Acquisition & Contracting

Measures Of A Successful Vision

To be successful a vision must do four things:

1. It must capture an understanding of what the company can be great at.

2. It must make clear how the organization will deliver value to its customers in ways that are innovative and different from the competition.

3. It must be measurable – people need to know whether the company is on course to achieve the vision.

4. It must translate into a clear and compelling message. If it’s not easy to communicate, if you can’t create a clear mental picture of it, then you need to work some more.

Successful visions meet this four-way test. Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, published an “owners’ manual” in conjunction with the company’s initial public offering in 2004. They began by saying: “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend do become one.” They went on to describe Google’s vision over several pages. They concluded with this statement: “We believe strongly that in the long-term, we will be better served – as shareholders and in all other ways – by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short-term gains.”

One of my favorite examples of vision is the city of Portland, Oregon. The city did an extraordinary thing when it developed its 25-year plan back in the 1970s. It asked thousands of citizens to weigh in on issues like open space, affordable housing, job creation, clean air, and urban density. People were given opportunities to make trade offs between these values and then see the putative results modeled for them. Based on these results, city planners then constructed hypothetical scenarios for the future of Portland.

One scenario emphasized economic development and job creation, another emphasized preserving open space, and a third emphasized affordable housing. Each of the visions reflected a different weighting of values. Portland’s planning staff then surveyed citizens and asked them to rank the scenarios from most favorite to least favorite. Citizens responded in high numbers. They indicated that preserving open space was their highest priority, followed by job creation.

Portland’s city planners then came up with a plan that imposed a tight restriction on growth outside a well-defined urban core. There was room for some development – but not much. Citizens had indicated they were willing to put up with the higher housing prices and higher urban densities that this plan would necessitate – in exchange for increased protection of open space.

Today, visitors to Portland can see the impact of this long-range vision – and the success it generated. A lovely green ring of open space surrounds Portland. Its economy has boomed. Its housing values have skyrocketed – and new housing units are built in high densities. Unlike most cities, where complex trade offs are simply not addressed or brought to a vote, Portland illustrates the value of tackling vision head on.

Understanding Ignorance Loops

Eric Douglas’ Leading at Light Speed is an essential leadership book that outlines 10 Quantum Leaps to ignite innovation, foster trust, and construct a highly productive company.

The following article is about Ignorance Loops as described on pages 123-126 in Chapter 5 ofLeading at Light Speed.

The following is a prime model of an Ignorance Loop.. The three owners of an office supply company wanted to foster a close-knit, family culture in their organization. To make this happen, they appointed a consultant who suggested they create four different content teams in marketing, human resources, merchandising, and sales.

These teams met monthly. When marketing wanted to produce a new brochure, the marketing team had to agree before it went to press. When merchandising wanted to add a new product, the merchandising team had to reach consensus. When human resources wanted to set up a mentoring program, the team designed the program. The employees appeared excited to be included. The organizations’ owners were enthusiastic that they had constructed such a strong, family-like environment.

Then a competitor moved in. First, three customers left the company’s service, then another left, and another. The teams were created by organization’s owners. What to do? “Run it through the marketing team,” someone suggested. But the marketing team didn’t know what to do. The owners huddled. They were also at a loss as to proceed. A decision couldn’t be reached.

So they hired a new consultant. This time, our organization was involved. I did a situation assessment. It became quickly apparent that an ignorance loop was at work. Everyone thought: “We can only make decisions by consensus among our teams. If we are unable to reach an agreement, we must not be doing things correctly..”

Over a 12-month period we helped this company orchestrate a shift in its culture. We dissolved the four teams, created new management positions in key areas, and disposed of the group mind think that had been created. In its place we began building a different kind of culture, where decisions were made by teams and individuals entrusted with responsibility. The company had a strategic plan that concentrated on its key values and the growth of its service offerings. The next step was creating new learning loops and learning forums. Within two years, the firm was hitting new records for both revenues and profits.

As well as the staff? Internal surveys showed they were much happier now that people’s roles were clear and they weren’t wasting so much time in meetings!

The 3 Challenges To Maintaining A Systems Perspective

Leading at Light Speed is a groundbreaking leadership book by Eric Douglas describing the10 Quantum Leaps which build trust, spark innovation, and create a high-performing organization.

Eric writes about Three Major Challenges of Maintaining a Systems Perspective in Chapter 7, Spread Systems Thinking.

First, because we live in an era of accelerating change, it’s easy to become distracted by the daily influx of events and issues – “to spend 24 hours a day fighting fires,” as the vice president of a health care system told me. In an somewhat instinctive way, a person’s focus tends to be on things right in front of them: focusing on those who aren’t performing, budgets that aren’t met, or logistical issues that need attention. It’s easy to become bogged down in the details and forget to use systems thinking to create leveraged solutions.

Second, people don’t receive systems thinking training. Few companies offer it. Few human resource managers recognize its value. It simply isn’t a priority. As a result, there is no forum, no conversation, for leaders and managers to engage in systems thinking together. Lacking a dialogue around systems thinking, it’s easy to miss the opportunities and the benefits.

Thirdly, as one can be easily distracted by day-to-day details and lack of training, human nature is to avoid confronting deeply-rooted problems. “There are some issues I’d just as soon leave alone,” one manager said. “We have to pick our battles.”

That may be human nature. But a leader’s action must be focused through a systems thinking lens. Failing to listen to data, to challenge assumptions, or to use systems thinking to address underlying issues ultimately imperils the organization. One need not look further than General Motors, Lehman Brothers, or Enron. Then, in contrast, there is Porsche, which has single-handedly focused on engineering high-quality cars for five decades. Porsche has consistently been one of the most profitable automobile companies in the world. And, not surprisingly, managers at Porsche put a premium on core values, on disciplined performance, and on analyzing their customers and their competitors from a systems perspective. It’s this kind of thinking that builds high performing organizations in a time of accelerating change.

Helping people address hidden issues, are systems thinking. To steer clear of problems and focus their attention where it can have the greatest impact, leaders use different frames to identify problems, such as understanding traps like the assumption of causality, feedback delays, and the substitution fallacy.

Better able to tackle problems at their core, are leaders who understand their own mental maps and the system of forces.

Succession Paradox: Overcoming The Fear Of Being Dispensable

eading at Light Speed is a powerful leadership book for businesses, public agencies, and nonprofits revealing the 10 specific ways an organization must act and behave to build trust, spark innovation, and create a high-performing organization.

The Succession Paradox is a concept in Leading at Light Speed described in Chapter 9 along with three other Leadership Paradoxes. Buy the book to read about the other three.

Planning well for your own departure is known to be one of the true tests of a great leader. If a wealth of successors is set up and ready to go, you can be proud. If the organization is left foundering, you’ve failed. The question isn’t whether you have a succession plan. It is your ability to fins and surround yourself with capable people who could step up and run the show if needs be. And therein lies the paradox.

Some of the seemingly most successful leaders fail to find the path through this paradox. They can’t handle the challenge of surrounding themselves with people who are ready to take their jobs. Again and again, we see examples of leaders failing to deal with the succession paradox.

On the other hand, we also see great success stories. At one of our client companies, the CEO surrounded herself with a senior staff of highly capable leaders. If anything ever happened to her, there was a wealth of worthy successors already lined up, and this knowledge gave her board of directors great peace of mind. At another, the CEO of a construction company made a conscious choice to confront this paradox. He held a meeting off-site dedicated solely to the planning of future company leaders. Together with his management team, they identified the selection criteria, evaluated the candidates, and then changed the management structure to give three colleagues the opportunity to buy into the firm.

Cutting through the succession paradox is easy once you let go of the notion of your own indispensability. It’s another fear you have to overcome – a fear of the unknown. This step is not easily done by all, but it must be accomplished if a high performing organization is to be maintained.

Plan A Growth Strategy For Your Business Using Mind Mapping

One of the key components for facilitating the growth of a business is having a strong and clearstrategy for how you will achieve this growth. This strategy should include the main areas in which growth is desired, as well as clear goals and criteria by which to evaluate this growth. Mind Mapping is one tool that can be incredibly beneficial for outlining such a strategy, due to its highly intuitive and visual method of spatial diagramming. With Mind Maps, companies can literally “map out” all the aspects of their growth strategy in one document, using images, colors, or other graphics as desired. Organizing information in this manner has been shown to allow the brain to process and recall the information more naturally, as well as allow one to work with the information more efficiently. Thus, Mind Mapping offers those looking to develop a clear plan for taking their business to the next level a creative and effective means for doing so.

Developing a Strategy for Business Growth Using Mind Mapping

The owner of a small business wants to develop a strategy for growing his company over the next year. He now does the groundwork for this plan to determine the specific areas of his company that he wants to grow and the specific goals he has for achieving this growth. Using Mind Mapping, the owner begins constructing a map of his strategy by, first, representing the purpose of the map, his company’s growth strategy, in the map’s center. He then adds branches to the map, on which he lists the specific company areas that he’s looking to grow. On child branches that are attached to each branch, he next lists the goals he has for achieving growth in each area. As the year progresses, the owner adds any comments he has about how well his company is reaching each goal on twigs that he attaches to each child branch. Throughout his Mind Map, the owner uses colors, pictures, and other graphics to make his map more creative and his company growth strategy easier to conceptualize. When he has completed his map, it looks similar to the attached Mind Map diagram.

Achieving Company Growth

In the year since developing his strategy for growing his company, the business owner has seen his company achieve substantial growth. All the goals he had set for achieving this growth have been met or exceeded, thanks to his staying on top of the goals using Mind Mapping. The Mind Map he constructed at the beginning of the year allowed the owner to not only “map out” these goals, but also evaluate how well his company was doing at meeting each goal, in one intuitive document. As a result, the business owner can easily see which goals and growth areas his company has been struggling with, and address’s any problems accordingly. The business owner is now “mapping out” a 5-year growth plan for his company using Mind Mapping, and he expects to achieve the same growth success with this plan as he has seen in the past year.