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Dear readers,
As change makers, sometimes it can be difficult to progress when you might feel overwhelmed by the complexity of the challenge, the lack of tangible results or the lack of interest shown by others around you.
That’s why it’s useful to find ways to maintain hope in the endeavor you are part of, in the impact that you want to make in the context in which you act.
For us, one way to maintain hope through uncertainty and adversity is to follow some simple impact principles. Here are our six principles - we hope they resonate and that they’ll be useful to you as well.
Impact Principles
Start where you are.
Look around you.
Build on the energy.
Learn as you go.
Seek conversations.
Leave things better.
Start where you are, taking into account what you’re able to do. Look around you, spatially (farther, closer) and temporally (future, present, past). Build on the energy and on what emerges through your interactions. Learn as you go, from everything and everyone. Seek conversations, as wisdom is usually in-between, in generative conversations. Leave things better than you found them.
Insightful resource from the Regional Innovation Centre UNDP Asia-Pacific (highlights ours):
(…) a portfolio must be infused with a sense of directionality. As such, we have found it important to take the time to discover the narrative/story that is surfacing as a way to ground our thinking and better understand the problem space that we are dealing with.
Critical questions the narrative helps to address include:
What is the overall story of this work? What do we know about the challenge space that inclines us to intervene in this way?
Why is the portfolio structured in this way for this initiative?
What are we seeking to learn through this approach? What would desired impact look like?
Whom are the system stakeholders that may be most affected by this work? How might they be impacted by this work?
Increase your impact by:
Sharing your (organization’s / team’s / personal) strategy as a story;
Noticing how the ‘strategy-as-story’ is told by your colleagues, customers or partners.
Found a nice take on shadow boards by Andrew Hollo (highlights ours):
These are advisory boards with a very specific purpose: they capture views from one perspective (often a younger demographic) to inform strategy, product development or marketing initiatives.
Don’t call them a ‘board’. I’m not usually a stickler for nomenclature (I mean, you can call your strategy a plan, or your KPIs KRAs) but in this case, I’d strongly advise not confusing their purely advisory role with the hindsight, foresight and oversight roles of the board proper.
But, my client was wanting an answer to a valid need: How can she make sure her team isn’t ‘stuck in the 90s’ and, thus, breathing its own exhaust when it comes to charting new pathways?
Question: What perspectives should you include in the strategic advice you get?
Increase your impact by:
Seeking a diversity of perspectives when developing, adjusting and implementing strategy;
Being the “fresh perspective” contributor to various strategic activities.
Food for thought from Bob Emiliani, as he shares a collection of 55 management metrics, along with management beliefs, unfavorable worker behaviors and worker competencies associated to each metric. Few picks:
Management metric in use:Projects completed on budget. Management belief (favorable): On budget is good. Under budget is not as good. Over budget is very bad. Worker behavior (unfavorable): Padding of estimates. Worker competency (unfavorable): Never learns how to estimate properly. Learns to pad.
Management metric in use:Customer satisfaction survey results. Management belief (favorable): Survey results prove that the organization is customer focused. Worker behavior (unfavorable): Pressure clients to complete the survey and give excellent rating, or don't tell client about survey to avoid negative rating. Worker competency (unfavorable): Game the system and introduce bias in survey results.
Management metric in use:Annual Review and Year-End Goals. Management belief (favorable): Reviews are 100% indicative of employees' value and contribution. Worker behavior (unfavorable): Prioritize projects or tasks tied to goals over reality of those important to the company. Worker competency (unfavorable): Self-preservation and personal goal/task attainment.
Management metric in use:Sales. Management belief (favorable): Current year sales must exceed previous year sales. Worker behavior (unfavorable): Pressure customers to purchase more products. Upsell. Worker competency (unfavorable): Indifferent to actual customer needs.
Management metric in use:Communication. Management belief (favorable): More meetings means better communication. Worker behavior (unfavorable): Become less attentive in meetings. Worker competency (unfavorable): Ignoring management.
Increase your impact by:
Recognizing the beliefs behind the management metrics that you use;
Adjusting the list of management metrics that you use based on the outcomes that you want to achieve. If the desired outcomes change, are the same metrics relevant? Applies to self-management as well.
Interconnections
Picks from disciplines (vaguely?) connected to Strategy, Org Design & OD
“In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice.” Michel Foucault, 1966.
How we assemble the past — how we delineate epistemes materially and conceptually — inflects how we form the future.
We can imagine those forms as a ladder, a sphere and a rhizome.
Biologies and the biosphere increasingly co-shape and cross-pollinate each other’s interconnected futures, further interrupting past epistemes. Filaments of knowledge pop up unexpectedly, sewing themselves into surprising places. Ideas are dislodged from their original context and sprout in novel ways. Perhaps the current episteme is best rendered as a rhizome: a subterranean plant stem that can shoot out roots that grow, hydralike, even when snipped in two.
The episteme of the rhizome emphasizes humans’ ineluctable entanglement with nonhuman others.
Borsboom was inspired by contemporary theorising about intelligence – specifically, how it might emerge from the interactions of multiple cognitive subsystems. According to the network perspective he and others have developed, a psychiatric disorder, such as major depression, is itself an emergent phenomenon. It arises from a network of interactions among its constituent elements (eg, sleep, mood and energy).
This newsletter is curated by Raluca and Bülent Duagi, creators of ForBetterOrgs.com, with the aim to inspire and equip you to increase your organization-wide impact.
