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