Writing NCTs With Your Team Using The Miracle Question
A Collaborative Goal Setting Exercise
I’ve recently become enamored by NCTs- which stands for Narrative, Commitments, Tasks. NCTs are billed as an alternative to other goal setting methodologies like OKRs. I’ve seen many organizations struggle to consistently implement OKRs and personally, I don’t find them inspiring. NCTs engage your team with a story based approach, make clear what success is, and ask you to make a plan to make it happen.
You should read the whole NCT introduction, but I’ll still give a high-level summary here. First you set your Narrative. This should set the stage, inspire, explain, and direct. If you just stopped here, people would know your direction and intent. Next you make Commitments, these are things you will achieve to meet the Narrative. Unlike OKRs that ask you to get mostly there, you are going to get something tangible done — people can plan on it. Lastly, you enumerate the Tasks to hit the Commitments. This is important to ensure your Commitments are achievable and there is a real plan to hit them. That’s it! Everyone should be able to understand the system and your NCT just by reading it.
At my company, Highlight, we’ve now set quarterly product development NCTs twice and this quarter we’ve also set them for our Quality and Platform teams. I’d like to walk you through the process we came up with to set team-level NCTs — we found it fun, creative, and efficient.
Setting the Stage with A Big Question
In Coaching and Therapy there is an exercise called The Miracle Question, which goes like this:
Suppose our meeting is over, you go home, do whatever you planned to do for the rest of the day. And then, some time in the evening, you get tired and go to sleep. And in the middle of the night, when you are fast asleep, a miracle happens and all the problems that brought you here today are solved just like that. But since the miracle happened overnight nobody is telling you that the miracle happened. When you wake up the next morning, how are you going to start discovering that the miracle happened? … What else are you going to notice?
This prompt gets people out of their current experience of their problems and into a creative mode that allows that anything about their future could be possible. It turns out you can apply this to a business context as well as a kind of Vision setting exercise. So to start, we asked our version of the The Miracle Question:
Imagine you come to work tomorrow and a miracle has happened! All of our process issues are solved, we work together exactly as we’ve always wanted to, our tools are great, and we’ve built all that we’ve always wanted to. What would you notice? What would this new work environment look like?
We asked every member of our team to independently write down their answer to the Miracle Question for their team. After about 10–15 minutes we had everyone paste their answers into a shared collaboration board (we used Figma but for this exercise really any similar tool will do).
Finding Themes
We then spent a few minutes reading and discussing each other’s answers. It was pretty interesting to see the differences and patterns. Using stick-it notes, we then started writing down reoccurring or important themes from everyone’s answers.
Writing NCT Fragments
The next step was to select a few big themes we had a consensus on and place them in the following matrix. Themes form our rows of potential areas to focus on in the quarter. For columns, we have Narratives, Commitments, and Tasks. Cells are potential statements fitting the Theme and element of the NCT. Some people are task first thinkers, others are big picture first and this format allowed for both types of thinking simultaneously.
Putting It Together
Once you have all these elements, you can collectively decide on which row or rows to focus on and which elements best fit. Actually writing the NCT is simply copying in the elements and wordsmithing.
That’s it. We were able to run this exercise, minus the final wordsmithing in an hour, though an hour and a half would have felt less rushed. If you try this exercise, let me know how it goes!
