How well are you travelling? That’s a question I love to ask teams when starting to work with them, as it is the beginnings of getting them thinking about their agility as an organization. I usually get answers somewhere in the mix of “not too bad”. Then I ask them, “how do you know?” to which I get answers about metrics and surveys and similar things.
Accountability has always been tough but is getting tougher. As The Traffic of Dynamic Complexity has increased in our daily lives, we can feel overwhelmed and gridlocked. As a result, things don’t get done that needed to get done, which anybody could have done (Anybody, Anybody?).
Some things are so elegantly simple (Simplicity & Complexity), they are almost embarrassingly so, which is why most people don’t do them. As a result, they can often be left unnecessarily struggling with the complexity of things and wondering why things aren’t changing.
Like it or not, the portfolio of meetings you run is the gearbox of your business. Meetings are the collective mecahnism via which everything else meshes together, with the frequency and quality of communication, collaboration and coordination you need as a team for organizational agility.
When faced with situations in which the demands for resources far exceed supply and circumstances are unfolding dynamically in unpredictable ways, we have no choice but to triage. Here are two definitions of “triage”:
“If a picture is worth a thousand words, a metaphor is worth a thousand pictures”, says Daniel Pink in his book, “A Whole New Mind – moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age”. Read the rest of this entry »
Look around your business at how well the wall space is being used, which is often one of the most under-utilized assets in your business. What if your walls could talk with more real-time, on-line-all-the-time information about your business, such as:
Learn to draw! That’s one of the recommendations from Daniel Pink in his book, “A Whole New Mind – moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age”. He reminds us that, “a picture is worth a thousand words”, saying:
Three is a powerful number which our breakthrough thinking can pivot around - keeping the elegant simplicity of “3” in mind helps us understand and solve complex problems. When wrestling with complex problems here are some hip-pocket ways to tap into breakthrough thinking which can come from the power of 3:
When you walk into assuming some new kind of responsibility on day 1, that’s when you get to display what I call your “clean-sheet-ability” – the ability to inherit a clean-sheet of responsibility for a situation and start linking and accumulating thoughts, questions, decisions and actions from moment one – in the first few hours, days, weeks, months and quarters. It’s a journey and it’s very telling, as there is nowhere to hide.
Last week was a “5th Week” for me. What do I mean by that?
I design my monthly work pattern/schedule around a 4 week month and yet there are 13 weeks in each quarter, so one of the months has a 5th week in it - or some might call it a 13th week. You might be wondering why that didn’t happen in week 13 of the year, rather than last week, which was week 18?
In the face of a complex systemic problem requiring a systemic solution, it can feel like a daunting mountain to climb. If we are not careful, we tend to focus on the peak and the big fix solution which that represents, working backwards from that future with no clear path of how on earth we will ever achieve it. It feels like too big a mountain to climb, especially when it is just one peak in the mountain range of other systemic problems requiring systemic solutions. Read the rest of this entry »
Would your executives agree?
"Organizational Agility is a core differentiator in today’s rapidly changing business environment" - that’s the number 1 conclusion from a recent (March 2009) report from the Economist Intelligence Unit. Nearly 90% of the executives surveyed (349 business executives from 8 countries, including the US, 19 industries and with revenues ranging from under $500M to over $5Bn) believe that Organizational Agility is critical for business success. Read the rest of this entry »
These weekly tips are to encourage you to "hit singles" - each week, to single out one thing which, in addition to everything else you already have going on, you are going to hit hard to begin brewing up a breakthrough (the home run which will eventually come). 52 weeks of singles will add up to a lot of breakthroughs! Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Agility requires constant organizational learning and institutionalizing those lessons learned, so that history has less chance of repeating itself, even if it is well disguised. Any time history remotely repeats itself, that is wheelspin by definition, which could have been avoided if we had more traction on continuous improvement and institutionalizing lessons learned. The nameless, rankless debrief can help you.
Achieving breakthroughs is hard work - by definition we are trying to create systemic solutions to systemic problems which don’t happen by accident. We are typically gridlocked with insufficient time, money and resources. To unlock the gridlock, we need to employ the principle of compound interest and the 1% solution.
If Alan Mulally, the CEO of Ford, can do it, you sure as heck can! Hold a morning meeting (or a daily huddle at some other time of day) that is. As reported in an article in this week’s BusinessWeek Magazine (Ford’s Savior, March 16th, 2009):
Execution Excellence: Missing-in-Action“We hear a lot about execution these days, which is encouraging. But strategy and execution are only as good as the traction they create and sustain, on a higher road of a breakthrough journey."
Mike's Own Journey“As an executive and then CEO of small-to-medium sized and fast-moving businesses, I experienced an ever increasing sense-of-void. As the pace of business and change accelerated, my experience of most coaches, consultants and trainers coming into my office offering to help was that they didn’t really understand the nature of the seat I sat in everyday..." read more...
See Mike giving one of his keynote speeches, Breaking Through to a New Future .