A say-back catches the obvious gaps. For work that runs over days, write a six-line card instead: what you'll hand over, when, when you'll check in, how good it has to be, who decides, and what's out. Each of you fills it in alone first, so the gaps show up on paper and not on Thursday afternoon.
Moderate to start
High impact
Learn it: 2-4 weeks
Six lines, both sides
the expectation card, and the week it saved
Filled in separately, the card showed two answers that differed and one left blank. Twenty minutes on Monday, instead of a redo on Thursday night.
The habit
Try it now.
Name the outcome as a thing
Something you can hand over: “3 slides”, “a one-page memo”. “Look into churn” is an activity, and an activity has no end.
Put a time on the deadline, and a check-in before it
“Thursday 3 pm”, not “Thursday”. Then book a short look about halfway, when changing course is still cheap.
Set the bar, and say who decides
Good compared to what? “Figures match the finance dashboard” can be checked; “solid” can't. And name who says it's done.
Write down what's out
One line of what you won't do. It's the line most often skipped, and the one that stops a two-day job turning into five.
Fill it in alone, then compare
Each of you writes your own card before you talk. Where they differ is the conversation; where they match, you're done.
If the scope changes later, change the card and the deadline together, out loud.
When to break the rule: for something new where nobody knows yet what done looks like, don't fake an outcome. Make the card about learning: “by Wednesday, know which three reasons matter”.
Compare two cards
Fill in your side, ask them for theirs, and see where they differ.
Write what you think was asked. Then send them the six questions, or ask them out loud, and put their answers beside yours. Each row says whether the two match, which one is blank, or which word could mean anything.
OutcomeWhat you'll hand over, as a thing.
DeadlineA day and a time.
Check-inWhen you'll look at it together.
Quality barGood compared to what?
Who decidesWho says it's done.
Out of scopeWhat you won't do.
The two cards
Talk these through
The card so far
Nothing you type is saved or sent anywhere. The match is a rough word-by-word comparison: two answers it calls different may mean the same thing, and only the two of you can tell.
The research behind it
“Do your best” lets any result count.
Edwin Locke and Gary Latham spent about thirty-five years running and collecting studies of goals, and summed them up in 2002. The steadiest finding: people given a specific, hard goal did better than people told to do their best.
Their explanation is the useful part here. “Do your best” has no line outside your own head, so almost any result can be called your best. A specific goal gives both people the same line to look at, and that takes the guessing out of what's expected.
It came with conditions. The goal worked when people were committed to it and could see how they were doing along the way, which is what the check-in is for. And on complex work that was new to people, a specific goal about learning sometimes did better than one about results.
The direction of the finding and its conditions, no figures. Locke & Latham, “Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation”, American Psychologist, 2002.
The idea
Why it works.
Each line of the card turns one vague part of a request into something either of you can check. “Thursday 3 pm” is either met or missed. “Figures match the dashboard” is either true or not. Nobody has to guess what the other one had in mind.
Filling it in separately matters more than it looks. When one person writes the card and the other reads it, the reader nods along. When both write it, the differences are already on the page before anyone has to raise them.
When it goes wrong
Habits that help.
Keep it to six lines. A card that takes an hour to fill in becomes a spec, and nobody fills in specs for Tuesday's work.
Use it when you're the one asking. “Here's my card. Does it match yours?” takes the awkwardness out of being asked back.
Treat a blank as an answer. A field nobody can fill means nobody knows yet. Decide it now, or put a date on deciding it.
Change the card out loud. New scope means a new deadline. Edit both in the same message, so neither drifts.
We would like to use Google Analytics to see which pages are worth keeping. It is off until you say yes, and the site works exactly the same either way.
How we handle your data.
Google Analytics is currently on.
We use it to see which pages are worth keeping, and nothing else. You can change that whenever you like — the site works exactly the same either way.
How we handle your data.
