The Workbench
Tell me if this sounds familiar: you know your colleague said something important in an earlier exchange, but you’re not sure where. Was it in Slack? Email? Perhaps they were referring to a file on Google Drive…but where? That place is a mess. Ahhh, maybe it was in a Jira comment? Or Airtable?
Your platforms are likely different, but I would bet you’ve been through this exercise. The proliferation of digital tools is a double-edged sword that yields amazing functionality and stupefying complexity.
Have you ever seen a serious carpenter’s workshop? To the untrained eye, there are an overwhelming number of tools. Also, note how they are organized. Or more relevantly, the fact that they are organized. I would suggest that organizations must take a similar approach with their digital tools.
The carpenter has very clear situations in which they use an awl, a chisel, and a planer. Is your team as clear when it comes to Teams or email? What about Confluence vs. Jira? Airtable vs. Excel?
To extend the metaphor, the carpenter brings their tools to the workbench to use them. All the work occurs on that bench (or at least in that general vicinity). If they have an assistant, that person knows where to go to find the current project. What is your team’s workbench? Is there one single source of truth at which they can see what’s in progress and what’s up next?
Defining these things isn’t hard, but it does take a conscious effort to figure it out, implement the approach, and help your team orient to it. Once you do, however, I guarantee you will become more efficient and your time will be more focused on generating value rather than trying to simply find stuff.
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.
