The e-newsletter from Forrest WorkshopsFrom the pine...Do you employ rituals in your team get-togethers? Fun, serious, in recognition or in remembrance, deference and respect? They can be really powerful as culture catalysts and deepening strategies. I worked with a technical sales & service crew this month that, like the Aussie cricket team, presents each new kid with a team cap embroidered with a unique employee number. They get a senior colleague to make the presentation and share a few words about the newbie, about the number, and about the legacy of the bunch they've just become part of. Over laughs and beers, and almost brings tears. Rituals can live in monthly team meetings - a "share" about values, or a momentary reflection on the history of the business, or a pointed discussion about something that's happened of late that deepens pride in the gurnsey. They can happen at certain important-to-you times - all downing tools at a defined clock tick to remember an event of significance, to salute the flag, or dance the Haka. They can ease the tension or bolster the mood, with a ceremonial awarding of your equivalent of MVP, or BOG, or NAGA. They can utilise otherwise meaningless objects, like little urns or strange pieces of fruit or the Penske file, in the most meaningful ways. Symbolism to manifest a feeling, an idea, a shared belief. Rituals that involve baton passing - enabling more people to partake, to feel connected to the origins and meaning of the ritual - give you the benefit of sustaining the practice beyond the originator's involvement. Inclusivity, a special pass into a special connected club. The best bit about rituals? They have to start somewhere, by someone, for a reason that's only meaningful to a select few. Any worth considering for your select few in 2018? Troy Forrest, Forrest Workshops & Strategy Road. Talking Workshops 1:16 on what to start & end your meetings & workshops with. Strategic play – Refreshing knittingThere's a core business, a prime-mover value proposition, every enterprise has ridden to make it to this point. Your "knitting", or "wood chopping"; fundamentals you seemingly do well, and do well with, with others paying you profitably for it. In the strategy rethink, diligent conversation should vacillate between "doubling down on our daily doing-now stuff", and "stretching into other stuff". Mind though that any serious consideration of activities and strategic paths other than your present work isn't just a function of restless boredom, or shiny object syndrome, or because you hear loud shouts from the bleachers for something else (and the Jones' are doing it, so.....). Whether you're contemplating expanding your energies horizontally (adjunct products and services to place on shelves next to your cash cows; targeting peripheral customer tribes who drink coffee at the booth adjacent your current spenders), or whether you're thinking vertically (producing your best seller in V3.6 blue, or in mega-pack Costco sizes; deepening your position the lives of a narrow vein of VIPs with fresh offerings they'll buy because, hey, it's you guys...), be really clear about the worth of "other" relative to the persistence and perpetuation of "same". Maybe your knitting needs a different coloured wool, or new needles to re-energise and re-excite the knitters... but maybe it's still the same knitting the crowd want and will value. That's as relevant to the Board and senior leadership team in a strategy recalibration session as it is to the marketer contemplating dumping all things analogue for digi-sexy, or the sales folk thinking of eschewing phone calls and door knocking for LinkedIn Premium hyperactivity. What got you here can't be a sacred cow, but nor should it be a lamb you race too quickly to slaughter just because there are other interesting beasties out there batting their eyelashes at you. Think long and hard about pros and cons - it's near impossible to rebuild the jalopy when you've slashed its tyres. (May have taken the livestock metaphor too far...) From Rolf Dobelli, The Art of Thinking Clearly, 2013.. The Green RoomGood wood from smart guest contributors. This edition…. Katharine Crane, Crane Creative (Social media management & content curation), Cost-omers versus Custom-ers Here's a quick drill to check your willingness and ability to serve the one in front of you...
Decide who'll get your fixed vessel of hours each day. Applies to clients and suppliers. The upside of kids that do early morning sport... get to see Bryce Gibbs BURNING at training. Workshop observation...Chocolate. #ItWorks....Bright eyes and Pavlovian responses Seeds3 questions to pull team thoughts up that little higher…1. If we don't take this emerging pattern seriously now, and it continues on this trajectory, what's the likely implication for us in ... years time? 2. If you sat in our top customers chair, and looked at our operation from the outside, and compared it to the "dream supplier they've been craving", where is it obvious that we most need to pull our socks up (or get some new boots)? 3. When this exciting, innovative endeavour we're planning is seen / felt by our best competitors (meaning the ones that'll really give us a run for our money in the years ahead), what do you think will be the first words out of their mouths (and then the first actions of their feet)? MONA? Frank Gehry? Or the V-lux in my hallway. The Swarm GuideMeet Strategy Road Associate Jason Dunstone, the Founder and MD of Square Holes, one of Australia's leading market and consumer research organisations. Jason helps commercial, government and NFP clients enhance their shopping experience, develop better business models and products, implement behaviour change strategies, build brands and increase sales... BloomingHonour your debts…From Linda Kaplan Thaler & Robin Koval in The Power of Nice;
Tiffins on the Park, Greenhill Road. There's no house anymore, anymore... The rigid and the flexible Last week, I drove past Tiffins on the Park, the Adelaide city fringe hotel I officially launched my consultancy in some 12 years ago (on photo evidence, as a much thinner, smoother tie-wearing fella). A dozen years ago, the room was filled with ambitious sales folk, guest speakers and drinkers of free champagne. Last week, the excavators were scooping the rubble of my consulting life debutante ballroom into a Royal Park Salvage tip truck. "twas a fine establishment in the day, but... ageing bones, changing preferences, brighter visions of new owners... knock it down, down, down. The upsides of owning a bricks+mortar enterprise, of solid infrastructure and a sturdy wind-proof shell, are that they send a continually visible, obviously functional message to your market. "We're serious about our business - we've got a shop!" Moreover, they secure you with a saleable model that can sustain different humans with varying talents, energies and passions over time. Transferable ownership, potentially with minimal impact on the payers. The flip side? They physically decay, and it's also visible. They're inflexible, expensive in upkeep or alteration, and they can move in and out of favour based on evolving market desires (from "new and fresh!" to "stale and stodgy" to "retro and institutional" to "time to call Royal Park".) In this virtual coded world, of speed and scale and metrics up the wazoo, the barriers of building rigid are easily hurdled. The flexible is more easily begun and propagated. But it doesn't mean that your flexible enterprise and its artefacts are immune from degradation, from the signs of ageing. Check out every second dusty website, of social media accounts gone to seed, of your pdfs that look like me in that suit (sooooo dated). Moreover, flex-business (while maybe clever, and maybe right) suffers the rep of flighty, impermanent, faddy (so "trustworthy"?) Maybe you need bricks, or maybe you can run an empire from the coffee shop. Think about the freshness, and think about the perceptions and "solid" desires of your desired crowd. Worth a Bo Peep...I get Shane Parrish's Brain Food blog once a week. Out of Canada, he curates and extracts some diverse, remarkable insights and perspectives that will keep the coals of your love of learning stoked. Sign up - highly recommend - http://fs.blog Luft balloons* (imagine...)Retro. Turn on the time machine, dust off your Desert Boots, and strut back a mo into a sentimental slice of life you and your punters lived and (some bits) loved. What was it about the mood of that particular time that got them clicking their fingers, tapping their toes? Was it about a freshness of sound, a novelty of an approach they'd never seen, never imagined? Was it the clustering of like folk; a buncha chums spending time having a laugh, or endeavouring together? Was it about being unselfconscious, about being super-in-the-moment? Was it tastes, flavours, trends, a feeling of their fit, their place in the scheme of things? Was it a weight off their shoulders, a sense of freedom, a time and place where they didn't have to worry beyond whose turn it was to make the aspic (wouldn't that be magnetic? The feeling, not the aspic...) Hold there - what kinda things seemed retro back then, that they laughed at back then (but, in part, longed for back then), and what evolved at that time to satisfy their yearning for sentiment (underpinned by all that's fancy and new?) What service station driveway attendant initiatives have almost all gone by-the-by, that would stand out for their novelty, their harking to a simpler time, their connection with a less befuddling, personal touch life? What's your market's modern equivalent (or what could be) of the sawdust on the butcher's shop floor (as emotion-evoking as it was unhygienic)? Of that free slice of fritz for the kids (Devon, you philistines...)? Of the old Bedford soft drink truck pulling up in your street selling tall glass 1L bottles by the crate, right there on your doorstep? Of leaving a handful of coins on your porch at night, and waking in the morning to find 'em replaced with milk? Of vinyl on your floor and on your record player? What, today, rolled out to your people, would be OMG-I-REMEMBER-THIS!, and be beloved, and wistful, and reconnecting? Where, were you to tie-dye your offerings with it in 2018, might the idea of retro position you differently, in a good way (not a Leyland P76 way)? Slide deck specials To highlight an appreciation of balance (and the reality that balance is hard...) The facilitator's homework We're pretty good at setting it, but what, dear facilitator, needs your advance energies before trotting into the room with the slide projector?
It's the advance hard yards that hides the seams and makes your job look easy, pal. A ripping leadership team finishing a strategy review. The trees for the woods…It really is. Wanna sign up?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. Contact Troy Forrest from Forrest Workshops on 0430 308963 or troy@forrestworkshops.com.au for a discussion. |