In Defense of Templates
I come before you today to defend the much-vilified and wrongly-maligned template.
Templates—frameworks if you’re fancy—are powerful tools that speed your time-to-value and save your limited mental cycles for the hardest and most differentiating work.
“But wait,” you might say. “Who doesn’t appreciate a good Word template?” Or perhaps you recently used a Notion template to catalog your rare yarn collection. If that’s you, you might be surprised that some people—especially those who ply their trade in creating things—cringe at the idea of templatizing their work. They see templates as undermining the very bespoke approach of their efforts. How could we possibly make any assumptions about this particular effort without first examining all the factors at play?
But templates and frameworks aren’t about shortcutting the process. They’re about leveraging past experience. They’re the Pareto principle in practice. If you’re enough of a professional to start from scratch each time, you’re enough of a professional to recognize when your template isn’t doing the job. And if it is doing the job, you’ve just saved time that can be re-invested into higher value work, increasing throughput, or getting more done. Of course, don’t mistake a template for finished work! It’s like starting a 100-yard dash at the 40-yard line—there’s still work to do—but you have a head start.
Templates also help to scale your work in ways beyond time-to-value. If you work with clients (internal or external), templates help provide a consistent customer experience when they do repeat business 🙌🏻 with you. As you bring on new team members, templates help orient them to your ways of working. If you’re in a highly regulated industry, templates help ensure compliance. If you’re implementing organizational change, templates (aka, SOPs) are an easy first target of opportunity. You get the point.
So give the poor templates a break. They’re just trying to help…and I bet you could use it.
I help growing organizations remove blockers to collaboration and scale. I’ve built flexible structures for my own teams and helped many others do the same, from small startups to Fortune 50 goliaths. What are you and your team experiencing? Let's talk.
