Choose Your Initiative Statement:
What-When-Why

Once you have decided to initiate action toward a new future and planned your audience and message delivery, you need a summary statement of the initiative to serve as your basic announcement. Your “initiative statement” summarizes the What-When-Why of the desired future. These three ingredients comprise the nutshell version of the entire proposal:

• What do we want to accomplish?
• When do we want it to happen?
• Why does it matter?

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Focus on having the What-When-Why message reach everyone in your audience. This is not the time to give a lot of attention to “how” it will be done. Very often, as with the initiative to put a man on the moon, “how” to accomplish it is not fully known. As you move forward into using the other three types of conversations, you will be adding ideas and suggestions to continuously improve people’s knowledge of “how” to reach the goal. Choosing your initiative statement gives you the way to communicate efficiently and attract people’s attention to the What-When-Why of the future you are proposing.

What Do We Want to Accomplish?

President Kennedy’s desired accomplishment was to “land a man on the moon and return him safely to the earth.” This general outline was filled in over the next eight years with specifications of the types of fuels and metals to be developed and thousands of other specific achievements. Kennedy’s audience understood that they would need to do a lot of work to flesh out the “how.”

Kate and Mitch had a much smaller and more immediately available audience, some of whom they expected might object to their proposal or put up resistance. They chose to frame the new future as a joint venture to “deliver timely HR and technology results for all company managers and employees.” Because they knew their primary audience, they added two more details, confident this would stimulate all the necessary dialogue to get the conversation started.

  One addition, “staff promotions done in half the time,” would get all HR and ITS personnel interested in participating. As Kate said, “If it’s about promotions, we’ve got their attention.” The second, “100% use of the WOS system companywide,” was a way of putting everyone on notice that the work scheduling system would no longer be optional for anyone in the organization.

  Their What statement complete, Kate and Mitch put it on a poster that would hang in whatever conference room they scheduled for their joint meetings.

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The What element of an initiative statement needs to be brief and compelling enough to attract the intended audience into both the Initiative Conversation and all subsequent conversations for fulfilling the initiative. Some other examples include:

• “Eradicate extreme hunger and poverty,” the first of the eight UN Millennium Development Goals agreed to by all the world’s countries and leading development institutions.
• “Our goal is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal.” Larry Page, Google co-founder, November 27, 2007.
• “China sets an air quality target for the city of Beijing of 238 ‘blue-sky’ days in 2006,” Xinhua News Agency, January 14, 2006.
• “Our goal is to make a computer cost as little as $100 and distribute millions of them to the world’s poorest children,” Nicholas Negroponte, quoted by David Kirkpatrick in Fortune magazine, September 28, 2005, Fortune magazine.

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No one knows, at the time these goals are stated, whether they can or will be realized, or what barriers will have to be overcome. The initiative statement, however, leads people to consider what might be possible if and when the proposed new future is realized.

When Do We Want It to Happen?

Every goal needs a timeline—that is what makes the new future a specific event instead of an abstract idea. The UN Millennium Development Goals have a goal date of 2015. Larry Page set his timeline more loosely when he said, “It can be done in years, not decades.” China promised the air quality goal for Beijing would be met in the year of the Beijing Olympics, 2008. The $100 laptop goal was originally set for 2008, but that goal was revised when the technology breakthroughs needed more time.

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Some initiatives have a simple When:

• By this time next year, we will be in a new office building with a warehouse that allows us to have our entire inventory in one location.
• Within three months, we will have our environmental compliance policies drafted with policy implementation procedures in all of our production facilities.
• Starting today, we have a full-time person dedicated to updating our customer service Web site.

Kate and Mitch agreed to an overall six-month timeline that included time for the technology change plus time to capture data on the performance changes resulting from the initiative. Mitch set a two-week milestone to have his whole team using the WOS system. When he met with his vendors, he was able to develop a more specific plan for those two weeks. He scheduled the vendors to load the updated software, provide a half-day refresher training, and support two business process changes.

  “The vendors told me that most of the software was already loaded, and the technicians didn’t need much training,” Mitch said. “So I planned to focus on the business process changes. My techs had been using a work log to track their jobs, so the biggest change for them was to begin picking up their work orders from the new system instead of the manual log. It meant they needed to do some data entry and retrieval at the beginning and end of every day, and use mobile computing and dispatching throughout the day.”

  “The biggest problem,” he explained, “is that we won’t be able to get the technicians their mobile computing capability ready in two weeks. It will take at least six weeks to get the right hardware to make them fully mobile. Until then, we’ll keep using our beeper system, and the techs who are working in different offices around the campus will call in to our Central Command and get updated work order information.”

  Mitch was relieved that his techs were good sports about the change, and that his worst fears were not realized. He said, “They actually had fun inventing the Central Command idea and testing it out, so even the mistakes were not disasters. They joked about the ‘learning opportunities’ that they were having every day, and generally were much more upbeat than I expected. They were really enthusiastic about that two-week timeline.”

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Why Does it Matter?

The value of an initiative needs to be spelled out clearly for everyone, especially when it requires financial or material resources, or causes people inconvenience or extra work. The Why is a value statement that provides a context for the change and allows people to choose to spend their time, money, and effort to reach the goal. Leaders launching an initiative will already be enthusiastic about the new future, but they need to remember that their audiences may not recognize the value of the outcome and the difference it will make. Spelling out the impacts, benefits, and new opportunities will help people engage their best efforts to achieve the result.

One powerful way to communicate the value of an initiative is to tie it to your mission, vision, values, or strategies. Those things are usually stated in a positive way. Few people will be attracted to working on a timesaving or cost-cutting initiative, but many will be interested in positive-sounding purposes such as improved customer service, higher quality, or better communication between groups. When we invite people to work on something meaningful and positive that adds value to their organization or environment, they are more likely to be open to learning more about what is possible and how they might participate.

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Mitch told Kate, “All that stuff you said about your HR department—about how you serve every employee and work with unions and state and federal laws—it made an impression on me. I have not given that kind of thought to what we do in ITS, but I would like to be able to talk about my department that way. I know it would be good for the techs.”

  Kate agreed, saying, “My HR staff is also happy with this new initiative. When staff members saw the poster of our goal, they told me this was the first time they ever saw the techs as their partners instead of their problem. We talked about how the company is growing, and how we need to move experienced people up so we can hire and train more staff. Our old system of spreadsheets, interview schedules, and signature processes was cumbersome, and nobody is sad to see it go. With your support on the new scheduling system, we have a good database that is easier for us to help the managers more quickly.”