If you increase clarity, you absolutely will increase productivity. You will also increase engagement, commitment, and determination. You will make smarter decisions, better plans, and solve problems more readily. It’s true and I can prove it. Furthermore, the potential gains are enormous.

However, you can’t improve anything if you can’t see it. Thus, in November I proposed the 1st Quarterly Clarity Week and my first suggestion for exposing opportunities to increase productivity with clarity. If you participated, your team consciously kept their eyes out for bandaids and workarounds over the course of the week. This should have been relatively easy since bandaids and workarounds are familiar concepts. I hope you found some great opportunities for improvement.

Now it is time for the 2nd Quarterly Clarity Week. This time my goal is to raise awareness of a far less familiar, but incredibly important, opportunity. Here is what you do. At the beginning of each meeting in the week ahead:

1. Look at the agenda and pick any topic you see there.
2. Don’t discuss it at all. Work in pairs for two minutes to see which pair can generate the longest list of possible directions the conversation could go given that topic.
3. For meetings you aren’t running and can’t control, select someone else who is attending and compete individually with that person to generate  those lists before going to the meeting.
4. After two minutes, honor the pair or individual with the longest list, and then compare notes to see what others came up with that you didn’t By the way, if you can’t come up with at least a dozen different directions for any topic, you just aren’t trying.
5. Rinse and repeat. Try to do this several times during the course of the week for different types of topics and different types of meetings.
6. At the end of the week, convene your crew and share what each of you has learned.

I’d love to talk with you at that point. Feel free to email or call and tell me what you’ve learned.

The more intelligent, vested, helpful, energetic, and extroverted your team, the more directions they can, and will, take any conversation. What do you suppose that has to do with productivity?

Declare a Clarity Week now!