Bogin Report Q2 2024: The Declare and Extract Method

Each quarter, I write about my personal observations on a subject related to business. This content is my own, not that of my employer or any other individual/company. I am so sorry about the significant delay in posting my Q2 report. Thank you for reading! #BoginReport

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Consultants, product managers, program managers, and many other corporate roles need to bring together teams of subject matter experts from different backgrounds and collaborate to achieve certain outcomes/deliverables, often over condensed timelines. In these types of environments, it is critical to maintain pace and strong bias for action while making high quality, durable decisions. This is a very difficult tightrope to walk. I have seen so many projects suffer from an inability to get momentum, an inability to make decisions due to analysis paralysis. I have seen other projects rush hastily through key decisions, sending these efforts in the wrong direction and resulting in significant churn, wasted cycles, and a failure to achieve the desired outcomes. Think of the poorly launched product that totally fails to hit the sales targets. Think of the internal IT transformation project that gets extended for years longer than originally planned.

During my time in consulting, I started testing an alternative approach for balancing pace and quality. It is called Declare and Extract. Over the past many years, I have continued to hone in the Declare and Extract Method, and now I'm excited to share it for the first time with you all.

Declare and Extract Requires Three Core Building Blocks

1.       Assemble Experts: Build a team of people who represent the functional groups that are involved in the work at hand or will need to use the resulting product. Make sure that the people on this team are true subject matter experts for each of their functions or areas.  Check credentials.

2.       Establish “Speak Up" Culture: The team/program leader must establish a culture within the working team in which everyone is highly encouraged to speak up. Make sure the ideas everyone shares are met with “Yes And” constructivism. Create standard behaviors around everyone feeling welcome to come “off mute”, even if their idea is not fully refined. Encourage disagreement also. Make it totally fine to say, “I like the idea you shared and I think we need to consider XYZ details”. Or “I am concerned that the approach you just proposed will lead to ABC, and I think if we tweak it in this specific way, the outcome will be better”. Speak Up culture is usually best established when a team is accustomed to meeting in person or joining live calls on video and off mute.

3.       Understand and Plan: As the team or program leader, you must maintain a holistic understanding of the scope of the effort. You must really know what the leaders of your client/company have defined as "success". You also must have an intersectional understanding of each of the functional teams engaged; you have to know what each of the impacted functions, customers, and/or clients care about, as well as their key reservations. You need to be able to see the “box top” of the puzzle, the picture of how all the pieces will come together across the macro effort. And you need to understand enough about each piece to “know where to push”. Leveraging the broad based understanding, you should set aggressive micro milestones for how to chip away at the overarching goals of the project or program.  You must define what the success measures are for each milestone. Then you must determine what decisions have to get made to ensure that the milestone is met. Always ask, what will maximize the return on investment for your client/company while balancing risk?

Declare and Extract In Practice

The Method: With the right people (1), and the right team culture (2), propelled by your own strong understanding and plan (3), any project can move efficiently and effectively. 

• Prepare: To get the Declare and Extract method into motion, the leader, with her/his broad understanding of the scope, the options, and the expert opinions, should have hypotheses for what the best decision(s) are to advance the product, program, project, etc.
• Set Context: During a team meeting (in-person or on video with voice), remind the subject matter experts and working team members of the situation, the potential paths forward, and the deadline (based on the micro milestones).
• Declare to everyone the decision(s) that you think should be made and why.  Admit that you do not have all the details and invite informed disagreement. 
• Extract feedback from the group. Ask others to respectfully disagree with and build on the idea. The idea itself should provide a focal point for debate and ideation. It's a spark that can light the fire for rapid high quality decisioning. As others speak up, the team leader should capture live notes about any benefits and risks mentioned. Make sure everyone feels heard as they review the options and comment on the recommendation(s). 
• Conclude (and change course if needed): By the end of the meeting, reassert the decision, this time with everyone’s support and buy-in. That said, if the discussion revealed that a different option is actually best, then the team leader should have the humility to pivot to an option other than the original declaration. This willingness to change paths is a core artifact of a genuine “Speak Up” culture, it validates to the team that their voices are being heard.  With the agreed upon decision, the team leader can report back up to her/his senior leaders about the group decision/recommendation(s) and supporting rationale. In this way, the team leader can optimize for both the quality and momentum of the project.

An Example:

• Background: You work for a shipping company and you are running a project in which the team will have to determine which AI capability to enable in the next 9 months. You have built a team of experts who understand artificial intelligence both for internal efficiency and external go to market. But you are stuck on which capability to build next because there are three short listed capabilities all of which have compelling revenue and cost savings estimates.
• Prepare: With your broad based understanding, you as the team leader should have an ~80% hypothesis already formed inside your mind.
• Set Context then Declare: Tell everyone that the next capability will be X based on reasons 1, 2, and 3. Say it out loud, admitting that it is a “strong hypothesis”.  Remind everyone that a decision must be made by the end of the meeting, due an key upcoming deadline (based on the micro milestones you have set). 
• Extract: By having one option to focus on, the subject matter experts will be much more able to thoughtfully respond. Then, as team leader, you should start to lean on your "Speak Up" culture. Turn to subject matter experts who might disagree with you and ask what their concerns are. Ask if they think other options are better. Build on the ideas being shared. 
• Conclude: By the end of the meeting, you will have the best choice made. That best choice will have been made from the dull hypothesis being sharpened by the depth of understanding from the subject matter experts. And all this will have been possible because of the culture of speaking up combined with your declarative extraction.

Broad Application

Although Declare and Extract is described above within the context of a product, project, or program, it can be applied to enable much greater collaboration and productivity across a range of business functions and run-the-business activities. As long as team members feel comfortable speaking up, and the leader has adequate broad based understanding to provoke and declare, the building blocks are there for breaking through barriers and driving much greater productivity.