A Dozen Steps to a Yes

I watch Squawk Box every morning. Three anchors at one desk, and in front of each of them a bank of screens, a phone or two, a tablet propped against a monitor. That is how the news reaches them. No screen knows what the other screens know. The anchor is where it all comes together, and makes sense.

I know that desk. I spent a career in communications, and information never came from one place. When I consulted I adapted to whatever the team already ran: email systems, databases, interoffice comms, shared drives. Every one had its own combination, and much of the job was keeping track of what had been shared, where, when it changed and why.

The writing and the deciding were the work. The rest was carrying it from one place to the next, and I was usually the one carrying.

Two weeks ago I counted my tabs and wrote about what it takes to answer one question about an organization. This week I counted something smaller. One document, from me to my co-founder Lee and back, for review and approval.

Here is what that takes at our company on an ordinary morning.

• I write the draft.
• It gets rendered into a clean copy so he can see it the way a reader would.
• A second copy goes into a shared folder, because that is the one place where a comment can sit on a sentence.
• A message goes to him with both links.
• He opens the message, opens the folder, opens the document, and maybe the clean copy too.
• He comments and tags me.
• An email tells me he commented.
• I open the document and answer him, thread by thread. Every round of that repeats the last three steps.
• When we are done I go back to where the draft lives and apply what we agreed.
• The clean copy gets rebuilt.
• The shared copy gets filed away.
• The final goes into the record.

A dozen steps. Five places. Two people who agree on almost everything. It runs the other way just as often.

Why it takes a dozen

Two of those steps are the work. Lee reads and reacts. I decide what to do with it. Everything around those two moments is carrying.

On its way to one yes, the document gets explained to a rendering tool, a shared folder, a messaging app and an inbox. Every time I leave one of those places and open the next, I put the work back together in my head: which version matters, what Lee has already seen, what we agreed, what still needs a decision, what happens next.

There was no single place we both had that could show the document properly, take a comment on a sentence, tell the other one of us, and remember what we decided. Each tool does its one job well. None of them holds the whole of the work, so one of us has to.

The document is what moves. What we are really carrying is the understanding around it. That is the part nobody counts, and it is the part that wears you down. The cost is not the work. It is not the people. It is the carrying.

Why we are still taking the long way

We could shortcut some of this tomorrow. We have the tools. We are not doing it yet, and that is on purpose.

Lee and I are building BeMo to take the carrying off the person. If we make our own process clever before we understand where the weight sits, we solve around the problem and stop feeling what every other small team feels every day. So we keep counting: the steps, the places, the number of times one of us has to put the work back together before a decision can be made. The friction is useful. It keeps showing us what should need a person and what should not.

I asked Lee last week whether he wanted fewer things on his plate. He said no. He is fine making the decisions. What wears him down is finding the decision, and rebuilding the work around it every time it comes back to him.

That is the distinction the whole piece turns on. The judgment is not the cost. The carrying is.

What we are building

The answer is not to replace the tools. They have jobs, and they keep them. The rendering tool still renders, the shared drive still holds files, email is still email. What is missing is a place where the organization holds the understanding around the work, so a person does not have to.

That is what we are building BeMo to be. Here is what the dozen steps become in it.

• The draft is written where it will live, with what the organization already knows behind it: the decisions, the commitments, the history.
• When it is Lee's turn, the work reaches him with what he needs in front of it: what is being asked, what led to it, and why his judgment is needed.
• His comment lands on the sentence. If it is a change, it becomes the change, and I accept it or not.
• His decision does not disappear into a thread. It becomes part of the record, with his name, the date and the reasoning behind it.
• When a step needs a person, it asks that person, once. Everything else runs without asking.

When something needs judgment, a person gives it. When something needs to be remembered, the organization remembers it. Lee and I stop being the place where the organization's understanding lives.

The same loop at a nonprofit

Change the names and it is your loop. The board packet in a document. The link in an email to the board chair. The "looks good, one thing" by text. The edit. The resend. The yes, by text. The upload to the funder's portal. Two people, six places, one yes. Which of those steps was the work?

Now the same packet in BeMo. The director starts with the organization already behind her: last quarter's decisions, the commitments that matter. The chair sees the one question in the work itself, not an attachment she has to piece the history around. Her "one thing" stays with the work, and so does her decision, with her name, the date and the reason. A month later, when someone asks what was promised, the answer is on the packet, not in an inbox or a text thread or the memory of whoever was there.

The spreadsheet is still a spreadsheet. The funder portal is still the funder portal. What no longer happens is the director carrying the organization's history between them in her head. The chair decides what is hers to decide. The director owns the work. The organization just got better at keeping what its people already knew, what they decided, and why.

So, a question for your Monday. How many steps sit between you and the one person whose yes you need? And how many of them are the two of you actually doing the work?