First 50 Days

Again, busy as heck with scheduling.  Something exciting about this meeting was our review of the Launch meeting.  It's the first step toward After Action Reviews.  Here's the lesson for next time:  ask yourself what questions you'll ask in your AAR during your design face for your project.

Otherwise, you might make the mistake I made where I opened the conversation with, "what were your impressions of the event?"  And then received general, "I thought it was good" responses.  I'm all for open-ended questions, but if you leave them too open you can sometimes just get blank stares.

Do y'all remember about 10 years ago when every sales training org thought open-ended questions were the end-all-be-all.  Now, I think we're all realizing that an open-ended question works best when fronted by a specific kind of closed-ended question.  I call this the "fuse question," because when properly worded, a simple closed-ended question will light the fuse for the explosion of answers to the open-ended question that you really want to ask.  ("Explosion of answers" is trademarked by IckyCorporateSpeak, Inc.  All rights reserved.)