Leandro Herrero
— EPILOGUE —
Where would you put your money?
The good news is that you don’t need any money. But you will have to make choices. I have offered you a 10+10+10=1000 formula, but you need to create your own mathematics.
Imagine that you have limited ‘money’ or a limited number of ‘energy units’ (a combination of effort, dedication, attention and willingness to do something about it!) and that you have to choose amongst all the disruptive ideas (for an easy overview, see the graph on page 308). What would you do? Imagine that you have 30 units. Where would you use them? It would be a terrible idea to allocate one ‘energy point’ to each disruptive idea, because you only need a few to have real transformation. And if you want to get serious transformation faster, do it virally. Start somewhere, choose some champions and make sure they know how to reinforce behaviours and how to spread the chosen ideas to other parts of the organisation.
The following is a suggested process for engaging your team in this line of thinking:
- Read the book.[1]
- Allocate specific ideas to specific people. Everybody reads everything, but depending on the size of your team, every person will be the sponsor of one or more specific ideas.
- Each sponsor chooses a partner to be the critic.
- When you get together, each sponsor presents (no PowerPoint!) the idea, comments on it and suggests you imagine what the organisation would look like if the idea were widespread.
- The critic then presents his views on why it may not work. Make sure that the criticism is robust, but based upon solid grounds!
- Each member of the team takes notes and at the end of each presentation privately allocates some energy points to the disruptive idea presented.[2]
- When all 30 ideas have been presented, your group members disclose their ndividual allocation. Depending on your environment you may want to do that on a flipchart, a board, on screen, etc.
- The debate starts. Discuss the possible significant differences between the ratings by different people!
- Reach a consensus about a few of them. Warning: there is no ideal number, but if you have more than ten in total, I suspect you ‘want everything’, which is a traditional management temptation.
- Discard anything that, for whatever reason, can’t be implemented NOW. Regroup.
- At this stage you may think that you’re done, but you are not. See the combination of disruptive ideas in its 10+10+10 maths. Imagine what your organisation would look like and imagine the kind of culture you would be shaping.
- Agree on a final set.
- Allocate accountabilities for implementing each disruptive idea. Remember that in viral mode you will need champions. Draw up a plan of ‘where to start’.
- Off you go.
Approach the above professionally. Don’t complete the whole process in less than one day. Include sufficient time for preparation and reading.
[1] meetingminds offers discounts for bulk orders of copies. Please contact sales@meetingminds.com for more info
[2] You can download the overview graph here.
