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April 2024
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BEFORE YOU WORK HARDER5/20/2022 In an imperfect world with stifling budget and ever-expanding mandate, you might be tempted to roll your sleeve more and work harder. Before you do that, check all the value and motivation-destroying activities you engage, see instituted, or passed off as necessary. 1. Bureaucracy. Too much paper-shifting, oversight, approvals. I saw this in my former life as a municipal staff and very draining. 2. Failure work. Countless rewriting and re-editing, and asking for countless validation. Let's define what's needed and stop repeating the process. 3. Overreach. It's good to say you're inclusive and highly participatory, but overdoing it, doesn't add to another inch of impact. 4. Not communicating well. Setting clear expectations and being mindful of interpretations from different stakeholders matter. It's a preventative measure you can start with. Ask these questions now in your organization. Reframe the assumptions and received thinking around them. Provoke new ways of doing things. It's your work, it's your life.
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DON'T INCLUDE THE KITCHEN SINK5/12/2022 It's that time of the year. I was on the phone a few months ago, with the Executive Director who was looking for a Strategic Planning service. As usual, the conversation went as far as detailing the needs, specifications, and the rationale for reaching out for an external resource. Let's break the four misconceptions about strategies and strategic formulation, in general. 1. Get the text out soon. The product is important but there's more to the written text The process dynamics will be so rich that you should capture the momentum to bring your organization to another level of development or competency. Strategy exercises expend a lot of energy and resources, do it all with care and devotion, it will have positive compounding effects. 2. We begin from zero every time. The process is not linear and you don't have to start all over again The brick-and-mortar style can be shortened, there is no hard and fast rule on stages and how organizations should approach the strategy development. Use your prior strategic decisions to move you forward on a long-term path unless there's a big reason to make a radical right turn. 3. We don't have to implement them. Yes you do. It doesn't mean that you have to implement them all at once and with equal amounts of strategies and tactics. Implementation is an art and a science. There are bridging processes to ensure that the old strategy gives way to the new one without cutting off continuing impacts. It's like buying an expensive exercise machine and not using it or winning the lottery and returning the money back. Get the point? 4. We want to include a specific commitment to (another motherhood value statement). You can't include the kitchen sink, sorry. Remember, its your strategic direction- how you are going to act in the face of internal and external challenges, constraints, and opportunities to achieve your goals. Unless, it's strategic, leave it to the values section. Read this before you call someone for external support or talk to your Board or staff so you can get on with the program. Call me when you're ready to proceed.
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AFRAID TO FAIL4/15/2022 An organization that identified a huge gap in their operational talked to a consultant recently. They are willing to confront the pain and are willing to take steps to immediately reset their efforts. Then silence, silence, silence. What's happening behind the scenes would be telling? When managers have no strategic confidence to make decisions on the basis of information acquired and in the best intentions, paralysis-analysis occurs. They like bring too many people in the analysis of the problem, the prognosis, and the actions to be taken. They want to be told what to do. In short, they want to avoid failing at all costs. When this happens, failure-avoidance leads to very smart but all too narrow gains. What can you lose with that investment? Reputation loss, money, staff time, and opportunity costs? Think hard, are you losing all of them right now as we speak by doing the paralysis-analysis and failure-avoidance techniques. If you're too afraid, shut the doors and windows, and stay under the covers. |