Minimum Viable Partnership Model

Technology start-ups talk about Minimum Viable Products. The term refers to a product that has “just those features that allow [it] to be launched, and no more.”

This is also a useful concept when it comes to partnership. When working with a new partner, there’s a damaging tendency to try and figure everything out in advance. To launch planning efforts, seek consensus, and gain clarity on outcomes. To set up process barriers to getting underway.

Extended planning kills momentum, but effective planning builds trust. So what’s the balance? How do you move forward and actually get started?

You need three things:

Big, Shared Ambitions
An exciting, shared vision of what becomes possible if you work together. It doesn’t have to be clearly defined. It just has to provide motivation and establish the emotional tenor.

Raw Material
(i) A rough sense of what’s needed (funding, staff time, distribution channels, etc.);
(ii) what each of you bring to the table; and
(iii) trust in your teams to put it together.

Immediate Next Steps
The three things you need to do when you leave the room. Tangible, practical steps to get started. And a plan to reconnect once they’re achieved.

Everything else is wasted effort.

The private sector has a universal scoreboard. There is only one goal: have more tomorrow than you have today. You won’t hear investors or entrepreneurs or CEOs debating how to define success. It’s understood by everyone.

The public and non-profit sectors don’t have a scoreboard. This isn’t our fault. Our work is distributed, nuanced, and complex. What is our fault is that we keep wasting time trying to build one.

When we try, we end up with two things:

1.) Quantitative measures (web traffic, bodies in a room, test scores) that can easily be mistaken for impact; and

2.) Qualitative measures (feedback, expert observations, personal stories) that prove impact in specific instances, but don’t provide a definitive ‘Yes, we were successful.’

Businesses use metrics to measure efficiencies and conversion rates. To track how employees are performing. To see if advertising dollars are being well spent. Metrics inform the path to success.

We, on the other hand, attempt to use metrics to indicate success. To have the metrics be our scoreboard. And then screw ourselves by working towards an arbitrary, artificial, and largely inaccurate standard.

To end the interminable ‘metrics’ discussions and put a lot of great people back to work on the stuff that matters, I suggest the following consensus:

Give up. Accept the scoreboard will never exist.

Instead, do one of two things:

1.) Define your mission as something that can be measured, success as achieving the desired score, and stop there. Make the metric the mission, not an indicator of the mission. Increase graduation rates by 5%. Reduce hospital wait times by 20 minutes. Get 100km above the earth.

2.) Or, if you’re particularly enlightened, agree that you’ll know it when you see it. That everyone working on the project is smart, well-intentioned, and will try to make the right decisions. Use metrics to help with those decisions.

We’ll be happier, our resources will be put to better use, and we’ll all stop chasing our tails.

UPDATE: Working on a constructive follow-up post mashing Most Significant Change with iterative development and open funding models.

What I do for a living is help people understand new ideas and points-of-view in their own language, on their own terms. I’ve built relationships across every sector and between people of every political stripe. (Well, most of them.)

Partnership development is about stripping away preconceptions to expose shared values, then building to common cause. This experience has taught me a few things about how to encourage people to listen to and work with one another.

* If you dig down far enough, most people want the same things. Disagreements are generally limited to process. If this weren’t true we couldn’t all live next to each other.

* People are more likely to consider new ideas from people with whom they already agree.

* Nuance, tone, and appearance drive first impressions. And first impressions control access. You can’t build relationships if you can’t get in the door. Dress the part.

* Fear and uncertainty kill things before they start. Assuage and reassure. Everything is always personal.

* People reject what they don’t understand. And no one understands perfectly right away. Present things in pieces and build understanding over time.

Truisms, sure. But also key to getting things done.

Rightly or wrongly, the right and centre-right is scared of the NDP. Also rightly or wrongly, its reaction to an NDP government will be self-fulfilling. Economic growth – the main area where left wing competence is challenged – will stall under an NDP government because Bay Street will make decisions that cause it to stall. The Canadian dollar dipped on speculation of an NDP government.

This reaction is based on fear, uncertainty, lack of understanding, assumption of disparate interests, etc. The task for the NDP over the next four years is, not coincidentally, to strip away preconceptions, expose shared values, and build to common cause.

And, from the comfort and sheltered pulpit of my blog, my 3-point plan to make this happen.

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1.) Frame Everything in Terms of Responsibility

Responsibility, when defined not as obligation but as aspiration, is a shared and unifying value. It’s a universal yet highly personal premise that can underpin bold ideas. Corporations want to honour their responsibility to their shareholders and clients. Individuals want to honour their responsibility to their families and each other. Governments want to honour their responsibility to citizens and the public trust.

As with all words, the meaning of ‘responsibility’ can be shaped and redefined over time. The NDP can build from the language of corporate social responsibility, individual effort, and effective stewardship to unite Canadians behind a shared perspective on what Canada can achieve under an NDP government. The mantle of responsibility will also add an element of gray hair and navy suits to a party currently defined (at least externally) by Birkenstocks, blue collars, and tattoos.

2.) Adopt the Language of Social Enterprise

Canadians believe in the value of enterprise. ‘Enterprise’ evokes hard work, skilled innovation, and earned reward. Values respected by hard-core capitalists and socialists alike. Every sector and political party – or at least those with even a chance of voting for the NDP – can rally behind ‘shared enterprise’.

The sector that wields this language the best is, unsurprisingly, social enterprise. Executives in charge of these organizations move seamlessly from boardrooms to policy tables to protest parades. They’ve mastered the art of expressing social, environmental, and economic objectives in terms that garner support in every context. It’s a near-perfect model for how to communicate across viewpoints and sectors. The NDP would do well to follow their lead.

3.) Recruit More Suits

The value of winning 102 seats and becoming the Official Opposition is huge. The NDP has moved from ideological watchdog to government-in-waiting. That running for the NDP presents an opportunity to wield legislative power means the party can attract new talent and leadership.

And they need to be people who wear suits to work (at least metaphorically). For no other reason than we don’t have any. The opportunity before the NDP is not to aggressively assert its platform. It would be divisive and ineffectual in face of a Conservative majority. The opportunity is to be reasonable, agreeable, and actually compromise. To display maturity and acumen. To use the new profile to recruit capacity from the middle. Then take over the wheel and slowly, over time, permanently turn it to the left.

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There are, of course, lots of things that can undermine the recent electoral gains. Irrational, hair-trigger reactions to the colour orange, a very effective and well organized opposition party, a base that often values confrontation for its own sake, etc.

But the opportunity is ours for the taking.

As the Awesome Foundation continues to expand – Chicago launched just today – I’m struck by the endless variation. Each city takes the premise, $1000 for being awesome, and makes it their own. You’re empowered to do whatever you want with the model.

The freedom is alluring. A formal, considered, and informed rejection of process. And this simplicity is a big part of why the Foundation is growing.

But it’s also a huge challenge. The first thing that happened when the Toronto folks got together is that everyone looked at each other and wondered what was supposed to happen next.

There’s a lot to be said about just letting things happen. But there’s a lot more to be said about making things happen. And, usually, doing that quickly and easily requires a clear path.

“Awesome is getting shit done.” – Matt

The Toronto group is an interesting mix of people. Many – not all – of us have day jobs that require politely navigating large, complicated, group-based decision-making. Last thing we want is to spend our free time engaged in more of the same. But we’re also uniformly lazy and impatient and wanting to get to the bar. So we’ve come back to process.

We’re still playing with it, but we’re arriving at a model that strikes the right balance of all the things that matter. People get to be generous, indignant, supportive, evil, and conciliatory. Everyone gets to laugh, argue, debate, sympathize, and scheme. And we get from 50+ submissions down to 1, consensus-driven winner in less than an hour.

YMMV and we’ll keep changing it up, but here’s how we get it done.

1.) Individual Short Lists

Everyone enters their short lists of no more than 10 submissions into a common Google spreadsheet. We total the number of times each submission appears to get a sense of the emerging consensus.

2.) Fall on Your Sword Round

About half the submissions will have only appeared on one or two lists. The people who put these projects forward are asked if they are willing to pull the entry from contention. All the Trustee has to say is ‘no’ and it stays for the next round. This gets the list down to the entries with widespread support plus a handful of personal favourites.

3.) Ruthless Round

The conversation opens up and people get to single out entries for elimination. Someone is given a chance to defend the project, everyone chimes in, and then it’s put to a vote. If 7/10 trustees vote to kill it, it’s gone. This goes on till we have 5 to 10 solid projects for the short list.

4.) Weighted Voting

By this point there’s been a lot of discussion about the merits of each submission. Each Trustee ranks the projects from 1 to 10. The math determines the top 3.

5.) Deal-making and The Winner

The people backing the emerging favourite make their case to those who are still holding out. Deals are struck regarding what types of projects are going to be prioritized the next time around. The deals win over the balance of the Trustees, we unanimously declare the winner, and head out to celebrate.