The e-newsletter from Forrest Workshops
It's a fascinating moment in time. Where virtual interactions between people dominate face-to-face, shared Oxygen interfaces. Where, if you look around you, there's sufficient proof that we prefer tapping a glowing bipping device to locking eyes and speaking words. Where the barrier to personal growth isn't access to information, or money. And where your competition for the next gig is less about the pile of CVs on the recruiters desk, and more about the organisation's reimagining of that business function (AI'd? Offshored? Crowdsourced? Extinct?) 12 years ago, when I started building Powerpoint slide decks for team workshops, it wasn't too hard to razzle dazzle with cool (nicked) internet images and embedded TED talk video clips and a few
Inspiration Poster soul-stirring quotes. While I'm still too fond of overbaking the cake in my image-fat slide decks (hey, need to appeal to the visual learners, right?), it's impressed upon me weekly that the real benefit, the real longer-term value of a team in a room around a table isn't in rallying them to digest spoonfuls of PT Barnum-style enthusiasm elixir. It's in a conversation. In some argy-bargy, some airing of different perspectives, which can't be constrained on a table in a slide or polished or corralled in advance. It's in the harder-to-manage organic flow and friction and (if you're lucky) illumination that comes when a problem or an idea is dropped on the table for all to drop their 20c worth on, to compare notes on. "Harder conversations" is the winning play in 2018, according to me. Harder conversations about making it easier for them to love, spend and stay with you and your selected journeymates, in your vehicle, as you lay tracks en route to your purpose legacy. Troy Forrest, Forrest Workshops & Strategy Road.
Sub-2 minutes with Troy on what to whack in your first workshop of the year
Strategic play – cross-industry themes nestled in your PESTLE
In a PESTLE analysis, where we get a strategy-setting team to consider the major forces bubbling in 6 domains surrounding their business (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental), I noticed a few common patterns across most industries in 2017. - Political – things like “instability / fickleness of leadership”, “short-term decision filters in governance”, “conservatism over boldness”, “personality over policy”, “cross-border turf battles” and “Foreign policy impacts on an (increasingly) electronically borderless world”.
- Economic – “Cheap cash (low interest rates)”, “Urban densification (concentrated cash, infrastructure and customer pools)”, “Widening chasm between haves & have nots”, “New free market forces (from e-shopping impacts to the proliferation of choice and commoditization of previously unique offerings), “Baby Boomer money (super)”, “Transition of ownership”, “Mortgage stress” and “Competing with “free””.
- Social – “Tribalism & Patriotism”, “Extreme public views / everyone airs an opinion”, “A generation that wants it all and immediately”, “Do-it-for-me vs DIY”, “Fake news?”,
“Values-driven consumerism & employment”, “finding & retaining the right folk in the war for talent”, “the future of work / the rise of transience & gigs”, “Diversity (including, but more than gender equality)” and “Balanced lifestyles (tailored to the individual)”.
- Technological – “e- and i-everything”, “the crumbling of bricks & mortar”, "shortening innovation cycles", “hybrid models”, “AI impacting UX / CX”, “data big & small (but what & how to apply?)”, “Blockchain (forget Bitcoin)”, “Direct-to-consumer enablement reshaping supply chains (what role the intermediary?)”, “Drones” and “Imperfect
iterative design trumps hidden-until-perfect”.
- Legal – “Cross-border trade restrictions”, “Cover our a*ses (everyone wants to litigate)”, “Tightening regulations within the market”, "Threat of deregulation", “WH&S responsibilities”, “To protect IP or not to protect IP (that is the question)”, “Compliance requirements” and "Paralysed with risk-realised fears".
- Environmental – “Global warming impacts / extreme weather events”, “sustainability as a function of good corporate citizenery / for green marketing / for long-term economic upside”, “C footprint”, “doing more with
less”, “the evolving primary produce preferences of our growing global middle-class population”, “alternate fuel sources” and “transport costs & impacts servicing a global market from our antipodean location”.
It’ll be interesting to see how this list shifts / concentrates in ‘18+ discussions, maybe a good starting point for your future market analysis.
From Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan, 2007.
The Green RoomGood wood from smart guest contributors. This edition…. Michelle Bakjac, Bakjac Consulting (Psychology, Leadership & Wellness Coaching),
"A Growth Mindset Organisation needs a Growth Mindset Leader".
"Communication" is the most commonly referenced "we-must-get-better-at-this" plea of every leadership team in planning workshops. Where does it fall down? - Right person-Right message-Right vehicle-Right tone? A quadratic equation super-challenging to get right every time. Which dimension is your business most battling with?
- Consistency... with what? Your own biases? Your culture? The default settings in your software? Or your Purpose/Vision/Values/Strat Priorities/Self-determined tandards?
- Clarity. Do I immediately appreciate the comms need, the nub and the next steps?
- A high-ranking break in the chain. "Do as I say not as I do" might've worked for your Grandpa, but if Boss Cocky isn't role modelling stellar comms practices, you're doomed.
- A lack of understanding of the efficiency & engagement impacts of mucking it up. If indeed the org culture feasts on smashed strategy on toast in the a.m., and if how we're communicated with impacts our mindset about our crew as much as anything else (ergo, drives our behaviour and culture), then maybe it makes sense to audit our comms regularly, assessing the impact of the good, the bad and the wow!
If you’re going to use a whiteboard to capture team goals & commitments;a. learn to write in legible English (versus my stenographer's chicken scratch), and
b. check textas in advance (eking last gasps of ink from the pen - looking nasty).
3 if-then closed questions you might ask VIPs as you collaborate on your 12-month plan for them…1. If we can deliver X upside to you at Y cost, then will you commit to investing Z with us? 2. If scenario X plays out and the impact is Y, then can we agree that Z course of action will be the best way to go? 3. If, together, we try X, and subsequently Y happens, then why don't we plan to make our next move Z?
Meet Strategy Road Associate James McGill of 180 Consulting, a specialist in organisational analysis to provide informed, experienced advice to your business to help you understand & plan for best-fit change opportunities and shield against emerging or likely risk impacts…
Reversing the cancer of ingratitude…A simple positive psychology and wellbeing practice you can try; - Each night, take 5 minutes in quiet
- Consider & write down three things in your life, or that happened today, that you are really grateful for
- Repeat ad infinitum
Dawn, West Lakes, watching the eldest heaving oars
Leader, first follower or long-tail picker?
"Leadership" sounds so grand, so appealing, to most organisations. Take first position, go earlier, do it faster, be better, and we'll reap the rewards of gold medallists. It's not always that way though, nor is it honest for many organisations to think they can be the leader in their field (the very definition means there's only ever one...) Strategically, there are a few places you can "win" from. - Being first - a bold front-runner, faster, the earliest to get a product, service, new model to market, or to take the standard to a level above all others. If the market, in
sufficient numbers, has been craving the value of something better, newer, and they're all ready to commercially convert their desire into orders, AND you can do it justice, sustainably, at least awhile, then great - be first. The sky, those green fields, are all yours for now.
- Being second (or third, or maybe fourth) - slip streaming behind the leader, protected to a degree from the bugs that hit the windscreen of the first positioned, benefitting from their learnings and their wedging open of a new market sector. Being "leaders lite" earns a great many a great amount, mindful you incorporate some variants that appeal to the greater segment of the bell curve than the earliest adopter sliver (maybe yours is a little cheaper, maybe in blue, maybe with a fox tail on the
antenna...), and that the bell curve is indeed big enough to sustain a dais-worth of strong players.
- Mopping up years worth of crumbs. Long tail harvesters of the innovation that's gone before them, unashamedly leveraging the foundation work of leaders, not too proud to service long, with toil and without front-page-story glamour afforded trailblazers. If the value proposition looks to remain relevant for many for the foreseeable future, stay there while the tap keeps dripping - it can certainly underpin commercial success. Mind the rapid evaporation overnight when the new disruption hits...
Whichever position you think best fits your pride and profferings, make sure it's honest, make sure you can hold that position well, and be clear about
the ability of that defined position to help you sustain your course to the Vision & Purpose you defined for yourselves.
I stumbled across this via Alain de Botton ("The Architecture of Happiness"), who I follow on Twitter (highly recommend... de Botton more than Twitter). An interesting article on the causes, consequences and occasional merits of procrastination. It's part of a larger collection of interesting perspectives on a range of "understand your behaviour better" emotional intelligence topics from thebookoflife.org - check it out. http://www.thebookoflife.org/natureandcausesofprocrastination/
Luft balloons* (imagine...)
Language - arguably our most powerful tool as a species (supposedly) differentiated from the rest of the animal kingdom. Constantly evolving, that says so much about who we are, how we want to be perceived, and what we believe in or prioritise.
Imagine defining some "us-only" language that galvanises your tribe; your "Semper Fi" equivalent, that builds esprit de corps and plucks the patriotic heartstrings of your peeps. Imagine incentivising and rewarding the application of desirable language (syntax, semiotics or tone) in interactions with customers, before staff, meeting supply partners. Imagine paying out in cash when you hear key desired words about your crew from the customer collective.
Imagine a team that can verbally communicate so far above anyone else battling in your market, to a team member, in dimensions of clarity, accuracy, ease-of-interpretation, even enjoyable-to-engage-with-ness. Imagine language laced with love messages in every consumer interaction from every member of your crew.
Imagine evolving the language of your customers, as "Google" has evolved our language for "Search Engine" or "Astro Turf" has for "fake grass", to the point you ARE the market.
Imagine pointing your every resource, planning your every action, in order to weld a single descriptive term in the minds of your target audience referencing your brand, to the point that, when we ask them to play a word association game during a backyard BBQ with a cold Coopers in their hand, we say "you", and they say "......."
Imagine a word : deliverable alignment so clean, so accurate, so tight, they say "this all just makes so much damn SENSE!"
Where can you take language, and leverage its power to a greater degree, in 2018?
(I'm betting Oprah's speech wasn't off the cuff...)
Balancing "listen up, everyone" didactic sections, all-in collaboration conversations, quiet alone thinking time and small tiger-team breakouts in any workshop can be really tricky. Most workshops, there's a place for all four components. - Listen up everyone - to welcome the gathered, set the scene, to establish context & purpose at workshop beginning, then used throughout the workshop as a recalibration touchstone. Use it to poke the bear with some challenging questions or ideas, to put some knowledge / factual fodder into the discussion pit, to summarise group conversation pieces, and at session end, to capture the proceedings summary,
next steps and thank the crowd. Also for when the talking stick is handed to a breakout group representative to share their thoughts with the wider crowd (mind the interplay between breakout groups when the talking stick enters the mosh pit).
- All-in conversations - where a topic is common and opinions are valuable from all workshop participants. Used to engage hearts and minds, help dot-connecting in peoples heads, and to elicit the breadth of perspectives only gained when input can come from a big crowd. Where a facilitator earns their money, drawing the right people in at the right moment, massaging unknowable discussion, ears perked, intervention ready.
- Quiet alone-time thinking - after some team conversation and
front-of-the-room input, a chance to have them mull a problem, or overlay an idea, or mine their brains for insights to put on the table thereafter. Where groupthink might first benefit from smart, considered reflections, and where a topic might be interpreted differently according to different roles / folk in the room. Equally vital for a session-ending "so what will you do next with this?" call to action per person - give them a moment to think, plan and diarise.
- Small cluster breakouts - the facilitator's relief valve (mind you don't overplay it). For deeper collaborative discussions not able to be managed as a large crowd, to concentrate thinking, opinions and input while leveraging a little diversity. Sometimes it needs clustering similar people (roles, team), other times mixing it up
is your friend (especially when a key aim of the session is developing a common sense / across-the-board appreciation of a topic). Needs protecting from domineering souls and occasionally poking the mousey to get into it. If a cluster looks glum / not engaging, change them up next round. Equally, take care it doesn't all turn vanilla - encourage outlier perspectives.
Maybe sometimes you've just got to cut to the chase...
If a mate has forwarded this free e-share to you and you’d like it once or twice a month, click here and type "sign me up, Scotty!" – thanks!
Thank you for reading! Forrest Workshops custom-builds and facilitates team workshops on topics ranging from strategic planning, leadership and sales practice development, to innovation, customer experience creation and collaborating with your supply chain in an evolving market. Based in Adelaide, serving clients nationally and internationally, from SMEs to Fortune 500s.
Committed to facilitating purposeful teamwork. Contact Troy Forrest from Forrest Workshops on 0430 308963 or troy@forrestworkshops.com.au for a discussion.
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