Frameworks to support you and your team

Chapter 3

Collaborator Empathy Canvas

Build your understanding of people connected to your initiative to discover opportunities and challenges.

Transform “stakeholder management” from a chore into a capability. This becomes your secret weapon to spot the difference between what people say they need versus what they actually need.

Use it when you’re new to a team, taking over an initiative, or you can feel something is off and can’t name it.

• ThinkFrameworks & assumptions
• FeelEnergizers & drains
• DoHow they show up
• Six questionsRole, expected involvement, energy, why they joined, why the work matters, how it’s really going
• Power & dynamicsHypothesized · Perceived · Hopeful — your read, the team’s read, and theirs

Keep this one private. It’s the only canvas in the book I’d tell you not to put on a wall — the whole point is that people told you these things in a one-on-one. The Grid below is the version you share.

Chapter 4

Collaborator Grid Canvas

Lay the empathy canvases side by side and the team’s real shape shows up.

Sort every collaborator into the level they told you they expect. Then sort them again into the level the team actually treats them at. Anyone who lands in two different columns is either asking for more than they’re being given, or has been handed more than they asked for. That displacement is the finding — and your next step to help the team be more successful.

Use it when you’re about to run a listening session, or before you redesign a recurring meeting and need to know who genuinely belongs in it.

• ColumnsFour levels of involvement: responsible, accountable, consulted, informed. Each with what it costs and how often you show up
• Row 1How they say they need to be involved
• Row 2How the team treats them day-to-day
• Bottom stripKey observations → “So I wonder…” → “How might we…”

Chapters 6 & 7

Values Workshop: Whiteboard

The highest-impact workshop in the book, in the shortest amount of time.

Company values are usually wall decor next to the OSHA poster. This board turns them into something coachable. The team names what’s helping them work well, then what’s holding them back, then writes an antidote for each blocker. Everyone gets three votes — only three, which is the point — and a named decider narrows the wall down to three to five principles the team will actually remember.

Use it when you’ve been with the team long enough to have felt the friction yourself. The book says four to eight weeks; don’t run this in week one.

• Zone 1What’s helping us — max three per person
• Zone 2What’s holding us back — max two per person
• Zone 3Antidotes — a principle that counteracts each blocker
• DecideThree votes each, then one decider narrows to 3–5
• DefineWrite down what each one means, out loud, before anyone leaves

Frame the output as team principles, not values. It’s far easier to be told your principles are out of alignment than to be asked why you tried to change the company’s values.

Chapter 9

Conversation Design Template

The best meetings are designed for the people in them — not for the person who called it.

The usual meeting agenda answers three questions: who, how long, what topics. That’s a recipe for mediocrity. This technique makes developing meetings as strategic as building a deck to present to executives: the business context, which of the seven meeting functions you’re actually combining, what success looks like, who’s coming and why — and then a row per topic pairing the time with the activity that will shape how the topic gets discussed.

Use it when you’re planning anything that matters: a workshop, a kickoff, a hard one-on-one, a recurring meeting that’s stopped working. Budget one to two minutes per person, per prompt. Ten people, one question, is twenty minutes. Do that math across six prompts and watch your agenda inflate — then cut it.

• ContextThe business reason we’re gathering right now
• FunctionWhich of the seven functions this serves, and why
• SuccessWhat has to be true when we walk out
• LengthHow much time is actually allotted
• ParticipantsWho’s joining, and why they specifically
• Time / Topic / ActivitiesA row per topic — the activity is the part everyone skips

The seven functions: share information · ask for feedback · advance thinking · solve problems · make decisions · build community · teach others. Most bad meetings are three of these at once, unnamed.

Chapters 12 & 13

Operational Rhythm Canvas

Not fewer meetings. The right meetings, for how your team needs to work right now.

One row per recurring meeting. Fill it in top to bottom, then left to right — it’s deliberately non-threatening, because you’re asking people to describe their week, not defend it. Once the whole rhythm is on one page, the problems announce themselves: the standing call carrying five functions at once, the thirteen-person status meeting, the planning session that doesn’t exist so the strategy lives in Slack.

Use it when you inherit a team, when a client relationship is going sideways, or any time someone proposes “let’s just have fewer meetings.”

• NameWhat do we call this meeting?
• Function(s)Which of the seven functions does it serve?
• SuccessWhat does the best version of it produce?
• LengthHow long is it scheduled for?
• FrequencyHow often does it occur?
• ParticipantsWho attends, and from what parts of the company?

Pair this with the Collaborator Grid. The grid tells you who genuinely needs to be in the room; the rhythm tells you what the room is for.

Chapter 16

The SAID Framework

Everyone is good at planning to do work. This is for planning to do the right work.

Success metrics, Activities, Initiatives, Deliverables: what you said you were going to do. Start from the end and work backwards. If nobody handed you success metrics, four questions get you there: why now, what happens if we don’t, what problem or opportunity is this, and who is it for. Then the team fills the columns and argues about where each idea belongs. That argument is the whole point. It’s where the gaps in the thinking show up.

Use it when the business drops a new ask on the team, or when a roadmap is full of features nobody can trace back to an outcome.

• Success metricDefine what you need to achieve — one section per metric
• ActivitiesHow the work actually gets done
• InitiativesThemed blocks of time, like a sprint
• DeliverablesThe features and artifacts that come out the other end

There are no wrong answers here — but there are wrong places for answers. Push on every card until the team agrees which column it belongs in. One thing worth saying out loud: the acronym is SAID, but the hierarchy runs Success → Initiatives → Activities → Deliverables. Initiatives are the blocks of time; activities are what happens inside them.