Every little step counts

In my last day job I worked at a big agency where I oversaw a global account in 75 countries. Something was going wrong in at least one country every week. I felt like I was at Mavericks, surfing a 20-foot wave full of sharks, chainsaws, rusty engine parts, broken bottles, poisoned daggers, and jagged rocks. I knew that if I looked down, I’d fall in and die. The only way to cope was to keep my eyes focused on the shore and my two feet on the board.

Somehow these days feel the same - the constant swirl of economic, political, and social bad news could crush anyone. How does one run a company or a team in this chaotic, constantly shifting world?

Back when I had my day job, I had to redefine how to tackle problems. Once I accepted that there would never be a time when everything was going perfectly, I could see which problems to handle and which to ignore. I reset expectations for myself and for my senior team. What could success look like? We knew we could never achieve order and perfection, so we embraced the Law of Incrementalism. We just tried to get a little bit better all the time, and we didn’t allow ourselves to stop trying.

Our 75 country network was a perpetual, massive beta test. Whenever a team anywhere in the world did something creative or brilliant or shrewd, we’d share their success and encourage other countries to adopt it - if India has a great content management approach, can’t Europe and Latin America see if it will work for them too?

And, if anyone in the world fell into quicksand, we’d warn other teams about the new pitfall that team discovered. That way, the whole global team could get a little better all the time, strengthening a culture of communication that was open, non-hierarchical, and fast.

It was such an inspiration to watch relationships being built on support and encouragement across every corner of our global team. It was great to see the unglamorous and yet essential improvements in the Law of Incrementalism become our team’s norm.

There were always things going wrong. Some crises were Gordian knots that took months to undo, some were comical mishaps, some were gut-wrenching disappointments. The only heroism was in simply persevering, identifying the small things we could change, changing them, and celebrating ourselves along the way.