If you’ve spent time with Cub Scouts, or at your local REI, you’ve heard of the 10 essentials. The 10 things you can’t forget if you’re headed out camping, hiking, or any other off-road activity. This is what preparation looks like.
Sure, you can wing it, you can go in unprepared, but when things go south, you’ll pay the price.
And just like the great outdoors, important work requires preparation too.
Pilots do a pre-flight check.
Coordinates, weather, fuel, landing gear. All for that same Seattle-to-Portland flight they’ve flown one thousand times before. But they treat it like it’s important because it is.
Amazon requires a 6 page memo for their executive meetings. The host writes it up, the attendees read it. Once they are all thoroughly prepared, they meet.
A 6-page memo and a checklist are not always necessary, but you’d better do something. A pre-meeting planning sheet, some common questions you expect to hear, some things you’d like to express to the team about why you’ve gathered them. Even a simple agenda can help you get everyone rowing in the same direction.
10 minutes of prep and you’ll almost look like a real professional.
It lets everyone know that you are there to work.
They’ll start preparing too. And that’s a good thing. As the saying goes, proper preparation prevents piss poor performance.
Scouts have their 10 essentials, and you probably need 10 essentials of your own.
- History and homework, who is going to be in the room and what are they building?
- Industry best practices, what works for similar groups, teams, products?
- Good questions to get them talking, open ended, find some common threads.
- A story to tell about where you are awesome, that one time when you helped in a similar situation.
- Useful resources and tools for them to use, online or in your inbox, how can you help even if the current project doesn’t launch?
- An open mind and a growth mindset, how can you help them see things in a new way and make progress?
- Work to report back on. What you’ve done for them lately, what you did to get ready for this exchange.
- People they should meet in the community, people you think could add value as well. Now make the introduction.
- Recommendations, work or otherwise, places they can see you’ve done this before, and people who can speak to your abilities and your character.
- New ideas, brainstorms, random thoughts for progress and entertainment.
Of course, your list will be all your own, but this is a good place to start.
And just like in Scouts, the map is not the territory. We need to step it up and do the work up front, but it doesn’t stop there. Keep learning, growing, and adjusting your point of view.
The world is dynamic and the work you are doing is important.
It’s worth doing well, and that work starts now.
