Let us face it in all of our lives their are two certainties starting with your birth and ending in your death. That gap in between is your "Gift of Time" to this planet, society and will typically be measured by your friends, your family, your colleagues but most importantly by you.
So you need to pause and reflect on how have you utilized your "Gift of Time" and it only takes 5 minutes but could give you some soul searching ... some of you will like it, others not because they feel they are toooo busy or don't truly value the gift they provide to the rest of us.
Now we wish to introduce you to an additional alignment tool … The Weekly Debrief. The concept of the de-brief tool germinated many years ago when Mariela was managing a bunch of university interns along with a gang of CI foot soldiers harvested from the floor. The concept was simple review the activities of the day and plan for your accomplishments for the following day. The tool worked beautifully.
Since then we have morphed the tool into a weekly De-Brief and it has become a corner stone with our client partners. Reviewing the weekly De-Brief enables us to stay intimate and connected with our clients while at the same time allowing to provide some remote coaching and encouragement.
Recently, a client partner issued a memo that contained the following information about doing weekly De-Briefs;
Hi team,
Thank you all for the weekly debriefs. As discussed, you can now forward your debriefs to me (a hyperlink is sufficient) and I will copy Richard and Mariela along with my feedback to you. This is an opportunity for us to sustain this practise which ideally would be replicated elsewhere within the organization. We've been doing debriefs for more than 6 months now and I would like to take this opportunity to review why we are doing these.
As you all know, our Operating System Document describes all activities that deliver value to customers and suggests that we carry out these activities through a continuous cycle of planning, execution, measurement & analysis, and improvement. This applies not only to manufacturing but to all activities that we carry out at the company, including support services, such as CI. The weekly debrief, in my view, is an excellent tool because it provides us an opportunity to complete this cycle on a weekly basis.
It is simple and quick and has all elements of the cycle - PLANNING is completed by expressing the "Planned Accomplishments and Resources Required from the Team", EXECUTION is carried out throughout the week, MEASUREMENT & ANALYSIS can be done throughout the week and is expressed at the end of the week by stating "What Went Well and What Didn't Go Well" and finally, IMPROVEMENT is expressed by identifying "What We Need to Do Differently".
Typically it takes less than 5 minutes to prepare your De-Brief, what an excellent way to reflect on your weekly “gift of time” contribution While planning for next weeks activities.