I shared a post a couple of weeks ago where I detailed a super useful framework for empowerment and accountability.
…Then last week I went and promptly fell into a mess of my own making by not practicing what I preach.
Backing up a little for some context — the Friday before last Thinkific had some necessary downtime to do much needed backend improvements. Overall, the upgrade went as planned and Thinkific was down for *most* customers for around four hours.
But due to some unintended consequences, a small group of visitors received a downtime message for longer than that — in the end up to 12 hours.
As a result we decided to share the details of what happened with our customers.
Instead of proceeding directly to an ARCI at this point as we should have done, we had multiple one-off conversations about how to proceed with different stakeholders, never once establishing who was accountable or responsible for the details.
Basically, we took a relatively straightforward (albeit rather important) email and created a bunch of uncertainty — uncertainty that creates friction and stress about how to proceed.
Creating an ARCI for this project would’ve taken us 5 minutes.
…Plus it probably would’ve resulted in the email landing in customers inboxes within a few hours of that.
In the end, the email went out the following morning (not the end of the world, but not ideal either) and the whole thing took longer (both in actual time and mental effort) than it needed to.
The takeaway from the whole thing is something I should’ve learned eons ago:
Taking a quick moment to build an ARCI matrix is an important step even for seemingly simple projects. ARCI helps clarify goals, inputs, and expectations so everyone can execute quickly.
Gary Allen 