It’s time to make the critical shift from leading the business by yourself to leading an organization of people. At P2Excellence, we help you navigate the uncharted territories of organizational growth with clarity and confidence.
We’ve all needed a refresh in this turbulent and confusing time as we figure out what a post pandemic – if not a post-COVID world looks like. As always, I invite you to grab a cup of coffee or something else to drink and join me. Speaking of post-pandemic, you may remember that several times, I have pointed you to a model named Cynefin.
Look at the center of the Diagram. We are all here! We are struggling to understand the Environment. And just for these next few moments, let’s describe the Environment, both Internally and Externally.
What is your own personal landscape – mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually? Chances are in at least one area, if not more, you are running on empty. Use the model to ask more in-depth questions and then commit to action. You are worth it!!
And then Externally – let’s divide that into Family Dynamics, Work Dynamics, Neighborhood Dynamics, The Country, The World.
You can’t work on everything at once, for the sake of modeling, let’s pick one.
- The Obvious is all about the situations we have seen before. We have Best Practices. We simply need to use them. Are we using them and they aren’t working? If so, list out the reasons why. And if that doesn’t help, look at other quadrants. We often think we are in the Obvious quadrant and just need to buckle down, but it turns out not to be true.
- The Complicated quadrant is for those situations where we know the questions, but we aren’t sure of the answers. We have the skills we need to figure it out, we have choices among good practices. We must take the time to analyze the current realities and choose something new.
- The Complex quadrant. This is the space I have been personally looking at a lot over these last few years. We don’t know the answers and frankly, we frequently don’t know how to frame good questions. Not having good questions means we need to ask a lot more questions. We must be open to not knowing. We must experiment. We will likely experience multiple failures, and our solutions will come from iteration.
- Remember that we land in the Chaotic quadrant because we missed the knowledge and/or opportunity to function appropriately in the other quadrants. Here, we must act quickly and hopefully smartly. Problem containment, not long-term solutions, is the goal.
It’s my experience that “the things that keep us up at night” are multi-faceted. This means that as you separate the parts of the problem, it may be that pieces of the problem belong in different quadrants. Be flexible. And note, with this model, you can easily move from feeling lost to studying a problem to be solved.
I’ll say again, you are worth the trouble it takes to get unstuck. Recognize we are in a new landscape, and like all explorers, we don’t really know where we are going. Not exactly, anyway. The most we can hope for at times is to be directionally correct.
Remember, I love hearing from you, please reach out if I can help.
