In a chaotic environment, it can be hard to find a toehold everyone can agree to coordinate around.

Ideally, that toehold will then be a stable point to pull yourself up into ever larger and more established things.

Without that toehold as a schelling point, nothing coheres.

A tactic I've found robustly successful to establish that toehold is what I call a 70/20/10 doc.

…I need a much better name for this.

It puts in one package a thing that a large collection of different types of people can read and find compelling enough to make it stand out from the background noise of other approaches and say "yeah, I can believe this is a good next step."

In the doc you want the most surface area to be devoted to the most concrete problems.

Big idea: make the amount of space on the page correlated to how much people should be thinking about it right now.

You want the doc to be compelling to people who spend only 15 seconds skimming it as well as to people who spend 15 hours grappling with it.

The document should be only a few pages–possible to read end to end in 10 minutes or less.

The first 70% of the document is devoted to the short-term time horizon.

One succinct paragraph is devoted to the broader context.

A bulleted list describes the fundamental constraints.

Each constraint should be 1-3 bolded words, and then one or two explanatory sentences.

If you need more explanation, link out to a separate doc… but assume no one will click through.

The next section lays out a sketch of a short-term (1 month) time horizon solution.

It should also be a set of bullets of the characteristics the solution has.

Bonus points if they slide, hand-in-glove smooth, into the constraints you established.

This section sketches out the toehold that people agree is cheap, low-risk, and viable.

The next 20% covers the medium term (up to 18 months) of glidepath.

The point of this section is, without much detail, to convince the reader that the toehold isn't a deadend, but has a series of smooth, non-miraculous extensions that would build to an increasingly great outcome.

The last 10% of the doc is the cherry on top: painting an optimistic picture of why this approach could lead to a game-changingly great outcome.

This is where you talk about the compounding loops, and paint a WOW kind of abstract long-term vision.

But don't spend much time describing it… the idea should still be a good one even if people don't read or agree with this last section.

I've found this format robustly convincing to just about every kind of person.

It's short enough that everyone could plausibly read the whole thing in a few minutes.

It uses bolding and section heads to make it easier to skim and extract the big ideas for people who can devote only a handful of seconds.

It spends most of the time and space on the most concrete and pressing constraints, which convinces one-ply thinkers.

The cherry on top gets your 10-ply thinkers excited about why this is not just good but possibly great.

By not devoting excess space on the page to things in the future, it reduces the number of things people might disagree with.

I've found this works well in any context where you have swirling ambiguity about what to do next–large company or small.

These docs create schelling points for everyone to coordinate around.