Sherpa Alliance

Month One of our Fiscal Year (January for many of us) is a time to do an Opportunity Assessment:

i)  Taking stock of the year that just ended and the year which is just beginning.

ii)  Using the Journey-Judgment Opportunity Assessment to assess our opportunities for improvement:

• With our organizational agility and process of translating strategy and execution into traction
• Including enroling and engaging more of our team, broadly and deeply throughout the organization, and other categories of stake-holders, as appropriate.
• With architecting our multi-year BREAKTHROUGH! journey

iii) Taking actions in advance of our next Quarterly Traction Review in Month 2 (February for Many of Us)

Here are some things-to-think-about, questions-to-ponder, decisions-to-make and actions-to-take.

Things-to-Think-About

• Think about the changing nature of your business landscape and how it is shifting, the dynamics of journey as a business and the business/leadership vehicle you need to be fit for the coming journey challenge.
• Think about how your organizational agility is being tested, mildly and brutally, how well you are passing those tests and what you need to do about it. 
• Think about what you want to be different this coming year and how you and your executives, individually and collectively, will need to evolve and develop, to have the journey-oriented strengths required.

Questions-to-Ponder

• What were your experiences last year of having agility and not having agility, recalling specific example incidents, events and circumstances of problems and opportunities which came up?
• What are the patterns you can deduce from these examples and what is your sense of the underlying issues, problems and opportunities? What  have you been doing to address these and what has been working, not-working, missing?  What-else has been getting in the way of achieving breakthroughs to resolve these?
• How will you feel if these situations persist this year and what are the implications to your longer term future, vision and path if you are unable to architect breakthroughs?

Decisions-to-Make

• Decide what commitment you have to the next phase of architecting a breakthrough journey (How Serious Are You? )  and the courage of your convictions to stay the course and go the distance to breakthrough to the next plateau of mastery, while under constant assault from dabblers, obsessives and hackers (Dabbler, Obsessive, Hacker or Master?)
• Decide how and when this month you will reinforce/launch this year’s cycle/process and discipline.
• Decide who will be involved and who needs coaching to show-up differently this time around and exhibit evolved behaviors.

Actions-to-Take

• Use the Journey-Judgment Opportunity Assessment to do a full review of opportunities to architect a breakthrough journey to the next level of organizational agility, identifying a next round of areas to prioritize on and associated actions to take.
• Hold sessions as appropriate to engage aand enrol the team, broadly and deeply across the organization and with other categories of stakeholders.
• Make sure these new initiatives are integrated into the Traction Plan by the respective champions, so that they are adequately reflected and addressed in next month’s Quarterly Traction Review.

When you are working on your organizational agility, progressively there isn’t a fight you can’t win.