People Strategies: Identifying big picture leads to successful horizon

Linda Bower is a speaker, executive coach and human performance improvement consultant in Rogersville.

Achieving strategic change is like hitting a rock that breaks on the hundredth strike. We tend to think it was the last strike that caused the break when it was really the first 99.

For most people, it is the planning and execution of the 99 strikes that causes the headache and heartache.

A simple four-step process can help pull the best thinking from a group of people. For each step, ask individuals to write their answers to the questions before group dialogue begins. Then use a flipchart to capture ideas, recombine them and summarize the themes from each step.

Step 1: Context for change

This step helps establish a big-picture viewpoint of a given performance challenge. It is nonthreatening to individuals because the contextual issues identified tend to reside outside the control of individuals, functions or organisations.

The questions should ask, "What key contextual factors influence our performance challenge?" and "What factors may impact our improvement pursuits?"

Step 2: Current status awareness

Where are we now with respect to the performance challenge? What are the current risks and uncertainties? And what are the sources of our confidence and competence?

Working from Kurt Lewin's concept of force field analysis, team members focus simultaneously on the positives (sources of confidence and competence) and the negatives (risks and uncertainties) of a current performance challenge.

This step answers the question, "Where are we now?"

Peter Senge writes in his book "The Fifth Discipline" that "an accurate picture of current reality is just as important as a compelling picture of the desired future."

This step is devoted to analysing current reality objectively. It highlights the complexity and relativity associated with analysing a current situation.

By forcing an exploration of both the good and the bad of a given topic, it encourages a balanced, objective assessment of current capabilities and performance.

This step helps to overcome a tendency in performance improvement analysis to focus solely on identifying and improving weaknesses. An alternative logic also is appropriate: that is, to identify inherent strengths and determine ways to leverage those strengths more effectively.

Step 3: Destination targeting

Here, the team answers the questions, "Where do we want to go?" "What constitutes success?" and "How will we know when we get there?"

Defining success can bridge the gap between a personal vision and a group vision. Linking personal and group visions of success can change an individual's mindset of compliance to commitment.

Citing Senge again, the creative tension between current reality and the desired future provides the fuel that moves organizations forward.

Step 4: Action identification

The preceding steps were designed, in part, to prepare a team for this exercise. The goal is to identify, define and prioritize a set of performance improvement factors.

The team answers the questions: "What do we need to do in order to improve, move forward, or breakthrough?" and "What are the few things we must concentrate on and implement to attain success?" As such, it is designed to identify solutions that will bridge the gap between the current status and the profile of success.

The result of this exercise is an "opportunity map." Issues are prioritized in two dimensions: value and performance. This prioritization yields the identification of key development "opportunities" (i.e., those factors highly important to future success yet rated low in current performance).

This step is intended as a summary exercise.

These basic steps provide a solid footing for considering, assessing and implementing an action plan. Ignoring one or more of these questions can create gaps in information and reasoning that will prove to be problematic in the future.