7 Ways to improve possibility thinking for better planning outcomes
|
Remember this drawing of the old crone and the young lady that is used to illustrate how we miss seeing possibilities that are right in front of our noses.
This also illustrates why it is important in the early stages of a strategy, planning or change process to spend time exploring possibilities before deciding on a course of action. As we have discussed previously, our behaviour, problem-solving and creativity is significantly constrained by the organisational and social context in which we find ourselves. We repeat dysfunctional patterns and fail to see options that are right in front our noses. So it pays early in the planning process to spend time on “what ifs” before deciding where you want to go. |
Here are seven activities I have found useful for injecting some possibility thinking into strategy, planning and change processes.
1. What is your customers’ experience when dealing with your organisation?
Design Thinking’s Customer Journey Mapping and Blue Ocean Strategy’s Buyer Utility Map are tools to help you stand in the shoes of your customers and look at their experience when doing business with your organisation in oder to find opportunities for better performance.
Go back to the Buyer Utility Map you developed when considering where you are now. (See my earlier article on Where are we now - the first step in strategy and change.) What new possibilities does this raise for dealing with the challenges your organisation is facing?
2. Bring a cross section of staff, stakeholders and strangers together to contribute their ideas
Design situations that bring diverse people together to consider your challenges in ways that encourage creative problem solving. According to staff engagement statistics, very little of people’s capability is used at work. So, when looking for ways to solve complex organisational problems, it pays to bring a cross section of people together and give them permission to throw off the constraints of their normal roles, and bring their experience to the challenge.
It’s amazing how much easier it becomes to solve complex system and people problems when we step out of our work roles and strip away our assumptions about what is possible. We often make things more difficult than they need to be. Stand back, look at the larger picture, think big, bring people together from different backgrounds from inside and outside the organisation and explore the possibilities.
3. Have you lost sight of why your organisation exists?
Sometimes organisations evolve over time and lose sight of their reason for being. I remember a Not-For-Profit client that had become so preoccupied with providing residential accommodation for their clients that they had lost sight of their core reason for being - to support the development of independent living skills in their clients. They had no performance metrics to even track activities or outcomes in this area which was at the heart of their mission. Just realising this resulted in a new focus for their Board’s strategic planning work.
4. What would it look like if this was easy?
Organisations often overcomplicate things and make it harder than it needs to be to achieve results by creating layers of bureaucracy, non-value-adding rules and regulations, or just creating imaginary barriers between people. Stand back and ask yourself - what if this was easy - what would we be doing differently? You could be amazed how simple it is to solve the apparently complex problems through the application of some basic human common sense.
I have found the answer to this question can be surprisingly simple and human and often involves talking to those affected and working out a solution together.
5. Who has solved this problem already somewhere else?
An award-winning government service delivery organisation I was involved in starting up applied a business model that had been used for over a decade in retail banking and transformed government service delivery. People in one industry, sector, or discipline usually fail to look outside what they know to find easy solutions to their intractable problems in other places.
Dogs have been found to use smell to detect cancer in people, but despite research into this for some time, I haven’t heard of their ability being introduced into main stream cancer detection. Maybe more research needs to be done, or maybe combining the world of human medicine and animal capability to enable cancer detection challenges too many organisational barriers and mindsets.
But these cross-discipline boundaries are where some of the easiest breakthroughs can occur if we open up our thinking.
6. What are the trends that will impact this challenge?
We often get stuck in the here and now and lose sight of the social, political and economic trends that will make something that is successful today, unsuccessful tomorrow or vice versa. Again, these trends may have already happened somewhere else in the world, so by looking around you may be able to see the trend in action and build it into your planning so you are ahead of the curve.
7. Have you gone back to basics and looked at the evidence?
I have already written about how much of our “best practice” in organisations is based on fads and ideology rather than evidence and common sense. Much of management practice is contrary to the social research evidence on what produces the best performance from people in social groups. Organisations accumulate layers of non-value-adding beliefs and constraints that inhibit good performance and limit the potential of strategy to deliver results.
By designing a planning process that gives people a taste of the possibilities and inspires them to explore and contribute their innovative ideas, you can create a process for strategy and change development that is likely to break the 80% failure rate of strategy, and unleash people’s underutilised potential to make a difference.
If you’d like some help with this – give me a call.
Susan Kehoe
Consultant | Coach | Change Leader
Work with Susan
Susan specialises in people-focused strategy development, implementation and performance improvement; human resource management and people, leadership and culture; and transformation and change. She brings practical experience and thought leadership gained from many years of leading successful performance improvement and change in some of Australia’s leading businesses and government. Her approach engages people and unlocks people’s potential to deliver exponentially better results.
1. What is your customers’ experience when dealing with your organisation?
Design Thinking’s Customer Journey Mapping and Blue Ocean Strategy’s Buyer Utility Map are tools to help you stand in the shoes of your customers and look at their experience when doing business with your organisation in oder to find opportunities for better performance.
Go back to the Buyer Utility Map you developed when considering where you are now. (See my earlier article on Where are we now - the first step in strategy and change.) What new possibilities does this raise for dealing with the challenges your organisation is facing?
2. Bring a cross section of staff, stakeholders and strangers together to contribute their ideas
Design situations that bring diverse people together to consider your challenges in ways that encourage creative problem solving. According to staff engagement statistics, very little of people’s capability is used at work. So, when looking for ways to solve complex organisational problems, it pays to bring a cross section of people together and give them permission to throw off the constraints of their normal roles, and bring their experience to the challenge.
It’s amazing how much easier it becomes to solve complex system and people problems when we step out of our work roles and strip away our assumptions about what is possible. We often make things more difficult than they need to be. Stand back, look at the larger picture, think big, bring people together from different backgrounds from inside and outside the organisation and explore the possibilities.
3. Have you lost sight of why your organisation exists?
Sometimes organisations evolve over time and lose sight of their reason for being. I remember a Not-For-Profit client that had become so preoccupied with providing residential accommodation for their clients that they had lost sight of their core reason for being - to support the development of independent living skills in their clients. They had no performance metrics to even track activities or outcomes in this area which was at the heart of their mission. Just realising this resulted in a new focus for their Board’s strategic planning work.
4. What would it look like if this was easy?
Organisations often overcomplicate things and make it harder than it needs to be to achieve results by creating layers of bureaucracy, non-value-adding rules and regulations, or just creating imaginary barriers between people. Stand back and ask yourself - what if this was easy - what would we be doing differently? You could be amazed how simple it is to solve the apparently complex problems through the application of some basic human common sense.
I have found the answer to this question can be surprisingly simple and human and often involves talking to those affected and working out a solution together.
5. Who has solved this problem already somewhere else?
An award-winning government service delivery organisation I was involved in starting up applied a business model that had been used for over a decade in retail banking and transformed government service delivery. People in one industry, sector, or discipline usually fail to look outside what they know to find easy solutions to their intractable problems in other places.
Dogs have been found to use smell to detect cancer in people, but despite research into this for some time, I haven’t heard of their ability being introduced into main stream cancer detection. Maybe more research needs to be done, or maybe combining the world of human medicine and animal capability to enable cancer detection challenges too many organisational barriers and mindsets.
But these cross-discipline boundaries are where some of the easiest breakthroughs can occur if we open up our thinking.
6. What are the trends that will impact this challenge?
We often get stuck in the here and now and lose sight of the social, political and economic trends that will make something that is successful today, unsuccessful tomorrow or vice versa. Again, these trends may have already happened somewhere else in the world, so by looking around you may be able to see the trend in action and build it into your planning so you are ahead of the curve.
7. Have you gone back to basics and looked at the evidence?
I have already written about how much of our “best practice” in organisations is based on fads and ideology rather than evidence and common sense. Much of management practice is contrary to the social research evidence on what produces the best performance from people in social groups. Organisations accumulate layers of non-value-adding beliefs and constraints that inhibit good performance and limit the potential of strategy to deliver results.
By designing a planning process that gives people a taste of the possibilities and inspires them to explore and contribute their innovative ideas, you can create a process for strategy and change development that is likely to break the 80% failure rate of strategy, and unleash people’s underutilised potential to make a difference.
If you’d like some help with this – give me a call.
Susan Kehoe
Consultant | Coach | Change Leader
Work with Susan
Susan specialises in people-focused strategy development, implementation and performance improvement; human resource management and people, leadership and culture; and transformation and change. She brings practical experience and thought leadership gained from many years of leading successful performance improvement and change in some of Australia’s leading businesses and government. Her approach engages people and unlocks people’s potential to deliver exponentially better results.