How to boost impact, collaboration, ingenuity and fulfilment dramatically
Everyone is doing the best they can - and some very smart people are totally committed and putting in huge effort. Is dramatic improvement possible?
How to boost impact, collaboration, ingenuity and fulfilment dramatically
The potential is huge in every single situation:
- Optimise flow, by relieving the bottleneck.
- Free up capacity by reducing multitasking.
- Stimulate creativity with Deliberate Genius.
- Catalyse collaboration with Deliberate Synergy.
- Orchestrate individual and collective capabilty with Deliberate Mastery.
Impact Potential
The Dramatic Improvement Opportunity
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 Dramatic Improvement Opportunity
The opportunity for dramatic improvement is huge. Here are some estimates to give you a feel for what's possible in most organisations:
- A 15% - 30% gain in capacity.
- A 20% - 50% gain in ingenuity and innovation speed & quality.
- A 20% - 40% gain in collaboration.
- A 50% - 100% gain in engagement.
Foundational Solutions
Flow Optimisation
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.
- Identify the bottleneck.
- Make sure that it's capacity is used wisely and not wasted.
- Make sure that it is never idle.
- Choke the inflow to match the bottlneck's capacity.
- Have the other steps in the flow do pre- and post-work, to free up capacity.
Without these steps you're wasting at least 25% of your capacity.
Defrag Time & Focus
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.
Defrag Time & Focus
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.
Advanced Solutions
Orchestrating Engagement
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.
Orchestrating Engagement
The keys to boosting engagement and motivation are to:
- Provide simple response and engagement frameworks that guide people to collaborate in defining, assessing and implementing the new way.
- Restrict rather than coerce participation.
- Display a commitment to each stakeholder's interests, without compromising the interests of any other stakeholders.
Capacity & Productivity
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.
Capacity & Productivity
The keys to boosting capacity and productivity are:
- Reducing time wasted in multitasking. Time
- Allocation Planning and Scheduling.
- Separating and streamlining process and practice.
- Optimising meeting time to maximise engagement, collaboration, synergy and innovation.
Ingenuity & Innovation
Ingenuity and innovation is as hard, time-consuming and unpredictable as it is because true ingenuity is, of necessity, counter-intuitive.
Ingenuity & Innovation
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.
Collaboration & Synergy
We're drowning in opportunity for both collaboration and synergy - and yet wasting it needlessly - because we are so poor at it and so blind to the forms it can take and the opportunities it presents.
Collaboration & Synergy
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.
Capability & Mastery
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.Capability & Mastery
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.
Services
Prodsol Website Membership
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.
Current Solutions
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.
Webinars
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:
- One-hour sessions to convey the core idea and help them apply and implement it within their world.
- A series of one-hour sessions addressindG each of a series of key facets of each solution.
Current Webinars
- Flow-optimisation
- Defag Your Bain!
Future Webinars
We plan to release a new webinar series at least every two months. The current programme is:
- Deliberate Genius
- ChangeGenius
- DemandGeneration
- Sales Acceleration
Public Workshops
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.
Public Workshop Schedule
FlowGenius Half-Day WorkshopFriday, 10 December 2016
Friday, 21 January 2017
FlowGenius Full Day Workshop
Tuesday, 13 December 2016
Friday, 28 January 2017
Deliberate Genius
Some time in February 2017On-Site Workshops
We have a large library of on-site seminars and workshops that we can provide in an ad hoc way or as part of a mini-project.
On-Site Workshops
Detail
Mini-Projects
Is this for you?
Indicators
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.
Kick off with a workshop or mini-project
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!
This is not the best place to start if:
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..
In either case, it may be better to lead with the functional area or situational solution and introduce only the relevant Impact and Fulfilment solutions within the context of that specific intervention.
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.
