How a 6-year old girl used planning and communication to achieve her goals
By: Marcio S Galli
Tags: Teamwork, Communication, Okr

#okr #communication #teamwork #synchronization #goals

This essay showcases a story of how a 6-year old girl successfully achieved her goal of bringing her aunt to her house to stay a night. Although her aunt wanted to visit her, the odds seemed impossible due to the number of competing events her aunt had on the weekends.

But this girl learned her way out because of her ability to read the environment and her creativity to make a plan that involved leadership and communication. She didn’t only solve her specific problem — she may also have understood the importance of communication in preventing goals from being left to chance.

As I have observed this story, I believe that she went through an inflection point and that now she knows more about the power of planning and communication.

Honey (real name replaced to preserve the child’s identity) is a 6-year girl that wants to spend more time with everyone she loves. Her aunt is one of her top targets. The way she used to approach her aunt consisted of asking in realtime — can we do this? Would you go to my place today? Sometimes it would work but the reality was that it was frustrating because her aunt was quite busy with adult events at the weekends.

Honey started to get an idea of her aunt’s chaotic schedule. One event in special may have supported Honey to change her strategy — a picnic in the park. Honey was invited by her aunt in advance. She waited as the event was planned to happen on the weekend. The weekend came and it was everything perfect, although the picnic occurred inside the car due to the unexpected heavy rain.

It should be noted that both of them were not used to having a plan for what’s next. Although no one can say that Honey learned from that specific event, it became clear that the communication ahead of time brought alignment to them and support from others from the family network.

A couple of weeks later, Honey took the lead and came up with her own plan. Her proposal involved her aunt to come to her house and bring pajamas to stay the whole night. She told her aunt that the event was to happen on Sunday. On Saturday, she reminded her aunt that the event would start “tomorrow before the day goes dark.” She also gave specific instructions asking her aunt to take a necessary action that would otherwise jeopardize the event on Sunday:

Tell Spacious (aunt’s boyfriend name preserved) that we are doing this party tomorrow. Otherwise, he can show up out of a sudden and take you to do something else.

Sunday arrived. As the big moment was approaching, her aunt started to receive updates on the mobile phone. Honey was informing the progress of her room’s decoration. The rest of the experience was smooth — they had a great time together as they spent long hours until the next day with no interruptions.

Honey made an effort to bring her goal closer to reality as she knew that the environment was consistent with a chaotic setting of unplanned requests dominating her aunt’s weekend agenda.

Perhaps that picnic event gave her ideas about planning. But beyond that, she understood how the communication effort was powerful to bring her goal closer. She did so great that it also helped her aunt to communicate with the other adults to have their support.

As I have observed this story develop, I felt that it was a good lesson about the power of planning and communication in a team. Honey successfully communicated ahead of time, defining and providing intermediate instructions to the peers competing for the scarce resource (her lovely aunt in this case). When she asked her aunt to inform the boyfriend, it was a strategic communication step. In addition, the sharing of photos seemed to resonate with the idea of sharing feedback about key measurable actions ensuring focus on the upcoming goal.

MG