In your organization, how does a typical meeting unfold? Does someone “present” for most of the time, ask if there are questions, receive sparse input, and then receive a passive green light? This may feel like a win until somewhere down the line, out of the blue, the project is stalled because support evaporates.

Perhaps the meeting unfolds differently. The audience doesn’t connect with the recommendations. People don’t follow the conclusions and want to back up to understand how the team got there. The team struggles to explain and lacks enough buy-in to move on. The team did not “pass go” and has to return to the drawing board. A wasted opportunity and it slows things down. Uncertainty. Letdown.

Was the team subjecting people to endless meetings in preparation and for alignment beforehand, only to fall short of confident decision making? Why do decision points and meetings feel so risky to navigate, onerous to prepare for, and difficult to get right?

The answer lies in the idea of upstream work and how underserved it is.

Anything new and meaningful a team is trying to create or solve will start with unknowns. Unknowns deserve space and a way to be transformed into answers or perspectives. If this work is shortchanged, the results are painful because they show up as blockers later.

Enter the idea of upstream work. “Upstream” work is when there are more questions than answers. Upstream work is how unknowns are sourced, synthesized, and reasoned through to arrive at conclusions that drive decisions. That may be a mouthful, but it will become super clear how Decision Sprint brings all that together for faster and smoother decisions. There is an entire body of work to flip the script on the unknowns.

Remember, the start or any new phase of a project is characterized by unknowns. Unknowns describe the upstream world. They are like puzzle pieces when you first open the box. Plentiful and unclear how they all relate. When enough is understood about these unknowns, we can draw conclusions, set direction, and decide on actions. Your organization needs a way to address this. Only then can we get on with downstream activities like detailed planning and execution. It’s time we stop shortchanging the upstream.

WHAT GOOD LOOKS LIKE

Upstream work is not a new thing to add to the plate of a team. Upstream work happens continuously in teams, but it’s often hidden and approached without a transparent method. The quality can vary. The impact of those quality gaps may only show up further down the line, for example, when the decision meetings are taking place and it’s “showtime” for the project team. Trust me. You don’t want to realize the quality gaps in a high-stakes decision meeting. By then, it’s too late and embarrassing. And the project can take two steps back. I can often trace the root cause of underwhelming outcomes in decision meetings to the quality of upstream efforts. There is a better way to drive your initiatives and projects, and it starts by recognizing that upstream work is critical.

Let’s take a glimpse at “what good looks like” for upstream work. Imagine a fork in the road within your project. You need to make a strategic choice, and there are seemingly “good” reasons for each alternative. The choice will impact the execution, so it’s more of a one-way door rather than something that can be undone easily. The working team convenes to discuss and reach some common understanding.

Now imagine in this meeting, for some time, no one is allowed to provide answers or opinions, only questions. A good question feels like digging and striking gold. The questions are on the right track. They help us see more. The team sorts, organizes, and explores the questions in an open ended manner. No one knows what the dialogue will conclude or lead to. Everyone is in the moment. The questions feel like they are surfacing the correct issues and provide a guide to how the team should explore problems. The rush to answers is gone, and the flow of the room is geared to surfacing important considerations. What matters? Can we see why they matter?

When the questions feel right, the team moves on. Someone takes a crack at answering a question or really exploring it out in the open. In doing so, this team member shares insight, explains why it matters, and reasons through how it weighs on a potential answer. It’s a solid contribution. Others around the table nod their head with understanding. Or perhaps someone views it differently. This team member shares perspective and reasons through a different or improved answer to the same question. Several issues, underlying questions, and explorations of those matters take place in an organic way. The team has done some “thinking together.” There is a point where everyone, by and large, feels confident to move on to draw some conclusions. Why? Because the group feels it’s standing on high quality information. The team has canvassed the topic with good questions, exploration of potential answers, and reasoning through their exploration. The team stands on solid ground to draw conclusions or recommendations.

No one held the spotlight, and virtually everyone had a common understanding. It feels like a collective IQ lift. These types of meetings are possible and are anything but chaotic. There’s a method to them. It’s an input meeting more than an output meeting.When I was working at McDonald’s I once headed a meeting that was very output-focused when I was looking to engage on the inputs. Since that time, I’ve had plenty of constructive input meetings. But that’s because I saw the need and tinkered with small changes to meetings and leaned into my calibration skills over a period of 10 years.

Input meetings occur routinely when learning is an active part of an organization’s management culture. So why don’t they exist in your world?

The answer is that many organizations miss entirely the notion of upstream work in projects, initiatives, and problem solving. The input meeting I described needs to be supported by a methodology built on the workflows you’ll acquire through this book. Yes, it’s a lot to ask for a meeting dynamic to promote “thinking together.” The workflows that you will learn about are designed to promote these behaviors. They start with the unknowns and provide concrete guidance to handhold the organization until these behaviors become the norm. The meeting I described can quickly become natural to your organization and teamwork. Decision Sprint will kickstart the change and make it stick.

THREE COMPONENTS OF UPSTREAM

High-performance organizations have a method for upstream. Their teams can connect the unknowns that we must tackle at the start all the way to decision points. That’s an expansive journey to traverse. Most initiatives, projects, or problem solving activities struggle to connect the dots. Before racing ahead to KPIs, outcomes, and execution, high-performance organizations intensely explore the inputs that influence outcomes. You can’t do upstream work if a system is built entirely for downstream execution. I was so focused on inputs in my efforts to revitalize growth at McDonald’s. The first step in the Decision Spring is to recognize that we need to build a new planet—call it the upstream world.

This world has three components we’ve mentioned: exploration, alignment, and decision making. These steps come before planning execution. Exploration is a concerted effort to surface the relevant considerations and get to the bottom of them. Alignment is about bringing together what’s been explored to draw conclusions. Decision making is committing to the necessary actions.

Three simple yet powerful descriptions. When these components work together, the results can be compelling. Teams can craft plans and move on to execution with confidence and the right backing in the organization. The three components are meant to feed the other and to make the next component an easier lift for everyone involved. They are part of one continuous thread of work which I call Decision Sprint.

Excerpted from Decision Sprint: The New Way to Innovate into the Unknown and Move from Strategy to Action by Atif Rafiq (McGraw Hill, April 2023)