News | Page 15 of 53 | Framework Consulting

August 7, 2022

Why Your Strategic Plan Needs a Deep Handshake Agreement

Have you ever played a part in crafting a useless strategic plan? You thought it was a good product, but it ended up languishing on the shelf or in unread email. However, you believed in the process followed, but something was missing… maybe from the final step which condemned the entire plan to the scrap heap.

As you near the season for developing your company’s strategic plan, you already know that engaging stakeholders is important. Getting everyone on the same page is the only way to implement the plan effectively. However, you may not realize that the final group handshake at your retreat isn’t a mere formality or nicety. Instead, it creates an emotional bond no participant should escape.

Compare this to the fond memories of a wedding. Most recall the fun. A wonderful ceremony. The party after. Delicious food. Engaging people you met.

But there’s only a single short segment that was essential. The vows between the bride and groom may be different each time, but the public promises they make are the ingredients which generate a permanent difference. Without it, the activity is not a wedding.

In the same spirit, a strategic planning retreat cannot skip over the ultimate promise attendees must make to each other. Dr Richard Rumelt from the Caribbean Strategy Conference calls it the “swearing-in ceremony.” (The phrase is borrowed from basic military training.) What makes this final activity – essentially a handshake agreement – so important?
1—It’s a Reckoning

A great retreat is an exercise in “managed disagreement.” Executives from different functions bring together disparate points of view. Collectively, they forge a future none of them could create by themselves.

When the planning horizon is 10-30 years out, profound conflicts are even more pronounced. They can only be resolved via in-depth discussions, including a heavy dose of individual give and take.

But the meeting is wasted if, at the end, everyone is not on the same page. This test cannot be left to a gut feeling. Instead, someone must be brave enough to publicly ask each attendee to commit to moving forward together. In other words, to make a vow equivalent to a wedding’s “I Do”. Or similar to an oath of office. Without this clarity, prepare to declare the meeting a failure.

2 – It’s Not Compete Consensus

While it would be nice to get total agreement on every single point of the strategic plan, that’s not the best practice. If you follow that path, expect the event to drag on indefinitely.

Why? A lone person with strong convictions could dominate and wreck the proceedings.

The fact is, this isn’t a debate. Or a marriage. Or a competition. It’s a business activity intended to move the company forward. With hard realities looming outside the meeting room, the organization needs a plan to fulfill its potential.

The best practice involves the use of a lesser form of agreement…”Disagree-and-Commit.” In this method, which is ideal for time-limited activities like planning retreats, participants don’t need to resolve all their reservations. Instead, they are encouraged to keep them, but simultaneously join the group in moving forward.

This technique is usually taught at the start of the retreat, but its influence is fully realized at the very end. Before everyone departs, there needs to be no daylight between participants and the strategic plan so that a united team can implement it as one.

3 – Defang Backstabbers

This approach is also intended to take power away from those who sit back, waiting to say “I Told You So” at the first signs of failure. But the truth is, if such people exist at the end, the process was defective. At some level, they were excluded.

Prevent this from happening by checking to see whether “Disagree-and- Commit” bonds are being formed during the retreat. Use your intuition to focus on those who seem to be withdrawn or disengaged.

Also, seek to forge solutions that combine the best elements of separate points of view. By the end, each component of the plan should be identified with the team, rather than any individual.

The bottom line is that the paragraphs and diagrams in the strategic plan don’t matter as much as the human element.

When the team hasn’t stepped up as a unit to make a visible, authentic commitment to the plan, you have nothing but empty words. The true test comes when people are alone in front of their laptops. Do they execute the strategic plan when they are tired, distracted, or just plain comfortable with the status quo?

Such moments are the ultimate proof that your final handshake agreement was authentic. Your plan is ready to be executed.

July 31, 2022

Stop Conflating Budget with Strategy

Each year, managers in your company sit down to devise budgets for the next twelve months. As a participant in the process, you see that each department’s spending reflects certain priorities. Where do these come from? Are some correct in calling them “strategic”? Should they be reconciled in some way?

Managing costs has become a bigger priority than ever in these pandemic times. The best method of control? It’s nothing new: negotiate budgets with your department managers. Then, hold them to account.

There is no question that this process works. It sets expectations and regulates purchases. In fact, some companies use the terms “budget” and “revenue targets” interchangeably in a nod to its universal acceptance.

However, as negotiations proceed each year, inevitable questions arise. Each department appears to be operating from its own background assumptions. Where did they come from? And what strategy is the unit pursuing? Is it related to the overall corporate plan?

Perhaps you are like many managers who notice these discrepancies. They exist, but you want them to disappear. The answer? Pull together a single “strategic plan” which covers all the budgets at the same time. Towards that end, a mandatory retreat is announced.

While this reasoning may appear sound, it’s often deeply flawed. A budget should not be conflated with a corporate strategy for many reasons. Why? Here are just a few.

Reason #1 – Required Budget vs Optional Strategy

In terms of immediate threats to your business, a broken budget process is a huge risk. Why? Compared to the existence of a strategic plan, a busted budget can cause cash to run out.

Consequently, managers who disregard budgets are likely to face severe sanctions. By contrast, when you ignore the strategic plan, you are probably safe in the majority. After all, it only serves long-term interests.

This is just human nature. We pay more attention to our anxieties than long-term concerns. In this context, strategic planning becomes a nice-to-have business activity which adds little real value. When a retreat is not scheduled, nothing changes from one day to the next.

Reason #2 – Strategy as an Afterthought

Your company may be like many. It only thinks about strategic matters when the fear of competition or disruption arises. The trigger might be a case study of failures, such as Kodak or Blackberry. Or a competitor’s advertisement for a new feature you didn’t even know existed.

In these moments, it becomes obvious: strategy matters. In fact, the right strategy probably earned your company the success and stability it experiences today. Someone had a vision of where the company should go.

However, history often reverses itself. I have led many corporate retreats in which the strategic planning activity was scheduled after the budgets were completed. They were merely last-ditch attempts to reconcile different points of view.

Today, the danger in leaving strategy as an after-thought is that your company might be heading into extinction without knowing it.

If you are a top executive, you may not be detecting slow changes underway in your industry. By focusing on budgets before strategies, you fail to scan the horizon for changes before setting priorities. This mistake renders the entire budgetary exercise impotent – a shuffling of the chairs on the Titanic.

But there’s no need to wait for a scare. Instead, examine your current strategic plan. A timeframe of five years or fewer is probably just an update of prior documents. It’s Business-As-Usual, plus some small changes.

If incremental improvements are all that’s expected, get everyone excited about producing a disruptive strategic plan instead.

Reason #3 – Game-Changing Results Become Impossible

Unfortunately, while your company rides on decisions made long ago, the world has continued to change. Before long, competitors will notice your slow-moving ways, leading them to look for disruptive ideas and technologies.

As they climb the learning curve, they anticipate transformations which build on each other. A dramatically different future comes into focus.

Such was the case of Apple’s iPhone division, and much closer to home, Digicel. By the end, thousands lost their jobs as the incumbents’ leaders failed to set a new direction.

If you’re interested in a new paradigm, consider the advice of Dr. Richard Rumelt from the recent Caribbean Strategy Conference.

He recommended that companies decouple budgetary and strategic activities. How? Ensure that they don’t follow the same annual cycle. Break them apart.

At the conference, we also learned to dream big by asking your team to contemplate 15 and 30 year scenarios. What does your company want to happen in decades to come?

Approaching your strategic planning in these new ways can preserve the integrity of the process. It might even keep your company from destruction.

July 5, 2022

First: Check Your Calendar or Read Email?

In general, you want to be responsive to those who wish to reach you. Consequently, each morning, before doing anything else, you scan your email inbox for new messages. However, if you have ever questioned the wisdom of this habit, your concerns are justified. The most effective professionals refuse to process email first. Instead, they start the day differently: they plan the time in their calendars.

Back in the mid-1990s when email was introduced to the general public, receiving a message was a rarity. It was exciting. Your computer announced the event, and audio-visual pop-ups celebrated its arrival.

But the practices you developed to address this new form of communication may no longer work. Why? They were suitable for a handful of messages, but useless for the 100+ deluge we face today.

One habit you may have adopted is the first-thing-in-the morning-check. If you’re opening email as the initial task upon entering the office, jumping in the car or sitting up in bed in your pajamas, you may be committing an error. Here are the reasons why.

You should be timeblocking your priorities

Most of us are careful to write down appointments with other people, treating our calendar as if it were a scheduling tool used by doctors and dentists.

In addition, the most productive also schedule their priorities. Unwilling to leave them to chance, they program time in their calendars to complete them. The result? Each day they are more likely to act on the tasks which are most important. This technique is known as timeblocking.

However, when you don’t timeblock, you are at the mercy of other forces. Some days your energy might be lagging… so you check social media. On others, you may be feeling a lack of motivation… so you focus on routine actions.

Left to chance, it’s easy to miss deadlines because your work is being driven by factors unrelated to the importance of the task and its urgency.

Even so, as ruinous as these internal factors are, the worst culprit of all is the email you receive from others.

How colleagues control you with messages

Too many people accept a passive role in their jobs. In other words, they see themselves as good soldiers whose job it is to take orders. In extreme cases, often with younger staff, they only aspire to make others happy.

If you’re in this cohort, email is a fantastic way for other people to transmit their priorities. Your assignment? Simply answer as many messages as fast as possible, and do what they tell you to do. Consequently, they give you more to do… which increases your email volume. The faster you respond, the more you get.

With this mindset, it’s only natural for you to check your inbox as soon as you can in the morning. If you never break the habit, you end up spending the better part of the day at the mercy of others who are happy to overlay their priorities over yours.

Unfortunately, while some encourage this practice, it’s not sustainable. To climb the corporate ladder, a person needs to show increasing self-direction and intrinsic motivation. In other words, they must lead, not follow.

Doing so means letting go of the anxiety felt when you haven’t replied to someone immediately.

This inner turmoil which leads to feelings of overwhelm has a name: The Zeigarnik Effect. There’s no way to climb the corporate ladder without learning to manage it.

By the end of the day, you have accomplished little

We all know that person in the office who is very busy with email, but seldom accomplishes much. Often, they appear exhausted.

You may think they are simply being lazy, but here’s a simpler explanation. They are failing to examine the habits, practices and routines picked up in adolescence. Therefore, they become stuck.

The antidote is to exercise relentless, continuous improvement in your task management. For example, checking your calendar before your email inbox each day is not a popular habit among Jamaican workers.

However, by seeking out best practices and experimenting with them, you can be as productive as anyone else in the world. At the highest levels, professionals accomplish both productivity and peace of mind. The key? High performance in core areas such as task management, even when your friends, family and colleagues don’t act as role models.

If you’re serious, bypass the conventional wisdom. Drive each day using the priorities written in your timeblocked calendar. This best practice (and others) will help you become someone who has both peace of mind and productivity. You’ll be striving to find the right answers to greater personal capacity.

Francis Wade is the host of the Caribbean Strategy Conference on June 23-25. To search his prior columns on productivity, strategy, engagement and business processes, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com.

June 26, 2022

Change the Perception of HR in Strategic Planning

For years, HR Professionals have lobbied: they must have a seat at the strategic planning table. Now, many companies agree. However, HR’s impact in retreats has not matched those of other functions. What can your company do to ensure talent management isn’t an after-thought?

Today, most Human Resource units have evolved well past the old “Personnel Departments”. Almost all executives in your organization are in support.

But it’s not enough. In two decades of facilitating strategic planning retreats, I have noticed a trend. The least effective participants are often HR Professionals.

I don’t say this lightly. Nor would I apply my observation to every situation I have encountered. But there is definitely a recurring pattern of behavior.

For example, when the HR Director makes his/her presentation, colleagues regularly stop paying attention. To them, nothing earth-shattering will be shared. They relax, sometimes get bored and may even leave the room altogether for busywork.

Also, from start to finish, the HR manager is likely to be the most quiet person. Sometimes, he/she could come alive near the very end, but it’s too little too late.

Instead of missing the chance, how can you ensure HR steps up from the first minute?

Be Strategic Before the Retreat

In general, many executives bemoan the fact that HR is too reactive. While this is a criticism, it translates to a great opportunity for improvement. For example, HR can establish itself at the forefront of strategic questions between retreats, perhaps focusing on the potential of human capital.

The truth is, there is no such thing as a wildly successful strategy that doesn’t involve human creation and execution. It’s not luck. Ingenuity, data analytics, foresight, business modelling, backcasting, deep listening – these are just a few of the skills needed to produce a game-changing plan.

Also, most non-HR executives can’t assess the capacity of an entire workforce. But HR professionals naturally ask: “What specific future can this potential be used to accomplish?”

If you’re in HR, this is an inquiry to be led throughout the year, building an awareness of the organization’s human capability map.

While it’s obvious that talented thinking creates strategy, other executives struggle to articulate what this means operationally. As such, the company desperately needs HR to drive this conversation.

Be Data-Driven

Whereas a CFO is trained to think in terms of numbers, the same isn’t usually true of HR. As such, reviews of past financial results take up an inordinate amount of time. However, they are all about a history, telling stories about what has already happened.

By contrast, HR professionals can be all about the future. But you must use numbers to describe it.

Unfortunately, in the heat of the moment at a retreat, HR’s lack of data forces it into vague, qualitative measures which colleagues have a hard time grasping.

In a prior column in Nov 2021, I argued that CEOs and other executives are upset at this fact. They want HR to catch up to the analytics train, but it’s not for charity’s sake.

Unfortunately, only a tiny fraction of CEOs, Chairpersons and MDs have HR backgrounds. Even though most of their work involves people, these skills only become important late in their careers.

As such, they need HR analytics and dashboards, tools and summaries to appreciate what’s happening with their people. Sadly, most HR managers don’t give them what they want.

If you’re an HR Professional, consider becoming data-driven long before the retreat so that you can shine in the event. I have seen it done to great effect and the result was stunning.

In this context, a retreat is more like the grand finale – the finish line of a lengthy race.

Lead Analysis, Not Follow

The presence of data gives HR deep insights others miss. This would reverse the trend in which HR is the short discussion at the end of the retreat…the afterthought.

Instead, as an HR Professional, you can develop your ability to define different futures and advocate for them. With this information in hand, you alone can speak to gaps in staff capacity and the cost of filling them. In this context, HR is like the manager of a modern sports team, as depicted by the movie MoneyBall. It’s a baseball story, but a similar transformation has occurred in football and cricket.

If you had the detailed information top coaches have, every conversation about company strategy would start with such analytics. HR would be the chief interpreters of people’s capacity.

In these ways, HR moves from a back bench into the foreground, returning organizations to their original people power, altering the prior perception for good.

June 13, 2022

Task Sequencing: How to Condition and Order Tasks for Greater Momentum

This week, the ProductivityCast team tackles the topic of ordering tasks conditionally and task sequencing for momentum. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/135 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to continue discussing Task Sequencing: How to Condition and Order Tasks for Greater Momentum, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | Task Sequencing Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | Task Sequencing Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. OmniFocusAny.doMicrosoft ProjectMicrosoft TeamsNozbeTodoistTemporal Structures in Individual Time Management - Wu DezhiRemember the MilkIFTTTZapierUnscheduleGTD Weekly ReviewJoin Ray’s Weekly Review Accountability Party on Fridays at 10:30 AM ET!KrispNotionPaprika (grocery shopping app) Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17Hello, and welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith. Augusto Pinaud 0:23I'm Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade 0:24I'm Francis Wade. Art Gelwicks 0:25And I'm Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. Today, we are going to be talking about something that I find to be fascinating, which is the order of operations, so to speak of tasks. And tasks. sequencing is interesting to me, because I think that when we deal with so many complexities in life, there are ways in which we can really order the tasks that we're doing, not just for making them more effective, but also making them more efficient. And I think that it's important for us to think through how we put things one in front of the other. And so I thought today, we would have a conversation around the idea of why would you condition tasks? Why would you sequence tasks, in essence, and then we could talk about maybe some of the examples and or pitfalls that we experience when we do task sequencing. And then we'll close out with maybe some tips and tricks for you all to utilize when you want to jump start the process of task sequencing. So let's get started with Why do you task sequence? Why would you want to do task sequencing, Francis Wade 1:32if we don't think about task sequencing, we end up making mistakes, small mistakes, big mistakes, we end up arriving at places late because we didn't start early enough, we end up with late deliverables, we end up being stressed, there's a host of problems that we can create if we don't do task sequencing correctly. And they all end up causing us emotional stress, the people around us come to realize that they can't count on us. It's loss of reputation, there's just a whole host of problems that gets created when we don't really pay attention. And we just do what we think we feel like doing in the moment. recipe for disaster. Art Gelwicks 2:19Task sequencing is one of those things that you don't realize it's important until you don't do it. Because you go to plug into working on a particular task.

June 12, 2022

Caribbean Corporate Strategy Conference 2022

Your competitors are attending a conference on crafting game-changing, post-COVID strategies. Should you?

During the pandemic, many regional organizations didn’t have time to focus on their competitors. Their survival was paramount and they couldn’t get what they wanted by trying to “keep up with the Joneses.”

But now that the worst is behind us, we have started to notice them again. Some are attending the Caribbean Strategy Conference on June 23-25, and learning how to craft disruptive strategic plans.

Think of Netflix, Fuji Film and Apple. Each of them implemented strategic plans that forced a disruption. Here in the Caribbean, Grace Kennedy, Digicel (in Jamaica) and Tribe Carnival Band have done the same.

If the idea of your competitors learning how to use the emerging principles of disruptive post-COVID change, don’t stop there. Because it’s not about beating them.

Instead, it’s about serving your customers unmet needs in ways that are unique, differentiated and can’t easily be copied.

As such, we give each company who registers a draft Blueprint to guide their planning efforts from July to December. What should emerge in January 2023 are actions: projects, initiatives and programmes that your customers can’t do without.

Some use new technology. Others use analytics. New skillsets and mindsets may be needed.

The point is that your customized blueprint will look different from even your closes competitor and it will be yours to implement the week after the conference is over.

Learn more about this new thinking and how we’ll share it via downloads, live panels, speeches and networking sessions at the Caribbean Strategy Conference 2022 from June 23-25. Visit https://strategyconf.fwconsulting.com

June 12, 2022

Stop Ignoring the Next Technology Disruption

Your industry may be the same as it was 50 years ago. Change comes slowly, if at all, so your future appears to be secure. But you’re worried, anyway. As you look around the world you see entire sectors in upheaval. New technology has led to companies being “Netflixed” – completely destroyed with sudden speed by outside innovations.

How can you be sure that won’t happen to your organization?

The fact is, you can’t prevent such external forces. Somewhere, bright people are invisibly trying out fresh ideas, experimenting. They intend to revolutionize and displace whatever product or service you offer. More recently, COVID has shown just how small the earth is, and how vulnerable we are in the Caribbean. Your company isn’t safe, and the barriers that kept competition away are falling faster each day.

In the face of increased risk, how do you respond? Some are fatalistic, believing that you can’t stop a hurricane, epidemic or technology from upsetting the best -made plans. However, if your organization intends to do more than put its head in the sand, here are some steps to follow.

Plan Scenarios

If you can divine the small beginnings of a disruptive technology, congratulations. You’re halfway there. If you can’t, start looking by scouring the trade press.

Also tune into what younger staff are seeing and saying. They could be closer to determining the outlook than you are. Why? They’ll be the ones who will deal with it. In fact, if they sense a disruption, expect them to test your leadership team. “Do these executives even have a clue?” they may ask. When they conclude the worst, they’ll leave.

Use these inklings to capture future scenarios for your organization. Go out at least 20 years and see what happens when different possibilities play out. For the ones which are most likely, craft a single preferred outcome. Then, backcast to this year to determine what your short-term actions should be.

But sometimes this won’t work.

I have seen teams realize: “The company has no future.” Like the old photo film industry, they realized that the tides are turning for good, and they need an escape plan. Working harder would just deepen their dependency, as it did for Kodak. Today, its rival Fuji is thriving in entirely new lines of business while Kodak is defunct.

Get the Timing Right

Another lesson which emerged from the Fuji vs. Kodak battle is the fact that the latter invested in bad bets.

Some believe Kodak didn’t foresee the advent of digital photography, but a closer look at the record shows otherwise. They were one of the first to predict that the technology would replace their more profitable film business.

However, their response to the threat was mistaken. They invested in digital kiosks around the world, mostly in shopping centres. Their belief? Customers wanted to make prints in a convenient location.

They were correct, but they missed the growth of desktop computing. Customers shifted to managing their photos at home, powered by computers and printers built by HP, Compaq and Apple.

Unfortunately, Kodak’s timing was wrong. Their strategy failed.

The best solution to this problem? Bring in a wide range of team members to craft your plans. This task is too difficult to be left to a single individual, even if he is the company founder and a certified genius.

Focus on Todays’ Implementation

Even if you capture the perfect plan for the next disruption, it’s easy to be swallowed up by today’s emergency. No surprise: your organization isn’t designed to adopt unfamiliar ways of doing things.

For example, the day after the retreat, the easiest thing someone can do is go back to what they were doing before. After all, their calendar looks the same, email messages haven’t gone away and the same meetings are scheduled.

Consequently, internal processes don’t change. Projects fail to be launched. Strategic initiatives never leave the retreat.

It takes incredible energy to bring about such a transformation and Caribbean people won’t switch if they don’t know why they must. In other words, just being told to do something different will not work.

Instead, company leaders should win over hearts and minds. They need to inspire staff to see the reasons why change is imperative and urgent. But this is no one-time task: it requires constant reinforcement and performance management.

In summary, the real villain isn’t innovative technology but your company’s ineffective response. Delay these three actions and you’ll probably fall behind, never able to catch up.

The upside is that these steps are within your control and will prepare you for the introduction of a new technology that threatens to “Netflix” your company into oblivion.

June 11, 2022June 11, 2022

Webinar: 3 Mistakes HR Makes in Corporate Strategic Planning Retreats

You’re an HR Manager who is aspiring to a seat at the table, or maybe you’re already there. You want to make an impact and have the executives understand the power of HR.

But before you even arrive at the first meeting, there’s a perception in the way.

Traditionally, HR has been seen as reactive. The first area to be cut when times are hard. Relatively unimportant.

It shows up when you, the HR Manager, starts his/her presentation in the strategic planning retreat. Attention lapses. Executives start to check messages. At some point, someone even rolls their eyes.

What is going on? Is it all their fault or are hidden mistakes being made? Could you be shut out if this situations isn’t corrected?

Unfortunately, from my experience facilitating retreats for a couple of decades, there is room for concern.

In this interactive webinar, you’ll understand the 3 mistakes HR Managers need to overcome to make a profound impact. Come to gain an awareness of what your (future) colleagues are thinking, but not saying…and why. You may also find ways to change their preconceptions before and after the retreat. This paves the way to your success in future high-stake meetings.

Get More Out of Your Calendar: Forecasting, Budgeting and Tracking Your Day

In this week's episode, the ProductivityCast team chats about how to track and manage time in a calendar/agenda style format to be more productive. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/134 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to continue discussing Get More Out of Your Calendar from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | Get More Out of Your Calendar Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | Get More Out of Your Calendar Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. SortdMacSparkyAcuity SchedulingCalendlyManicTimeUnscheduleIkigai Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17 And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith. Augusto Pinaud 0:22 I am Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade 0:23I'm Francis Wade. Art Gelwicks 0:24 And I'm Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. Today, we're gonna be talking about getting more out of your calendar, how to track time in a calendar interface to an agenda style format, so that you can actually be more productive. And so let's get into the topic related to utilizing your calendar for tracking it is something that is probably common to many of us, that is we are used to the calendar format, we we've been raised to see time in either a monthly, weekly, even a day style agenda. And so we're very comfortable with laying things out. It is just another form of list in a, you know, in a matrix or otherwise. And so the idea of a calendar is useful to us. And I'm curious from all of you, how do you use a calendar for tracking? Let's start off with events? Since I think it's probably the most common style and way of or, or data that you would capture into a calendar? It's it's the most common form of data that you would capture into a calendar format, which is what is going to happen in the future? And so how do you how do you use a calendar in that sense, and then we can perhaps, then turn over to the task or in Francis's terms, time demand space to think about how you would capture, forecast budget, and ultimately track the things that are happening in your productivity system. Francis Wade 1:57The way I do it, is to schedule the appointments in and then use an auto scheduler to fill in the gaps, so to speak, to put the flexible tasks in the times that I don't already have committed. But I think what you're alluding to is that that's that's the first part. And it might be even the easy part, the subsequent parts, which we all do, would do to some degree. And I think we all do mentally anyway, is we ask what whole? Well, did I build a schedule? And then how do I improve it in the future? How do I how do I do better? Scheduling in the future, because we've all the planning fallacy is real for all of us. We've all said all this to take an hour and five hours later, we're groaning and struggling.

May 29, 2022

How to Sell a Disruption to Your Executives

You’re the member of an executive suite who has battled the COVID-19 pandemic alongside your colleagues. As the world adjusts to accommodate the virus, it’s high time to look beyond the mere survival of your company. But…surprise! Not everyone on the senior team or board agrees this is urgent. Do you garner full support first or power ahead, hoping laggards will catch up later?

Now that the worst of the pandemic is behind us, most leaders are ready to move past survival mode. Today, companies must thrive in waters churned up by COVID-19, inflationary recession, armed conflict and unsteady supply chains.

However, a few visionary managers have outgrown a yearning for the old normal. Some are convinced that customer behavior has changed…permanently. They also expect new competitors to attack from anywhere in the world.

In their minds, there is no going back. They see once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to transform everything by moving forward.

However, their impatience to seize the future and disrupt their markets isn’t shared by all their fellow leaders. Board members, executives and senior managers are showing a mixed bag of commitment and reluctance. Why can’t they see the obvious?

They are stuck in short-term habits

Disruptive thinking requires an ability to think in the long-term. But the past few years have prioritized short term, firefighting skills. Many corporate leaders have thrived by learning how to set everything aside, other than the bare essentials. In this emergency mode, they have adapted by becoming hyper-alert, flexible and willing to exert a great deal of energy at a moment’s notice.

But it’s not enough. In fact, their transition up the organizational ladder requires more strategic thinking, not less.

The bad news is that these skills aren’t taught, nor is their need emphasized. Consequently, you find top executives and even board members silent in strategic planning retreats. While they can rally to any emergency, they lack the practice of asking themselves: “Where is the organization headed?” They become the kind of leaders who win battles, but lose wars.

However, it’s never too late for a reboot. Long before your next planning session, create opportunities in meetings at all levels to explore strategic choices. These discussions should help develop staff’s willingness to think in both short- and long-term dimensions at the same time. This crucial skill will make its way into the culture of the organization, preparing it for later disruptions.

They lack the skill of precise long-term planning

Newly promoted executives discover that an enthusiasm to be strategic is just the beginning. For example, in the middle of a retreat, when they are asked to create a detailed 20 and 30 year plan, they balk: “I can only think five years out.” Or, “Things are changing too quickly to look that far ahead.”

Too many leaders assume that because they can’t see how long-term planning works, it must not be possible.

When shown multiple examples of successful cases, their resistance softens, but the point is not to change their minds. It’s much more important to give them the necessary skill of long-term planning.

Unfortunately, even the best business schools only hint at this capability. If you’re an MBA, you may recall courses on strategic planning. But the case method of discussion which most use isn’t intended to teach you actual steps. That comes from real-life, and some lucky exposure.

However, the process is easy enough to follow, even for skeptical team members. In prior columns, I have laid out the steps in detail. Observe them, and you will have a skill which can be yours forever.

Don’t ignore the need to develop this competence among your leaders.

They won’t collaborate

If you’re a top executive, you probably hate the occasions when you have to force people to act. At most, you receive grudging compliance. But you don’t get true understanding or intrinsic motivation, i.e. buy-in. Therefore, you feel forced to micro-manage.

Nevertheless, you won’t produce a disruptive strategy following this method. Why? A lasting, game-changing plan is beyond the brilliance of a single individual. Instead, it takes a multi-disciplinary team to envision the breakthrough and implement it together.

While a collaborative approach requires more time and interpersonal skills, it’s the only one which is sustainable. Selling a disruption to teammates calls for extraordinary capabilities, but these aren’t ordinary times. The remaining months of 2023 are a chance to separate your company from the Blackberrys in your industry…the failures. Make the most of it by including your colleagues from the very beginning in a smart way.