuses the team’s work even before the project is complete.
If you want a read on where your team’s context is right now, the diagnostic takes less than 10 minutes. https://amykennedyleadership.com/diagnostic/