Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Owning the risks
One of the most useful questions I like to pose in a kick-off meeting is:
What are the risks to submitting a successful proposal on time?
Now, I could write up a pretty comprehensive list myself and simply hand it out. But by asking individual participants to contribute their personal thoughts, it stops being a case of “Jon told us that…”.
Instead, it becomes a case of “We’ve worked out that…” As a result, they’re far more likely to accept that the risk exists, and take ownership of the solutions that we go on to identify together.
We will have done hours and hours of work for little gain.
Hi, Jeff, and thanks for the comment.
I wasn’t thinking so much the risks “of” submitting an unsuccessful proposal (where your comment is spot on). More, I’m suggesting that one tries to get the team to discuss what could stand in the way of submitting a successful proposal. This might unlock discussions about resource, sponsorship, people, customer understanding, process, timescales,….