The challenges currently are ever-changing, highly varied, structural as well as contextual and often material. These leave boards and leadership teams asking questions.
The first thing I would do is segment the questions and look for the shared themes. Stating the obvious but bringing your vision and values to this will help.
Our 1st session was recognising our reality, using a “what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s confused and what’s missing” matrix - it was really helpful to bring out the team’s reflections on where we were at. We then identified the key themes from everything that had been written down - we came up with 8.
Our 2nd session has us focus on imagining and visualising where we wanted to see things in 3-5 years and then to share those as a team. We captured the key themes and made sure they mapped back against the 8 themes we identified in our current reality.
Our 3rd session we identified 5 priorities to focus on for the next 6 months, as our first step towards that 3-5 year growth plan. Again - we mapped it back against the 8 themes we identified at the start of the day to see if we were addressing them all.
This was for a strategy day but I think it also can be a 15 minute exercise, or a 3 day exercise.
Ask what’s right, wrong, confused and missing on this question
Ask where you want to be by xx period
Make a plan for immediate action
However, the framing of all of that through your vision and values is key - otherwise you can’t prioritise, you don’t know where to allocate scarce resources and you will likely be fragmented rather than focused.
Every one of the questions screams for attention. What’s more important in this moment? Ask yourself something I heard recently - if I don’t address this will it be the issue that sinks the company? Now, I aspire to more than avoiding sinking the company - but grabbing a sense of perspective is helpful.
I try the following with my children when they can’t decide which sweet from the box they want - I ask them if they had to remove one, which one would they put back in the box. Very quickly we get down to a choice of 2. I think that approach works with these questions - if you had to remove 1 that is not an immediate issue, which one would it be? Keep doing that until there are hardly any left and then analyse the issue, visualise the goal and make a short term action plan.
Momentum over almost everything.
Leading right now is tiring, it’s confusing and it’s pressured. With clarity of vision and values and using some simple diagnostic and process tools, a lot of the stressful questions can turn into a plan of attack very quickly.
Duncan McFadzean
The Weekly Distillation