The Catalyst is a Group 18 publication. I'm Kevin Noble. I run a business transformation consultancy and write practical frameworks for leaders who want more from themselves and their teams. If someone forwarded this to you, you can subscribe at https://catalyst.group18.co/.
Last time I committed to you that I would send out cold outreach messages to prospective clients. Ken on the team did the sending, using the PDF I built and some language we designed, and he sent out something on the order of 100 emails last week.
We’ve heard back from literally no one 🤣
It makes sense. I ignore every cold outreach message that comes my way. As they say, I like to buy, not to be sold.
Also, if you are going to do cold outreach, it’s a volume game. Alex Hormozi, in “$100M Leads,” says you need to send out 100 emails per day, every day to get traction. I’ll keep experimenting, but I’m not convinced this is a game I want to play. I much prefer what we’ve been doing, which is doing great work for clients and having them connect us to people they know.
Speaking of, we have a contract out awaiting signature for a big new project. It’ll be over 2x larger than our next largest retainer. I’ve got a new person working with us to help deliver it. The work is to split a single business entity into separate pieces, set them up legally and operationally, and help scale them. It’ll be high stakes and high speed, but we’re excited!
But if you asked me where my time has been spent lately, it’s in building software.
I’ve got two active client projects, and I’ve also been building something for Group 18 itself.
I started by just getting started. The use case was me and the team not knowing how we were tracking against time budgets for clients. For example, we might have a client where we should be spending 40 hours a month across three people, but we would actually spend 70 hours by the end of the month.
So I built a web app with a real database in the back end. Then I used the API of our time tracking tool to bring in our history of data, with a nightly task to refresh the data. I then built a configuration view in the app to establish time “budgets” for fixed fee, retainer, and hourly clients.
Next, I built an integration into Slack, and a way to configure messages. You select the Slack channel, the time budget(s) you’re interested in, and the schedule. At those times, we’ll get a message in Slack informing the team of how we’re tracking against the budget. I set these up so that right before the standup, we get a proactive update. We’re better aligned and can coordinate action while being mindful of how the project is doing commercially as well.
From there I just kept going. I started picking spreadsheets I owned that I could get rid of by replicating in the app. I implemented tiered security so that I can invite team members and control what’s exposed. I started connecting to more tools the team used.
I’m nowhere near done yet. I built out a big roadmap that I’ll execute on over time.
This project is doing several things.
One, it’s super fun.
Two, I’m learning a ton.
Three, this benefits Group 18 a lot!
Four, this becomes a showcase for potential clients. I can be on a call and just show someone what we’ve built, and offer to do something similar for them.
What’s funny is that I used to work a ton of hours at Atlassian and I thought I’d work less for myself. But I’m working even more now. The difference is I love what I do now, and these hours are my choice. I’ve got greater joy and fulfillment.
Back to building!
Kevin
“
But in a complex world, it’s impossible to know what might be useful in the future. It’s important, therefore, to spread our cognitive bets. Curious people take risks, try things out, allow themselves to become productively distracted. They know that something they learn by chance today may well come in useful tomorrow or spark a new way of thinking about an entirely different problem.
— Ian Leslie in "Curious"
Deep Dive on the Power of Synthesis
Whatever business you’re in, it’s actually a party planning business.
The party you’re planning might be a software go-live. It might be a new capability you’re launching. Maybe you’re recording a commercial. You might be building internal tools for your own company. They’re all parties. In fact, if you look at your calendar for the next three months, there are probably a LOT of parties to plan.
Every party has a set of expectations. And your job is to make sure it all comes off without a hitch.
Unfortunately, your team can make this really hard on you.
Imagine for a moment that you literally ran a party planning business. You’ve got different teams on cakes. They know what kind of cake you need and when it needs to be ready. They come to a project meeting to give you an update. The first team's update is as follows:
We have 2 cups of flour.
John went to the store to get eggs.
We have blue, brown, and pink food coloring.
There are fresh raspberries in the fridge.
WTF? As a leader you’re sitting there trying to figure out what this collection of facts means. How much flour does the recipe need? Will John make it back in time? Did we even want raspberry? Is the cake actually going to happen?
The second team goes next, and they say:
The cake will be ready on time, but 5% less moist than spec.
The client’s name is misspelled in the icing right now, and we have time to fix it.
The client has been updated and is happy with the plan.
Obviously the second update is much better. Team 1 gave you a summary of facts. Team 2 synthesized their work into the impact on the cake, which is what you needed as a leader.
If you scale up this minor interaction across ALL the parties you're planning in your business, the negative impact when your team communicates like team 1 are massive - as are the benefits of communicating like team 2.
What’s going on here? What’s the difference in these sets of communication? How do you get your team to be better at party planning?
(By the way, I want to give credit to my former coach, Olga, for introducing me to this analogy. I’ve used it ever since!)
When you DO get synthesis, it feels really good.
The team gives you summary, but what you need is synthesis.
I used to see this all the time in my own Monthly Business Reviews or OKR updates. The team would give me cake ingredients, but what I really needed was the implications to our party.
A summary is the facts. The car was blue. We have two cups of flour. The pipeline is at $1.2M. Q1 revenue came in at $2.8M.
Synthesis is doing the extra work of piecing the facts together into a bigger story, implications, and decisions needed. The cake will be ready but dry. We’re $200K short of plan and need to implement our safety valve. The pipeline is healthy on volume but soft on conversion. We need a decision on the segment discount by Friday.
Synthesis moves the team closer to action. Reporting facts is nearly valueless. And yet teams spend an inordinate amount of time gathering them, and very little figuring out what it all means.
A team that summarizes hands you raw material and asks you to interpret it. A team that synthesizes hands you a finished thought and asks you to act on it. The former is faster to send. The latter makes the business move faster.
I had an acute experience of this recently. I requested something over Slack, and then over the next 10 minutes I got a series of screenshots and attachments back. No words of explanation. Collectively, in theory, these facts contain the pieces of what I asked for, and the sender feels like they did what was needed. In practice, I’ve got to open everything up to make sense of it and determine the answer. I don’t have time in my schedule to do that.
You’re probably doing this work right now
Just like my Slack experience, your team is probably giving you more work right now.
You sit through your weekly team meeting and each person reports an update. Nobody says whether they’re ahead or behind. People say what happened, but not what was expected or needed. You’re left to figure out, in real time, whether there’s an issue and what needs to happen next.
Or, your VP of Sales sends sales numbers before the board meeting. Your marketing lead sends you their numbers. You spend Sunday afternoon stitching them into a coherent story for Tuesday morning, because nobody else did.
It’s mentally exhausting!
In every one of those moments, you’re doing synthesis work that someone closer to the data should have done.
Just like in our party planning analogy, the team told you how much flour they had, but not the impact to the party.
Synthesis does take work, but it shouldn't only be on the biggest leader to do.
Three ways this costs you
The absence of synthesis isn’t just a “bummer” or a meeting where you have to work a little harder. There are real costs to your business.
The first is exhaustion. Doing synthesis is difficult work. It’s strategic work. There’s a lot of uncertainty. Facts are facts; it doesn’t take much energy to grab them, but putting them together requires judgment. Someone who hasn’t done this doesn’t understand just how taxing doing synthesis across an entire portfolio of work can be. It’s absolutely draining.
The second is overall speed. When a team member sends you a response to something quickly, at first glance it seems like something to praise. Look how responsive! But if all they did was summarize facts, then the job isn’t done. Someone still has to turn those facts into action. You’ve already got a full plate, and your bandwidth is taxed. A team member delivering a full thought in twenty minutes is better than screenshots delivered in two that take you another hour to make sense of. Speed of sending is not the same as speed of getting the thing done, and your customers care about the latter.
The third is lack of development. Synthesis is the work of leadership. If your team never tries, they don’t get feedback, and they don’t develop the skill they need. You’re getting more and more reps as the leader, they’re getting none, and the gap between leadership layers gets bigger.
Modeling for the team
If you want your team to develop the skill of synthesis, make it visible, repeatable, and safe.
Start with shared language. The party planning analogy that kicks off this newsletter works well. I’ve been using this with people for close to five years now, and it’s always a hit. The example makes a lot of sense no matter your role. And once your team has heard it, you can refer back to it as needed. “You sent me a list of cake ingredients. Are we going to be ready for the party?” It works well because you’re not blaming a person, you’re just reminding them of a pattern and triggering a reset.
I struggle with this one, but you can also send the work back. When something lands in your inbox that’s all summary and no synthesis, don’t do the synthesis yourself. Ask them for another pass: What does this mean? What are the implications? Are we above or below plan? Are we ahead of or behind schedule? The first few times will be slow, but that’s the nature of development. It pays off in the long run.
Lastly, show the team what good looks like. Pick the ritual that matters most - probably your OKR updates or your weekly business review - and build a reference document with two or three excellent examples. Real ones, with a paragraph at the top of each explaining why it’s good. When I did this, I used my rewrites of their updates, to compare and contrast. Later, when someone did an amazing job, I’d push it up to the reference document and describe why it worked so well.
A handy reference document can work wonders.
Giving examples doesn’t just work for AI! If you publish a reference document your team can compare their version to that and keep iterating until it looks right without having to involve you.
Like all skills that are developing, don’t forget your appreciations. As the team attempts this, they’re looking to your reaction to know whether it’s safe to keep trying. Even when their update isn’t quite right, thank for them the synthesis. Don’t redo it in front of them (they’ll learn that you’ll always rescue them). Instead, ask questions to challenge them to think deeper, or to recognize elements that are missing.
Call to Action
Pick one thing this week to improve your team’s ability to synthesize.
Option one: teach the analogy. Talk to them about party planning and the difference between updates that give ingredients and those that talk about the implications for the party. Let them ask questions and really internalize the difference.
Option two: build the reference document. Choose the ritual where improvement is the most impactful (OKR updates, weekly business reviews, board prep). Find two or three examples of synthesis done well and write a short note at the top of each explaining what makes it good. Send the document to your team and tell them this is the bar they need to hit.
If you do this, I’d love to hear how it all landed! Email me at kevin@catalyst.group18.co and tell me what you did, how the team responded, and whether anything in your own communication started feeling different too.
Kevin
If this kind of thinking is useful, it's what I do professionally. Group 18 works with business owners and leaders of growing companies on the operational and leadership challenges that limit performance. If that's relevant to what you're working on, I'd like to hear about it.
