Choosing a Focus for your 100-Day Challenge
Choosing a Focus Area for Your 100-Day Challenge
There is no right answer here, but whichever focus areas is chosen, it is important to define it sharply enough so it is possible to pick a reasonably sized 100-Day Team (8-12 members).
If the focus of the 100-Day Challenge is too broad or too vague, such as “we want to make progress on ending gender-based violence in our municipality”, it will be very difficult to decide who needs to be on the 100-Day Team, or the team will be way too large to be a real team. As you probably have experienced, when teams get to be too large (more than 15 people), they become very slow and tough to manage.
It is important to engage other leaders in making the decision about the focus area. This will create buy-in.
Steps to Zero in on a Single Focus Area
It is good to start by presenting the short list of focus areas you developed to other leadership stakeholders. You need to make a collective decision to choose one of these as the focus for your next 100-Day Challenge. You can ask each to offer their perspective and then facilitate a conversation to see if you all naturally converge to one of these.
If the group is large, it may be helpful to split them into breakout groups of 4-5 each, ask them to discuss this, and then present in plenary to each other.
If there is no general agreement, you can use voting to select one focus area from the shortlist.
Tips
Resist the temptation to take on more than one impact indicator in your 100-Day Challenge. This will make it difficult to choose a reasonably sized 100-Day Team. You can remind your colleagues that this is just the beginning, and that you (or “we”) can focus on another impact indicator in the next round of 100-Day Challenges.
If there is enough interest and capacity, you can pick two or more focus areas and mobilize two or more 100-Day Teams at once. These can be launched at the same Start-up Workshop, but you will need to recruit two teams and to prepare two Challenge Notes.
At times, and especially if multiple organisations are represented at the meeting, you may find it useful to start the meeting by inviting each of the leadership stakeholders to talk for a few minutes about the relevant activities in which their organisation is involved. This will coordinate between organisations and give each stakeholder the chance to say what’s on their mind before engaging in the “convergence” discussion about the focus area.
Additional Conversations
Once the focus area is determined, make sure it is defined sharply enough so a reasonably sized 100-Day Team can tackle it. You may need to come back to this conversation after you discuss team composition. If it is clear that the team needed will be too large, you will need to sharpen the focus further.
Here are three additional conversations with leadership stakeholders that will help further define the Challenge for the 100-Day Team.
What are some of the guardrails that the team needs to be aware of?
For example, if you are challenging the team to reduce the backlog of court cases, you may want to remind them that they cannot do this at the expense of the quality of the decisions made to resolve the cases (proceeding to judgment without proper due process or evidence gathering).
What are some of the recommendations to the team?
Leadership stakeholders may be eager to offer up ideas to the 100-Day Team that come from their own experiences and wisdom. For example, in order to reduce backlog of cases, the Team may want to “triage” cases, and refer the complex ones to a special track so they do not clog the system for months. You can offer these ideas up to the Team in the Challenge Note. But be careful not to offer them so many ideas that the Team has no room to come up with their own. Trust the wisdom of the Team to come up with a work plan. You can always offer up additional ideas when you join the Team to review their draft work plan at the end of the Start-Up Workshop.
What are you hoping to learn from the 100-Day Challenge?
This is particularly relevant in 100-Day Challenges that focus on exploring new initiatives, versus improving performance on existing ones. For example, if you are challenging the Team at a University to “Break the Silence” about gender-based violence, you can be explicit with the Team that, from a leadership perspective, you are keen to learn why women in particular, are not speaking up about their experiences with sexual harassment. Is it because the culture ostracizes them if they do? Is it because they feel unsafe? Is it because they do not believe it would lead to any change? Is it because they do not know the proper – and safe – channels to report this? Is it all the above? This “learning agenda” can be integrated into the Challenge Note you send to the Team.
One More Tip: Active Listening
Often, we pretend to listen at meetings, but we aren’t really listening… It is particularly important to listen well to leadership stakeholders at the one on one or group meetings. Here’s a short video on the practice of “active listening”.
