I heard an interview with Duncan Bannatyne, the ‘Dragon’s Den’ entrepreneur, where he said: “business is really quite simple, it’s people that make it complicated”. This is probably something we can all relate when thinking about seemingly simple projects that we set our teams. Sometimes these result not in simple outputs and solutions but a complex mish-mash of ambiguities about the proposed method, personality clashes, technology hitches, power struggles, and inefficiencies.

Let’s admit something to ourselves right off the bat. We’ve all had that thought at some stage. You know, the one that goes: “Oh, if only I had 10 more people who worked exactly like me”. But of course if we’re all having that thought, it means that someone somewhere is being equally as disparaging about your own contributions to team projects.  

So if we’re all frustrated by the ambiguities and inefficiencies that team working can give us, what are some of the simple tools and rules for teamworking to reduce inefficiency and make it a joy?

The revolution will not be televised

I had a bit of an ‘Aha!’ moment the other day when I came across an excellent book by Dr Atul Gawande called ‘The Checklist Manifesto’. A medical surgeon by background, Gawande has seen firsthand the catastrophes that ensue when organisational memory and team procedure fails, and where complex surgical operations go wrong.

In issues of ‘life and death’ such as this, we often look to technology as the source of our continued advancement. As technology gets better, so the results of operations do too, and so we advance more widely as a human race. But there’s a flaw in this thinking of course: no computer we have yet created is more powerful on its own than the human brain when it comes to complex and strategic decision-making. We have to break our current discourse on ‘technology as the only source of advancement’, and recognise that simplicity has a key place in the development of innovation too.

In ‘The Checklist Manifesto’, Dr. Gawande describes his work with the World Health Organisation bringing the simple checklist idea to hospitals around the world. In eight hospitals as varied as a remote rural hospital in Tanzania serving one million people and a high-tech university facility in Seattle with a budget more than twice that of all of Tanzania, Dr. Gawande and a team of public health experts and surgeons applied basically the same 19-point checklist to see if it improved surgical care.

The study began in the spring of 2008, and the results were remarkable. Without adding a single piece of equipment or spending an extra dollar, all eight hospitals he studied saw the rate of major complications after surgery drop by 36 percent in the six months after the checklist was introduced; deaths fell by 47 percent:

“In every site, introduction of the checklist had been accompanied by a substantial reduction in complications... In seven out of eight, it was a double-digit percentage drop. This thing was real.”, Dr Gawande writes.

So my friends, the revolution is here. The revolution will not be televised. The revolution is a simple checklist.  

A simple checklist can remind medical personnel to wash their hands and introduce themselves by name and job to everyone in the operating room. We’re humans after all, and these simple ‘rituals’ work not only by very practically ensuring improved hygiene, but also by creating momentum, rhythm, a shared sense of understanding of each other and better team communication – things often overlooked when everything else run smoothly, but vital when the proverbial hits the fan.

This is a powerful insight: In an age of constantly involving technological complexity, the most basic steps are all too easy to overlook, but something as primitive as writing down a checklist to “get the stupid stuff right” can make a profound difference.

Can this learning be applied in a multitude of differing corporate environments? Almost certainly. Would it work everywhere? Almost certainly not. But I can relate to this story from my own personal journey thinking about my own productivity and designing systems to build a productive organisations.

One very simple use of checklists I’d invite you to think about is when conducting meetings. Throughout our careers we spend a lot of time in meetings that we feel like we’ve been in before. People are scrabbling around to work out exactly what is needed, how to approach the task, and how to focus their collective energies.

Often we think and rethink the same ways to approach the same problem, and design and redesign the same procedure. Equally, we don’t capture the learning of the day-to-day and make a note of what works: we just take these for granted, and then eventually once there are a couple of changes in personnel, the organisation forgets them completely. If you’ve ever approached your team with what you thought was a ‘genius’ new idea, only to find a grumpy, senior member of the team telling you “oh, we tried that 8 years ago... you know, before you got here?.. and it doesn’t work”, well, you know what I mean.

In recent years I have developed checklists for agendas for all of the most common meetings I hold. One example, a weekly catch-up and check-in meeting with my assistant, is now actually referred to by the shorthand “checklist”. As in “Charlotte, what time shall we ‘do checklist’ today?”. The meeting is short, covers alot of ground, and forces both of us to move logically through each key issue, not shirking our responsibilities to tackle the less comfortable or fun bits or giving in to the temptation to be more spontaneous but at the expense of actually getting anything done.

Every six months or so, the checklist might need to be altered or changed. In fact, it’s worth putting some calendar time in to ‘step back’ and holistically review meeting agenda checklists – if you have alot of them, a strategically spent hour on this could save you many hours of unproductive time in the six months ahead.

Remember that the human mind is a much better tool for making intuitive decisions than it is for holding, storing and recalling ideas and processes accurately and at the right time. Even your most intelligent decision-makers need a mental helping-hand when it comes to ensuring that team processes don’t let vital elements slip between the cracks. This is not because they lack intelligence, but because collectively we’re trying to deal with so much information and complexity at any one time, that human error becomes pretty inevitable without the frameworks to guide us.

Our role in managing our teams is to help develop such frameworks, without people feeling ‘boxed-in’ by them, or that these frameworks inhibit the intuitive decision-making process, reducing our ability to spontaneously develop even better ways of doing things. It’s a balancing act.

Like so much of what we do, when we’re at our best, it’s because we feel confident, in control and on top of things. It’s about a playful, productive momentum being generated and experienced. The simple checklist is a great tool to help with this, but not the only one.

And remember, K.I.S.S. – “keep it simple, stupid”!

So what other simple things can you do to develop ultra-productive teams? Here are 5 top tips:

Think about communication channels

Do your meetings give everyone a chance to discuss things openly? Or on the opposite end of the spectrum, are there so long that nothing gets done? Think about the checklists you could adopt here to provide habitual agenda structures. Also think about the follow-through and sign-off procedures outside of meetings, as well as the preparation and environment that the meeting is known for: if people take a meeting seriously but also feel valued, they’re much less likely to view it as a waste of time, and therefore waste everyone else’s time by being there.

Create a safe space to make mistakes

Mistakes are often looked at as inherently bad. But progress often comes from experimenting as much with what doesn’t work as what does. As one chief executive once told me, “I have no problem with people fucking up. My problem is always with the people who don’t own up or clear up”. Encourage experimentation and innovation, and think instead about how to do this as ‘safely’ as possible.

If you have a problem, rehearse in your head explaining the problem to a 5 year old

If a team is stuck, could you explain the problem to a five year-old child and them understand it? If you can’t, maybe you need to be clearer on what the problem is. And likewise this also applies to the solution – it’s probably right under your nose, and thinking about things in simple terminology can help you tweak your thinking to find it.

Encourage the identification and discussion of road blocks

What’s in the way? Sometimes it’s not an easy thing for people to explain. Sometimes you ARE the thing standing in the way. Sometimes it’s personalities, sometimes it’s that the team aren’t clear on the task, or have different understandings of what is to be done. Provide a window - either in meetings or with people individually – for them to openly explore and voice their thoughts on what the roadblocks are. In teams, communication is king, so actively encourage it.

Look for the key ‘cultural architects’

Culture in a team is built just as much from the ground up, as it is modelled from the top down. So look for your ‘cultural architects’: the people whose actions are influential, and who carry much of the ‘process’ discussion. It’s not always the manager: it could be the efficient deputy who always updates the records and ensures that everyone has the emails they need, or the administrative staff who act as the ‘glue’ that hold things together. Invest in these people, and learn from what they are doing that works.