Obsidian Canvas: The key to prioritisation and focus
This one tool can really help you showcase your impact story
Every time I get the opportunity to interview anyone for a role, I ask three questions, the second of which is more of a role play, and it goes like this…
Imagine you jump in to the lift, and as the doors close, they open back up again, and a very senior leader walked in. You both greet each other, and find out you are both going for a coffee (or tea), and that senior leader turns to you and asks, “So what are you working on?”. Now the lift is going to take sixty seconds to get to the ground floor, and your challenge is to demonstrate your impact to the business, so much so that they offer to buy you the fancy coffee. Lift door closes…. go!
I get a range of answers to this role play, and the sixty second element puts an interesting constraint/pressure on the delivery, some panic and fill in every second non-stop points, some finish the question in 30 seconds sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way. What I look for, is the people who under duress, can articulate a few key impactful things they are working on (prioritisation), how they measure it (focus on results), and how they would communicate it a way the recipient can relate to (stakeholder management).
