Modern businesses are complex, messy places. We have access to more people, more ideas, more possibilities than ever before. In response we create things – structures, strategies, technology, products, services, etc. – to give some solidity and direction.
Those things are useful, but only the start. Impact? Performance? Results? Whatever dent you are trying to make in the universe doesn’t come from structures and strategies directly. It comes from how people interpret and act on them, personally and collectively.
If you make the big announcements and then leave people to it, the realities of human filters and tensions inevitably mean people drift and collide, fragmenting impact and slowing progress.
But if you try and force things back ‘on track’, that doesn’t work either. There are simply too many plates to spin, too many balls to juggle for you to manage, and those human filters and tensions haven’t gone away.
I don’t want to panic anyone but, ultimately, those impact/results/performance ambitions you’ve committed to? They only come when people can join all the dots and find integrated, coherent ways to weave the various threads together. And because the dots keep changing, that’s an ongoing process.
Performance isn’t a set of dials measuring data. Now more than ever, with an ever changing landscape, it’s a human process of exploring possibilities and synthesising progress. Together.
That’s not what most of us are instinctively good at. I know I wasn’t. But I’m nothing if not persistent.
I started asking awkward questions about this a long time ago, thinking someone must have solved it. Along the way I discovered a lot of recipes with more gloss than nutrition, but also some real nuggets of insight and practice that make a massive difference to any situation where humans need to come together and build solid impact quickly.
Whether you call it innovation, transformation or change; whether it’s about technology, joint ventures, growth strategies or restructuring; success is not just about the solutions themselves. It’s about how you show up, everyday. How you let go of the tensions and positioning to really talk, listen and surface the stuff everyone knows is getting in the way, so you can finally change it, to get somewhere better.
Wouldn’t that be useful? Get in touch and let me show you how.
If you’d like more reading on my work, I publish most of that on LinkedIn these days. Here are some links to the latest stuff on Frameshifting™️, something I’ve co-created with Kathryn Pope to build the skills mentioned above.
Frameshifting™️: An Introduction
Frameshifting™️: Summary Slides
Frameshifting™️: Summary article
The Exploration Habit 