Image by niallkennedy via Flickr

Yesterday I participated in a Google Wave Committee.  It was clear immediately that we all came in to the meeting with different priorities and objectives. 

It happens all the time in the corporate world.   Sales believes Marketing should do more and Sales and Marketing both think development is building the wrong product. 

In our case, we were a group of eight that each had their own idea of what the committee’s mission should be.  At one end of the spectrum were committee members that just wanted to be educated on Google Wave and others (like me) that thought we should become experts and educate the entire membership base through whitepapers, videos and seminars. 

We spent a lot of time discussing the myriad objectives and working through each member’s ideas.   We went off on tangents, argued about seemingly minute points and circled around important points that some didn’t want to raise.   

The disconnect was caused because we focused on the ideas instead of the mission of the committee which is to provide a forum for membership to learn more about Google Wave.  It was a lot easier to talk about ideas than the more difficult task of digging into how we define the mission itself.

This is where the obligating questions became so crucial. "How do we create a forum for our membership to learn about Google Wave?”  “How do we keep the topic interesting and relevant to our membership base?”  "What resources will we need?" "Do we become Google Wave experts or do we provide access to experts?”

The at times difficult discussion about the mission was far more useful than the idea discussions.  Once we set in place the mission and objective, all of the long tail ideas disappeared.  We narrowed our focus and had a plan going forward. 

The more clarity we got about the committee’s mission, the more likely we will have a delighted membership base when we’re done.