Sherpa Alliance

Are you truly "tackling" issues or just "tickling" them every once in a while and wondering why not much has changed?  Systemic problems require systemic solutions - we have to be tackling the whole and the parts of the system in an organized, simultaneous manner, to orchestrate a breakthrough and allow system performance to pop to the next level.  Anything less and we are just tickling the issue and are fooling ourselves that there is going to be any kind of breakthrough.  We are just "tickling" the problem, not "tackling" it. No wonder we are experiencing wheelspin not traction (Growing Cashflow by Reducing Wheel$spin and Increasing Tra¢tion, for cents on the dollar) 

It’s really about change leadership and change management.  Two of the best books on the subject are by John Kotter, "Leading Change" (1996) and "The Heart of Change" (2002).  Visit TheHeartofChange to learn more about The 8 Steps and do a quick assessment with the Change Insight Tool.

 If you feel energized to create some immediate traction, the Ice-breaker & Conversation Starter tool is designed to help you break the ice and get a conversation started on the change leadership/management challenge of your most challenging issues, opportunities and challenges.  Set in the frame of the Execution Excellence model, it helps us diagnoze where wheelspin is coming from and how to get into traction.  As part of that, it embeds the 9 Stages of Change reflected in Kotter’s two books above, for you to assess how you are doing against them.  It is both a working tool in which you can consolidfate your thinking electronically and, as such, it also provides a presentation tool to brief, engage and enrol the the rest of a team.

One of my favorite quotes from John Kotter’s second book, The Heart of Change, is:

“In a turbulent world, the requirement for change is ongoing.  Imagine needing to keep urgency up and complacency, fear and anger down all the time and throughout the organization. Imagine needing to have groups guiding change efforts all the time and throughout the enterprise. Imagine the demand to develop visions and strategies for all the changes, to communicate volumes of information to everyone, to keep batting obstacles out of the way throughout the organization.  To succeed in that world, how many people in an enterprise must see change as a part of their jobs?  How many of us must understand change well enough to help with the waves of new product lines, mergers, reorganizations, the e-world, process reengineering, or leaps of any kind?  How many of us need some minimum capability [of breakthrough leadership]?  Reasonable people can argue about what these numbers should be, but the figures surely are very large.  Most organizations have less than half of what they need today and many enterprises have only a fraction”. (John Kotter, The Heart of Change 2002).

This book could really have been entitled, "Breakthrough Leadership", as that is what it is very largely about.  You don’t have to imagine the expanding stream of parallel change efforts you have to deal with as you live it everyday.  Faced with this overwhelming number of change leadership/management efforts, we don’t have the bandwidth to deal with any one of them as comprehensivley as we should.  Consequently, the stream is prone to becoming a constant white-water ride (Constant White-Water?) of half-started, half-finished and half-hearted change efforts.

This week, you could try the Ice-breaker & Conversation Starter and experience how it will enable you to:

• More time effecttively and efficiently review individual change efforts, think through next steps to reduce wheelspin and increase traction.
• More easily brief, engage and enrol the rest of the team, using it as a presentation tool
• More broadly and deeply delegate change efforts to the rest of your organization, with a tool which can simultaneously educate, guide and mobilize them on your behalf, which they can also use to easily brief, engage and enrol you and the rest of the team.
• In so doing all of the above, it will be expanding your breakthrough leadership capability and capacity (along the lines of John Kotter’s quotation above), which is essential these days.

As you further mobilize this stream of parallel change efforts, and the breakthrough leadership capability and capacity of your team to do the heavy-lifting, you will need a tool to be a container for all that you have in motion.  That’s where the Traction Plan comes in, as a visual tool helping your whole team brief, engage and enrol each other in their synchronous efforts.  It provides an efficient, effectyive and engaging way to keep tabs on everything, triage our efforts dynamically as things change and create the accountability and commitment in our team to stay in traction, prevent wheelspin and avoid things melting down into white water.