Celebrating 2021

After a phenomenal 2020, nothing was easy for Amplifier in 2021. While COVID extended macro trends beneficial to 3PLs like Amplifier, it also brought stresses to offset those benefits. Online shopping might be up but the massive decline in labor participation made finding help much harder. Austin's explosive growth only compounded our competition for labor. Grinding supply-chain constraints and rapid inflationary pressures squeezed margins everywhere. We ended 2020 moving into our first new build-to-suit warehouse in our twenty-year history, but it would take well into Q2 2021 before we could optimize its layout. Amidst these transitions, our tactical meetings were consumed by satisfying out-of-band client expectations stemming from our failure to set proper boundaries.

It would be easy to say that 2021 was successful only in that we lived to fight another day.

Except that at least twice a week, for 52 weeks, I was in meetings where we marked the end of each meeting with a “celebration.” The last point on every agenda was to take turns declaring who or what we thought was praise-worthy at that moment. Given some of these meetings had six or more people, I heard at least twelve things a week worth celebrating at Amplifier.

I did not start this practice. I thought it was kinda dumb. Were we not building a “lean management” discipline? Why after two decades working towards the goal to “eliminate waste” would we start to add arbitrary “happy talk” that wasn’t tactical or strategic into our meeting structures?

And besides, while I'm a thankful person who likes parties, I don't like to be forced to celebrate. I say this as a confession. I have been that guy who doesn't want to give a Valentine's Day card because "It doesn't mean as much when you have to do it." "Celebrations" as an agenda item felt the same: forced and a little contrived.

But I'd hired a new leader who said it was a good thing to do. I'd hired him because I believed that he had things to teach Amplifier so it seemed like bad form to start things off by telling him his ideas were dumb. So we started declaring who/what we were celebrating at the end of our team meetings, writing it down each time.

After the first meeting, I thought, "Huh. That was not as lame as I thought it would be, but this won't last. People are going to start phoning this part of the meeting in." After the sixth meeting, I thought, "I really like hearing about amazing things and people at Amplifier, especially at the end of a rigorous and taxing meeting."

And then it started being my favorite part of the meetings, because, as it turned out, everyone could always think of something genuinely worth celebrating. Typically we all had different things or people we were celebrating, and all of a sudden I'm getting a constant signal from all parts of Amplifier about what is good and noteworthy. Nobody phoned it in. And after a while, it was clear that people were coming into the meetings already excited about what they were going to share at the end.

Operators are always looking for the constraint, the work module that's least efficient, or the part of the flow that has the highest error rate. In a continuous improvement organization, you can get lost in a generally negative view of "what's next to improve?" And that doesn't even count when you make a mistake and folks are properly on you to get your work fixed. It's very easy for Operators to live on the negative side of the operation.

But in 2021 there were 104+ times at Amplifier where I was forced to speak aloud something worth celebrating. Just as a personal practice, that's seriously helpful. I confess, again: it never would have occurred to me to embed it in the life of Amplifier. But because we did, I heard a few thousand things worth celebrating during the year.

Are there many things I would re-do about 2021 if I had the chance? No question. But I also know that in the middle of everything, there was deep growth and genuine achievement. I would have missed most of that if I hadn't heard about, in real-time, all the things, events, and people worth celebrating each week.

So I celebrate Michael Pelletier for bringing this practice to Amplifier. You were right. Thanks for adding that to our culture.