Last week we kicked off our series about Legos and change management by focusing on knowing what you’re building.  This week is about breaking Lego builds down into sections and having clear milestones.

My parents bought me this Spider-man set a few years ago for Christmas and it’s one of my all-time favorites.  It is comprised of 2099 pieces.  Imagine how difficult that would have been if all of the pieces would have just been mixed in together.  That would have been horrible!  Luckily, Lego doesn’t do that.  They break the build down into digestible sections.  Each section has a bag with the pieces you need for that section.  You then work through the instruction book section by section until you’re done.

Let’s connect this to work.  How often have you been involved in an organization wide initiative and been utterly confused on how to execute it?  That’s happened to me a lot throughout the years.  It’s almost like they dump a bunch of info (Lego bricks 😉) on you and hope you just figure it out.

Now, think about the time when you’ve been involved in something complicated, but they did a nice job of breaking it down into digestible sections.  You could see how all of the milestones would add up to get you to where you need to go.  You also were clear on what you needed to accomplish for each milestone.  What impact did this have on you?  I’ve found in these situations I was less confused and could put my effort toward executing vs figuring out what the heck was going on.

The challenge- How can we break complicated initiatives down into easier to execute milestones?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry