A former coworker was investigating starting up a scotch brand and decided to fill me in. One of the difficulties involved is that scotch typically sells for more once it ages - but it's a tough pill to swallow to start up and then have to wait 10 years for your first product!
There are two approaches often taken to mitigate this:
1) Start up by making spirits that don't involve an aging period (ex. Vodka), and use that money to keep the business afloat until the barrels are finished aging.
2) Start up by making a blended scotch, by purchasing from other distilleries and making your own custom blend.
Age labelling regulations state that for approach 2, you must label the age of the scotch as the age of the youngest in the blend - so if you wanted tomorrow to offer a 5 year scotch, you could start by selling a blend of 5, 8, and 10 year. As your batches matured, you'd gradually replace each year with your own batch until 10 years later, it's no longer a blended scotch and you are selling your own 10 year old scotch.
I was remembering this story when thinking about templates.
Templates have been a cornerstone of every midsized (100+) organization I have worked in. They are an incredible way to help someone get past the blank page problem, but over time they proliferate and without careful attention in the early stages of their development, they can do more harm than good – not to mention the ongoing maintenance cost involved with maintaining them over time. There are some pretty good blended scotches out there, but when it comes to templates starting from a blend often hampers how great your results can be.
A common default for producing templates is to distill a template out of existing examples. You might commission a team with "produce a good template for how we write project updates"; to help them out you offer them 4-5 examples of great ones for them to work from. YOUR goal is "level up how we communicate with clarity on our projects", but THE TEAM’s goal often becomes "distill a template from these great artifacts" - and too often you get a bad blend!
The team has been tasked to deliver a template, and they have 5 examples that are great to work from. When they look at them, they are often REALLY different - so surely, the thing that only shows up in one or two of the examples isn't as important as the thing that shows up in all of them, right? In the end, you end up with a distilled template that is worse than the sum of its parts - only capturing the shared common attributes for your examples, and not recognizing and highlighting the “why” that makes each of the examples really great.
Having to use templates built in this way is demoralizing - the template sucks, and the things made with it don't seem like they are very good either; often you can't do work at the quality you hope to within the constraints of the template. Your brain shuts off and you drop into "just get this filled out and I am done" mode, instead of engaging with the deeper problem you're trying to solve and use the template for. Over time, this is a path to mediocrity.
Before you delete all your templates because some random guy on the internet told you to, let's talk about how to make this better. YOU know what the goal of the final artifact is - get clear on that and build towards it! If you are asked to develop a template, start differently by examining:
1) What is the outcome we are trying to drive by developing this template? (Often "write a template" is an XY problem)
2) For the exemplars of what doing this really well looks like, what makes each of them good? What is shared that is good, and what is unique that is good?
3) What conditions led to each of them being good, and how can we support and reinforce those for folks following this path?
For the folks I consider to be experts at this, something I’ve noticed about the way they work is that they use outcome-oriented template authoring, rather than lowest common denominator – often working backwards from questions like the examples above. If you start from there, you might find you don’t even want a template at all!
Thanks to Allen Pike and John Brennan for suggestions and early draft feedback.