What is the Three Pass Process?

Humans have a natural way of learning and processing new ideas, especially when faced with abstract ideas. Effective communications for all your engagements in your professional and personal life are very important. The Three Pass Process is how to break them down pragmatically into Why, What and How. How to guide people in the natural way of consuming information to get your ideas understood, and to reduce the stress of conflicting interests. Learn how the Three Pass Process will shorten your interactions times, increase the listeners’ retention and to have everyone involved in the engagement.

Why
The Three Pass Process is about improving communication up the food chain, down the food chain and across the food chain. By being consistent and pragmatic in your communications, discussions will move more organically.
When you are trying to solve problems, the biggest obstacle at times is confirming everyone is understanding each other and the problem. You cannot solve what you cannot name and agree on. The Three Pass Process is about confirming understanding at the human level on what is the problem, and that everyone has the context of the problem.

As a Change Leader, many of the engagements you will be involved in are Brave New World engagements where there are many unknowns. These can be very exciting engagements, but they are also fraught with dealing with the humans when trying to get them implemented. Not everyone on these engagements is at the same level of understanding or at the same level of functional responsibility within the engagements. Some may be executives, some may be managers and others are at the tip of the spear in the engagement doing the work. The Three Pass Process is about respecting everyone at where they are, and how they perceive the engagement. Respecting people as people who are all doing their best with the information that they have is very important. As the Change Leader is on you to always provide the context in the language of the people you are providing the content to.

An added organic benefit of the Three Pass Process is that it allows, you, the Change Leader, to educate as you communicate without it coming off as a lecture. It allows you to be open, transparent and effective with all the stakeholders of the engagement.

What
The What is quite simple in that it is a methodology for collaboration with people in a structured way. That may seem ominous but in fact it is just a layered approach to natural communications.

In its simplest terms, it is about always looking at the conversations from three perspectives or context levels as you present the content.
Why are we here, what are we going to discuss, and how are we going to achieve our goals? By starting with the why, then the what, and finally the how, the goals are reached and the humans can process the information is a natural and respectful way.

By guiding the narrative, the Change Leader can ensure everyone is on the same page. Seems almost too simple, but in fact keeping it simple is what makes the process so effective. The more you practice the approach, the more it will become muscle memory for you along with you your teams.
What so many people find interesting when using the process is that it is respectful of people’s pace and cadence of consuming new information. The audience can consume the information in a natural way. Once the information is consumed, they can collaborate with others in the group due to increased understanding of the context and any information being presented. Context becomes the critical artifact of the process and not just the content being presented.

How
As the name implies, the How are three passes of information exchange.

The first pass is about the high-level strategic perspective of information exchange. The goal of this pass is to explain the why of the discussion / meeting / presentation. You will have heard terms like Vision, Conceptual View, Idea, Listen, Define, etc. What these terms infer is a perspective from higher above. Some would say the view from the tower.

The second pass is the tactical pass. This is where some context starts to be applied to the strategic level. In most cases, it is the what we are talking about. Other terms you will hear are Goals, Logical View, Straw Dog, Discuss, Assess. Different words but similar meaning. The context is taking shape and form at this level.
The final pass is about How are we going to reach the objectives of the what for the why of the previous two steps.

Meetings that start at the how level become very difficult meetings to witness and to be a part of. Individuals will consume too much time discussing nuances of details without proper context or priority setting. You may spend most of the meeting dealing with a detail that sounds interesting, but if the group had context, then they would understand it had no relevance. The details are very important, but not at this point in the meeting. Too many working groups get caught in this trap. As the Change Leader, be aware of this trap and the best way to avoid this trap is to utilize the Three Pass Process.

Overview
The Three Pass Process is about being respectful to humans as it is a human centric approach. Many organizations fail to realize the basic importance of respectful communications. They think that by making meetings be like social events they are being respectful, but in fact they are just causing more anxiety for the individuals that are trying to navigate what is expected of them in an unstructured, and unclear manner. By using the Three Passs Process, everyone is provided the Why, the What and the How in a structured way to align with others in the group to effectively collaborate to confirm what was agreed upon.

When you follow the Three Pass Process, others will come away from the engagements having a better understanding of the context of the discussion, which leads to much higher retention level of the content that was conveyed. As a Change Leader, I have always found it helpful when you are working on the engagement to remind everyone what is the “Spirit” of the engagement. It is a constant reminder to all involved of the high-level view of it. Do not lose sight of the spirit of the engagement, especially as the engagement starts to get bogged down in the actual details of execution.

Before you have a meeting or a discussion or give a presentation about your engagement, take the time to understand everyone’s roles. Once you understand the roles of the audience then look at the information you need to convey to understand their perspective. Speak in the language of your audience not the language of the content. You become the translator of the content for each audience. Same message for everyone, but in the appropriate language.

The Change Leader must remind the engagement teams to focus on the actual scope of the engagement and NOT just the constant stream of changes. The goals are your scope and you have to keep your focus on them. The tasks are very important, but the tasks must align to the goals. The Three Pass Process is an effective way of ensuring the vision and goals are never forgotten as you discuss the how of the changes to achieve the tasks, that achieve the goals that realize the vision.

The Three Pass Process is truly a natural way of seeing the world around you. Make it muscle memory and you will find your teams will be productive and lively in their engagements. To some, the process is too structured and military in its tone; however, upon execution people find it more organic and respectful because everyone gets to engage at their own pace and time. People working on change know there is work to be done and want to ensure the work they are doing is being valued. The Three Pass Process is an excellent vehicle for confirming the work is valid and valuable. By not wasting people’s time in meetings to allow them to really work on issues, they feel more valued for the work that is getting done.

When you are getting bogged down in operational issues do you need to escalate to the strategic level? By thinking about it in this Three Pass Process framework, you will be able to affectively answer this question. If there is no one in the room that can say yes to the action plan, make sure you get this information to the people that can say yes to the action plan. Just because people in the discussion look and sound convincing, does not mean they have the authority to approve the action plan.
As the Change Leader, when you are faced with scope creep, ensure that the goals of the engagement are not getting blurred. Remind everyone of the tactical goals constantly along with the spirit of the engagement.

Always present your plans with:

• Spirit of the engagement
• What are the goals of the engagement
• What are milestones/tasks (do not start the conversation at this level)