Ideas for Success November 2011

In this issue...
Applying the 'Art of Action' To Your Business
Designing Surveys to Test Customer Needs
3 Key Ideas for Business Success in 2012

Applying the "Art of Action" To Your Business

Most organisations suffer from too much planning that does not achieve the desired results. Increase the size of the organisation, the number of management layers and departments, and the problem only gets worse.  More planning and more detailed plans are not the answer to address the issue of improving the implementation of strategy!

Stephen Bungay’s latest book “The Art of Action” shows how leaders close the gaps between Plans, Actions and Results. 

The three main components of planning outlined in the book are Plans, Actions and Outcome or Results. You develop your plan to get you from where you are NOW to WHERE you want to be, defined by the Outcome you want to achieve. The Actions then show HOW you will get there.
 
There are three critical gaps you must recognise and then handle correctly.  The Prussian general von Moltke outlined a way of closing the three gaps in his Memoire of 1868.

	Problem	Usual Reaction	Von Moltke's View
Knowledge Gap	The difference between what we would like to know, and what we actually know	More detailed information	Do not command more than is necessary or plan beyond the circumstances you can foresee
Alignment Gap	The difference between what we want people to do and what they actually do	More detailed instructions	Communicate to every unit as much of the higher intent needed to achieve the purpose
The Effects Gap	The difference between what we expect our actions to achieve and what they actually achieve	More detailed and often tighter controls	Everyone retains freedom of decisions and action within bounds

His solution to each gap runs counter to our intuition and to common practice. To overcome the Alignment Gap, he recommends cascading plans, united by a common intent and in more detail at lower levels. As for the Effects Gap, to what extent do you need to reduce autonomy to achieve greater alignment?  Von Moltke’s insight is that there is no choice to make. “Alignment needs to be achieved around intent and autonomy should be granted around actions.”
 
Intent is what to achieve and why. Actions are how to achieve the intent. The difference between strategy development and strategy execution disappears. It is replaced by a “thinking – doing” cycle of learning and adapting. You do not need to know everything, but you do need to be clear about the intent and to communicate this clearly.
 
We can now jump to Jack Welch, Chairman and CEO of GE in the 1980’s. Bungay quotes a letter published in Fortune magazine that had a major impact on Welch, who called the approach “planful opportunism." The salient part of the letter is the observation that the Prussian general staff “did not expect a plan of operations to survive the first encounter with the enemy. They set only the broadest objectives and emphasised seizing unforeseen circumstances as they arose.”  Bungay’s term is “directed opportunism”.

The “back brief” is critically important. Firstly, it checks the understanding of the intent. Secondly and more importantly, the superior gains clarity about the implications of the intent and this may lead to changes.  Thirdly, it facilitates alignment across the organisation.

Bungay stresses that “what cannot be made simple cannot be made clear and what is not clear will not get done.” This is a critical message that should underpin successful strategy implementation in your business.

Simon Fawkes is a “reformed engineer”, linguist and B2B marketing specialist, who helps hi-tech companies grow faster in niche export markets.  See www.globalmarketinginsight.com and www.b2m.co.nz.

Designing Surveys to Test Customer Needs

By Chris Mason, Founder - Mindshop

One of the challenges when we want to survey our customers (to find out their needs, and/or how well we are servicing their needs), is to look for lead indicators, rather than lag indicators. Ultimately we could measure the profit we make, but that is clearly seen to be a lag indicator (as well as not being very useful in determining what we need to do to increase our profitability).

Even asking how we have done servicing their needs over the last few months is a lag indicator. They normally have difficulty remembering  exactly what you did for them, even if you prompt them with some service outcomes such as, “cooperation”, “value for money”, or “communication”.  These service outcomes are a good start, but add some enabling outcomes such as, “pro-activity”, “self-confidence”, or “product knowledge”.

When it comes to measuring the response, we suggest using a Likert type scale, say -5 to +5, as that encourages the respondent to not select the mid-point (in this case 0). We also suggest getting your team to self-assess on exactly the same outcomes, that way you can test if there is a correlation between what your team thinks and what the customer thinks.

Why not get the respondents to do their ratings over three time frames, the past (say six months ago), now, and the future (say in six months’ time)? Have a look at the example below and think what it tells you.

	Six Months Ago	Now	Six Months From Now	Importance To You
Cooperation	+2	0	+4	+4

Notice I have added an additional column, Importance To You. What this rating tells me is that, the cooperation is important to the customer, it is getting worse, and it needs to be much better. I wonder how the employees would rate cooperation? If you can get a reasonable sample size, say 20 people or more, we suggest plotting the responses into a histogram, and overlaying the four histograms for each outcome.
The key outcome of such a survey is to conduct a gap analysis, and then pareto the outcomes to find the 20% of the items that provide 80% of the performance improvement opportunity. Adding the future column enables you to pro-actively plan to improve the perceptions of the customers, as well as providing your team with feedback, and a plan, to improve the key outcomes.



3 Key Ideas for Business Success in 2012

1.  Know your Personal Brand
Every person in business has a ‘role’ or a ‘title’ that defines what they are expected to do day-to-day (the ‘features’ of what they do). However rarely is that the same as what they are truly ‘known for’ (the ‘benefits’ of what they do) within the business. For example somebody may have the title of ‘Operations Manager’ but they are actually known for being a great strategist who can problem solve better than most within the business. This ‘Personal Brand’ or what somebody is truly known for is in many case more critical to that persons future growth potential within the business (or outside of the business) than their title. Knowing clearly your personal brand can also help you move between departments or play more effectively to your strengths. Finding out your personal brand can be as easy as asking those around you that you trust: “What do you feel I’m known for in the business above and beyond by role?”. What’s your Personal Brand?

2.  Be an effective Leader in volatile times
True leaders step up during volatile times in a business. They are the ones who can navigate through the choppy waters of business and take an ‘internal locus of control’ approach (i.e. focus on what they can control rather than what they can’t control). To help you or your leadership team be more effective in volatile times it’s critical to:

• Slow down the amount of change initiatives in the business. It's more effective to have 3 strategies properly implemented than have 10 strategies in the air your team don't have the time to complete.
• Focus on what's within your control to change. Don't fall into the trap of blaming things outside your control, develop strategies to work around them.
• Be more effective problem solvers. Train your team in key problem solving tools such as Force Field, Pareto, Mindmapping, One Page Plans so they can have the tools to address team issues and problems that arise.
• Boost the accountability levels of your entire team. Have a culture of "doing what you say you will".