As the most fundamental piece of making progress, defining how ideas should move and interact with each other is a crucial thing before venturing out. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of figuring out the way how you think as a team, and as a company, contrary to the common belief, which can be summed up as “don’t we already know to think?!?”. All the things from establishing legal entities to designing user interfaces, to developing solutions to marketing them, are a result of the information flow capabilities you’ve built.

The way you run meetings, the way you articulate your vision in writing, the way you circulate your ideas; all these behavioural choices can increase your speed when broken down into their core components and re-engineered with clear instructions. Following a template for setting a meeting agenda or trying to apply predetermined instructions when to send out weekly reports may seem too constraining for some, but, especially in starting early stages, clarity and defined rules bring consistency in your thinking which eventually shows its benefit in shipping speed.

Undoubtedly, needs and expectations change over time, and you should adjust your templates and rules accordingly. But, having decided how to think, one actually puts forward a set of principles which shore up the overall culture. Building tools and processes abiding by those principles turns out to be an easier task. And as long as your principles remain solid, anything built as a byproduct can evolve over time.

Having a basic concept of how your team or company should think in a particular way gives you intangible benefits too. With such a concept at hand, you look for people who think the way you do. With such a concept at hand, you can exchange ideas more quickly and precisely, which saves you time. With such a concept at hand, you build your narrative more purposefully making your messaging more relatable to your prospective users.

In any task that requires more than two people, start with how you will think and how it’s going to change as you scale. A blueprint of how you think, regardless of its format, can give you much-needed clarity and save time that would otherwise be spent on back-and-forth communication and rework.