Everyone is doing the best they can - and some very smart people are totally committed and putting in huge effort. Is dramatic improvement possible?
The potential is huge in every single situation:
The primary constraint on organisational performance is people's engagement, capacity, capability, ingenuity and collaboration.
Deliberately and systematically improving each of these dimensions of human performance dramatically yields huge gains in end-to-end performance and fulfilment - and establishes a virtuous cycle of ongoing improvement, inthe process.
The opportunity for dramatic improvement is huge. Here are some estimates to give you a feel for what's possible in most organisations:
Every organisation, situation and relationship is a flow-system, so knowing how to optimise flow is essential to - well: everything!
The trick to accelerating and streamlining flow is to improve the flow-rate at the bottleneck. This is so obvious that we all think we're already doing it - but we seldom are.
Without these steps you're wasting at least 25% of your capacity.
Multitasking wastes time, energy and opportunity and destroys ingenuity, capability, relationships and fulfilment.
We're largely unaware of the impact of multitasking - and assume that because our world demands it, it's a good thing to do.
It takes the human brain 10 - 25 minutes to - and a huge dose of neurochemicals to achieve deep concentration on a challenging task. We incur those setup costs every time we return to an interrupted task.
The Solution
Set time aside to work uninterrupted and proactively manage interruptions in a way that minimises their impact and improves internal and external customer satisfaction, in the process.
Engagement is crucial to impact & satisfaction & one of the primary constraints on improvement & change.
The primary prerequisites for engagement are a deep: alignment of interests, sense of meaning & purpose & conviction that we can succeed.
The keys to boosting engagement and motivation are to:
Our go-to excuse for lack of impact and fulfilment is lack of time and resources.
The problem is that the human brain wasn't evolved for productivity, but for survival, so the opportunity for improvement is massive.
The keys to boosting capacity and productivity are:
Ingenuity and innovation is as hard, time-consuming and unpredictable as it is because true ingenuity is, of necessity, counter-intuitive.
And counter-intuitive doesn't look counter-intuively brilliant ahead of time - it just seems, well: stupid!
So we reject really valuable ideas and adopt helpless ones.
Provisionals, alternative generation and integration, forced innovation postponed/ reserved judgement.
Deliberate Evolution. Innovation hothouse.
The key to collaboration and synergy is familiarity with the various forms that synergy can take - and what synergy opportunities look like.
We're prone to the Fundamental Attribution Error (attributing evil motive and intent to others and extenuating circumstances to ourselves, in seemingly adversarial situations).
The antidote is the Golden Assumption - deliberately assuming good intent and appearances to the contrary to be merely miscommunication and mistake.
Individual and collective mastery is the key to all human endeavour.
The trick to mastery is intervening at the ideal time (mostly early) in the most effective way.The problem is that if we're haven't mastered the domain yet, it's impossible to know how and when to intervene - or is it?
The secret is to work out what the most common failure modes (things that can go wrong) are - and what each of their earliest symptoms are.
Then practice diagnosing and intervening in increasingly demanding simulated and real-world situations.
Register (it's free) for more detail on a selection of dramatic improvement solutions.
Registration will also give you access to a general discussion forum on all of the solutions accessible to registered members.
We'll be launching a paid membership option in due course. It will give you access to even more detail on a more comprehensive set of solutions - pricing will be adjusted as content is published.
Anonymous Access
1 Impact & Fulfilment Solution Summary
Registered Access
3 Impact and Fulfilment Solution Summaries
Access to the Registered level Discussion Forum
Paid Access
7 Impact and Fulfillment Solution Summaries
eGuide, Audio and Videos and dedicated discussions on each solution.
We hold webinars on various solutions and techniques for boosting individual and collective Impact and Fulfilment. Our webinars are more interactive than conventional webinars and come in two forms:
We plan to release a new webinar series at least every two months. The current programme is:
We hold a series of half-day and full-day Public Workshops in Auckland, New Zealand.
These workshops are for individuals from SMEs and from larger organisations who attend to experience our workshops firsthand with a view to rolling them out within their organisation if the fit is good.
Public workshops are more affordable per person, because of the inability to discuss potentially sensitive confidential information.
Detail
Mini-Projects
This is the best place to start if:
1. You need better engagement or collaboration or more capacity, or shorter lead-times, higher quality, consistency or predictability or lower costs or effort across the whole organisation.
2. Your people are keen - or at least open - to lifting their game, if you approached it right.
2. No single department or function is the bottleneck - they all could do with a boost.
If all of these indicators resonate with you, targeting Individual and Collective Impact and Fulfilment could be the best place to start.
As people get more engaged, productive, innovative and collaborative, end-to-end performance will increase dramatically - and the functional area-specific opportunities will become more obvious and unequivocal.
It's probably still worth starting where the appetite and aptitude is highest, though!
1. The constraint is elsewhere
Your end-to-end constraint is clearly in a specific functional area or department and your people are fully engaged, productive, and collaborative but need a breakthrough in that specific area.
2. Your people aren't keen to lift their game
Whether the lack of apptitude is justified or not..
This is not so say that there is nothing gain from investing in the impact and fulfilment of your people - merely that the context of a situation-focused initiative will be a more direct way of securing immedaite gains and momentum.