If you are a person who sees the need and you would like someone to participate, it’s the power of the pre-consult that prevails. If you’ve got someone and you want that person to participate because you believe in it – the key is to ask the owner to sit down with you for an hour or two to do a pre-consult.

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How many of you have been in a situation where people say, our biggest problem here is communication.  What does that mean?  Does it mean the phones don’t work?  Does it mean we don’t speak each other’s language? People in other departments don’t care what people are doing?  Senior management does not pass down clear information?  People send unclear email messages – we don’t know the goals?  We don’t trust each other?  That’s because words like ‘communication’ are fuzzy and vague – they mean too many things to too many people.

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Research shows that effective organizations display two characteristics simultaneously: efficiency and adaptability. The efficient organization follows well-structured, stable routines to deliver its products or services in large quantities with high quality at low cost. In a stable world, efficient organizations may be successful. But in a changing world, organizations also need adaptability. While efficiency implies mastering routines, adaptability means mastering the process of deliberately changing routines.

Adaptability is a proactive process: it allows the organization to deliberately and continually change and create. It entails deliberate discontent — discovering new needs to be met and problems to be solved, finding new things to be done, and adopting new technologies and methods before the competition. Adaptability is disruptive. It requires looking outside the organization for new opportunities, problems, trends, technologies and methods that may dramatically improve or change routines or introduce completely new products and services. Adaptable organizations anticipate customer problems and develop timely solutions. They deliberately and continually change how they do things to improve quality, raise quantities, reduce costs and stay ahead of competitors.

Organizations that build concrete strategies allowing them to confidently and capably shift the balance between adaptability and efficiency will be well positioned to adapt and prosper in volatile economic times, such as today’s environment. And while the results of emphasizing adaptability may take longer to appear than the results of an emphasis on efficiency, the long-term success of the strategy can be found by looking at Japan; While decision-making in many organizations in North America is driven by the next quarter’s results, Japanese organizations tend to favor long-term planning and reporting.

We live and work in an era of rapidly accelerating change with frequent upheavals and interruptions.

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Implementing as part of your job or routine is very different from implementing something that is new and unusual. Many of the implementers in the world are implementing routine things.   Many of those people are doing implementation jobs and so they go off and do them and they get a good pat on the back for doing them. That’s totally different from implementing something new. It’s way more awkward to implement something new so you’ve got build skills of implementing something new which is very different from implementing something routine.

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One area we see most often is leadership. The leader as a facilitator makes things easy for people, he knows the process, leads them through. A good leader is going to make sure the action plan happens when many people might be looking at their watches and want to go.   In all sessions, it’s imperative to leave enough time for action planning. If you have a two-hour meeting, make sure you put in about a half an hour for action planning – don’t leave it for the last 10 minutes!

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