Communicating and leading, one lesson a day

Imagine you coordinate education programs at a small natural-history museum. On Monday, a trustee sends a note that says, “Make school visits more interactive before autumn.” It sounds like a request, but it is not yet work you can finish. Does interactive mean a handling table, a new guide, a scavenger hunt or training for docents? Which age group? Which galleries? What has to be ready, and what is not part of this round?

Instead of rushing into the exhibit hall, you rewrite the request. You explain why it matters: teachers report that younger groups lose focus during the fossil tour. You define the boundary: create one fifteen-minute activity for the dinosaur room, test it with two classes and do not redesign the full tour. You add the fact an outsider would miss: nothing may touch the open specimen trays without the collections manager present. Then you place the work after the safety review it depends on.

That rewrite is not paperwork around the work. It is the first useful piece of the work.

The idea connects to Peter Gollwitzer’s research on implementation intentions. A goal intention says, “I want to do this.” An implementation intention says, “When this situation occurs, I will take this action.” Across many studies, the more specific form made follow-through far more likely, especially when getting started was hard. A vague goal has to be decided again every time you see it. A specific plan has already settled the next move.

A loose request is a goal intention. A clear action brief is an implementation intention for a team. Every time you convert one into the other, you remove a decision from somebody’s future.

A request is ready when you can answer three questions in writing. First: why now? Give one or two sentences a capable stranger could understand. Without the why, people cannot make tradeoffs or recognize when the result is useful.

Second: what is in and what is out? The out is usually more important. “Improve school visits” is a swamp. “Test one guided activity in one room; do not change the rest of the tour” is a path. A boundary protects the work from every good idea it might attract.

Third: what is the one thing about this environment that is not obvious and could hurt the result? At the museum, it is the specimen-handling rule. In another setting it might be a delivery cutoff, an accessibility need or a permit that must come first. That sentence can be worth more than the rest because it gives the next person knowledge they cannot see from the request alone.

There are two traps. The first feels like speed. When you understand the problem, it seems quicker to begin than to write. For a task that truly fits in one short sitting, that can be right. For anything larger, skipping the rewrite leaves the understanding trapped in your head. The next person has to rediscover it, and so do you when you return after a few days.

The second trap goes the other direction. A rewrite is not a complete manual. If you are drafting the fourth long paragraph, you may be building the solution in prose. Use the test: could a capable person begin after five minutes of reading? Why now, in and out, one sharp warning. If that is not enough, the request may be two pieces of work and should be split.

Defining work also shapes it. The person who turns “make visits interactive” into a clear, bounded experiment has set the direction even if a docent builds the activity. That matters when your time is limited. Doing fewer tasks does not mean having less influence if your framing helps the whole group move.

Try this today. Take the vaguest item on your list, the one you keep rereading without starting. Do not begin it. Give yourself ten minutes to rewrite it using the three parts: why now, what is in and out, and the one fact an outsider would miss. Stop when the timer ends. Then look again. The work is usually smaller than it felt, or it has revealed itself as two separate jobs.

That is lesson twenty six. The rewrite turns a wish into work somebody can actually finish.