show up with a draft (for proficiency, politics, and pace)
You’ve got a meeting ahead where some kind of brainstorm is going to happen. Or some kind of policy will be debated. No one in the group has been assigned anything except maybe some pre-reading.
Assign yourself the job of showing up with a first draft of whatever might come next. There are at least three good reasons to do this:
Proficiency: Even if you never share the draft with the group, your writing will force you to master the relevant content better than anyone else.
Politics: If you do share the draft with the group, you give yourself a first mover advantage, exerting an anchoring effect on the conversation that follows. The agenda item for the meeting becomes “Your Proposal or Not” or “Your Proposal vs Some Undetermined Other Thing” instead of “What Might We Do?” This gives you power and gives your point of view centrality you might not otherwise have. Unless you’re in a particularly dog-eat-dog kind of workplace, this won’t read as a power move - it will look like you are exercising admirable ownership and responsibility (which you are doing).
Pace/progress: On a “first butterfly” basis, your draft probably sharpens and accelerates the conversation, even in cases where the group quickly decides you were on the wrong track. It’s way clearer and faster to edit or vote on a draft than to discuss an unbounded universe of options lacking defined features.
-eric
