Welcome to Lessons episodes of Success Story, part of the HubSpot Podcast Network.

These Lessons Episodes will be shorter conversations with past guests,

valued members of the Success Story community, and myself. They'll be focused on teaching you

actionable insightful takeaways that you can use to upskill your personal and

professional life. I want to understand how those two concepts play.

So when somebody thinks, say somebody looks at this and they're like, and we're going to talk

about some of these superpowers, we're going to talk about this framework in a second,

but when somebody thinks about superpowers, what does that mean for them?

Is that these are like the attributes or the skill sets or the soft skills, hard skills,

what are superpowers?

But then also that framework, I want to go deeper into that framework as well.

Great.

So high level concepts are basically, first is the idea of upstream work versus downstream. Downstream everybody understands. the make a project plan and let's execute. But I think we can all relate to the fact that we

spend weeks and months trying to get to the decision point and getting our

organization to say yes. And so this upstream part, you know, is broken down into three phases, exploration, alignment, and decision making. So let's take them one by one.

So exploration is a concerted effort to surface the really important

considerations especially the unknowns and get to the bottom of them and you do this by starting with questions. Questions are very

democratic. They're very inclusive. You can get four people from a company. They have

different roles, different different jobs and you put an idea

in the center of the table and the first thing that comes up will be all kinds of

really interesting questions. To me that's gold, that's not skepticism and

you know that is actually high quality input to say, hmm, what are the unknowns around this,

...