Domino

5The Permission Ceremony, Part 2: The Conflict

When you have someone following you in a car, how do you know if they noticed your turn signal? How do you know whether or not they intend to follow you around the turn?

Your best bet is to look in the rearview mirror and verify that they also switched on their blinker. When you're leading a team, you can do the same thing—sort of. Problem is that your people probably don't come to work every morning wearing little light bulbs sheathed under orange reflectors on their shoulders (or at least not when OSHA pays a visit). In the absence of that literal blinking light, you need another clear indicator of your team members' intentions to get out of the old lane and follow you into the new lane.

That was Jonathan's challenge.

His oath was kind of funny, kind of strange, and awfully effective at signaling his turn. But it wasn't yet clear that everyone was following him. He still needed to see their blinkers in his rearview mirror.

So after Jonathan finished his oath, we split the room up into the five major sub-teams. Each team was tasked with two objectives.

First, they created a 90-day sprint that identified the top three objectives they would commit to focusing on for the next 90 days.

Second, they created a waitlist with all the other objectives for the year that they would intentionally put on hold for 90 days or until their three sprint objectives were completed.

When they were finished, each team had a document that looked like ...