Thirteeners

by Daniel F Prosser

  Additional Preparatory Materials

  Before beginning an important session with a client’s team, I like to find a way to ground the team in a new way to approach their work together. For that, I use a DVD to start my team sessions titled Celebrate What’s Right with the World hosted by Dewitt Jones. Another DVD that has been extremely helpful in communicating the important distinction of paradigm shifts is The New Business of Paradigms, Second Edition, hosted by futurist Joel Arthur Barker. I first saw the original version of Barker’s DVD in about 1976. Its message has stuck with me for decades.

  You can buy or rent a copy of either or both of these powerful DVDs from www.starthrower.com. (Tell them I sent you, and they may be able to provide you with a consultant’s discount.)

  If you download the ConnectionPoints PowerPoint (see the last item on the materials list), you can simply follow the PowerPoint through the process. However, I recommend you familiarize yourself with the process, the questions, and the PowerPoint before you start.

  For a formalized workbook for each member of your team, you can order team member workbooks at www.ThirteenersBook.com. You can also order workbooks that are personalized with your organization’s logo, along with a personal letter from you inside the cover, all for a small additional charge. Be sure to allow a few extra days for customization.

  To Create a New Future for Your Business, Ask Questions, Then Listen

  The ConnectionPoints process uses the Socratic method of inquiry and dialogue, combined with Appreciative Inquiry. Both of these rely on investigation as a tool guided by questions. The process is designed as a series of requests for the sharing of information and dialogue. Here’s what I’m talking about:

  The Socratic method is based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking between individuals with contrasting and sometimes divergent viewpoints and to illuminate ideas. It is a process of searching for general, commonly held truths that shape perspective, and it allows participants to scrutinize these truths to determine their consistency with other perspectives.

  Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is the cooperative search for the best in people, their organizations, and the world around them. It involves methodical discovery of what gives a system “life” and when that system is most effective and capable in economic, ecological, and human terms. AI involves asking questions that strengthen the capacity to heighten positive potential. It mobilizes inquiry through crafting an “unconditional positive question,” often involving hundreds or sometimes thousands of people.19

  Socrates claimed to know nothing. Instead he asked questions and used dialogue to create and share knowledge. He sought to discover and teach universal truths, and he insisted that all people had knowledge within them.

  How often have you taken that approach with your team? Have you ever been willing to put your opinions and assessments aside and defer to the thoughts, reasoning, and knowledge of your subordinates? It’s difficult. If you’ve been in business any length of time, you might have learned to trust yourself, and you might often doubt the wisdom of others, especially if they don’t have your experience. Perhaps you’ve had to cajole them into taking action.

  You probably have great employees who work their tails off, but how often have you turned the thinking over to them and listened? Now’s your chance! This process works when you honor and respect the contributions of others.

  At the same time, when was the last time you asked questions that drew out the best in people, rather than trying to pin a problem on someone on your team? Too often your frustrations with outcomes get the best of you, and you can’t help but ask questions that point up an individual’s weaknesses instead of the strengths on which you could build a better company. Trust me, I’ve been there, too.

  Remember when I said, earlier in the book, “Perspective is everything”? The view you now want to create with your team is one that emboldens people, lifts them up, makes them feel like heroes, and elevates their hard work. In the ConnectionPoints process you are asked to identify experiences of the past that have resulted in outcomes that worked. This is the AI approach to strategy creation. You find the good and the great to build on, and then you debate the nuances until you’ve finally crafted a powerful place to come from—to come from—not a place you have to work like hell to get to by tearing down everything that didn’t work. A powerful stand will keep your future front and center.

  LET’S GET STARTED!

  Transformation Begins Here

  Stage One is the beginning of the end of equilibrium and balance. In this stage, you do the following:

  Break your ties to your thinking that recreates your past or some semblance of it. You are closing off the past as your source of understanding.

  Declare and map the future you are committed to bring into existence. You get to say how here.

  Declare what is ultimately possible in that future, even if you’re not sure.

  Identify what overall outcomes you will commit to—bold outcomes only.

  Stage One Is the Genesis of a New Future for Your Organization.

  Leading Stage One

  In Stage One, you allow your team to say whatever is necessary to “be complete with” the past, to invent, as a cohesive team, a future not constricted, hampered, or informed by that past. To be complete with the past means that nothing from the past is negatively informing any possible future. To get there, you inquire into the current “truths” that people have made up, spread around, believed in, and even gossiped about. In other words, Stage One is where you start uncovering the source of the viral memes that make up the Execution Virus in your company.

  It’s crucial for you to keep in mind that the truth for you may not be the truth for others. You need to be prepared and willing to hear any perspective they have about the past, and you must tell them you are willing to hear it all. When I say, “perspective is everything,” in this case, I’m pointing to each person’s perspective that impacts the conversations (and outcomes) they have about what doesn’t work about you (especially you) and your company. Any possibilities for those conversations changing are dependent on your being willing to listen and remaining unattached to what people believe, feel, or judge.

  When I have taken my own teams through this process, I have had to emotionally (not physically) leave the room. Of course, I’m not walking out, but it’s critical in this stage for you not to get defensive. Don’t get attached to your own perspective. Hold your tongue and remember this: Just because someone has an opinion or a made-up assessment of how things don’t work in your company, that isn’t the final assessment of your company. Your job is to listen and not respond and get the negativities spoken and complete. If you fight against what anyone says, you literally cement it in the space you’re trying to clear out.

  Do not respond to employees’ perspectives or perceptions of “how it is” for them. Just because they see it that way doesn’t mean it’s the truth. It can be their truth without your having to correct it. The real truth will come later, as you will see. Trust me here.

  In the first stage of this process, you will be confronted, I promise you. I beg of you not to respond from your old way of being the boss. It won’t be helpful to what you want out of this work. Your first defensive outburst objecting to someone’s perspective will make the rest of the process much more difficult than it needs to be. Just relax and hear what they have to say. Make it safe for them to get it all out.

  As I’ve said, this is your chance to create the safety that your employees need to have in order to be able to authentically and fully contribute to amazing outcomes in the future you’re about to invent.

  When you take the time to get everything uncovered about the past—both good and bad—and when you validate that information regardless of your own opinion of the truths of other people, you create a safe place to say anything.

  I once employed a controller who, I discovered, didn’t want to give me any bad news. I told him that he neede
d to tell me what was happening in the company financially if I wasn’t aware of it. Apparently he didn’t want to disappoint me or get me upset. He was really a nice guy, but I had to fire him because he was essentially giving me no information—and no information is bad information.

  I want to be clear with you that I know now that this was my problem, not his problem. I didn’t make it safe for him to tell me bad news, and I apparently wasn’t willing to hear it, or he wouldn’t have withheld it. Don’t make my mistake. I lost a good controller. Look at the people on your team and tell them that you want to hear all their perspectives—every bit. You don’t want them to hold anything back. Tell them that you won’t penalize them for their viewpoint. Then dig in for the ride. You will uncover the source of all your current results when you’re willing to hear what doesn’t work, especially when what doesn’t work is about you.

  Again, as I’ve said, the key will be how you behave when you hear what others have to say. It may be the truth or not. That doesn’t matter. From their perspective, it’s their reality. Here’s another technique to consider if you want an even more powerful outcome for the day—mirror and validate. Once you hear what people on your team have to say—even if you can’t make total sense of it, remember it makes sense to them, and you want to validate that—listen carefully and mirror back exactly what you heard them say. That’s the mirroring part. Then tell them, “That makes sense.” That’s the validation part. You can acknowledge that it might have been hard to share that particular information. They might fall out of their chairs when they hear that.

  What you’re essentially communicating to them is (don’t say this part out loud), “What you personally have to share is appreciated, and your perspective is acknowledged and valid. It’s your perspective, and for that reason, you are essential and valuable to this process.” If you respond that way, by the time you have validated each of the first positive and negative responses to your question, you will have begun shifting the context of your relationship with your employees.

  This is the first critical step in the real transformation of your organization into an unstoppable company. I learned this technique of mirroring and validation from Dr. Harville Hendrix. His process of dialogue has made a huge difference in my own and my clients’ effectiveness.

  Transformation, Not Change

  This is a process designed to activate transformation, so before starting, let’s once again be clear about the difference between transformation and change. Change is just the alteration of something you already have. You take something in existence and create a new version of it, but it’s still the same old thing. For instance, if you are struggling with sales, you might look at your sales plan and change the kind of clients you call on or hire new salespeople with different skills. But you’re still using the same thinking that went into the original plan, the same way of being in business, now altered slightly with the hope of a different outcome. That’s change.

  In business, the outcome of change is simply a more, better, faster approach to what you already have. What you want is something completely different.

  Transformation is not change. It’s the creation of something from nothing. It’s causing into existence that which did not exist before. Transformation is borne of the creation of a possibility—a declared outcome with no evidence that it is even possible—a desire for, and a commitment to, something that is not already.

  The First Four Steps Toward Transformation

  It is said that a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, but I’m going to go above and beyond here and give you the first four steps.

  Step 1: Break with the past

  * * *

  The first step in the ConnectionPoints process is to make a complete break with the past, and the only way I have ever found to do that effectively is to acknowledge what happened in the past and tell the truth about it—the good, the bad, and the ugly. When you ask your team members to describe five or six events from the past year that boosted their spirits or that they are proud of, they are immediately disarmed. They expected you to start your planning by launching into what’s wrong with performance and, by association, what’s wrong with them. Do the opposite by leading off with the good, and that will set the tone as you work together on aligning on your new future. It will help you deal with the bad and the ugly in due course.

  There will always be some good in your past that works for you and that you keep. But past-based thinking is limiting and simply reestablishes the past’s power over you. You want to break ties with that past so you can invent something new.

  The biggest perpetrator of nonperformance is the way you as a leader treat those who are subordinate to you. This is your golden opportunity to change the way you behave—by visiting all the past things that you can celebrate with your team and all the things that help you see what’s not working for you to work on later.

  Step 2: Declare and map your future

  * * *

  Declaring and mapping your future is the first step in shaping what is not already (nothingness) into what is desired (somethingness). Changing your strategy (what you have) will not create the future you want. Now is the time to start digging into the notion of who you are for the world.

  Mapping the future is about the design of ideals, principles, and values. It’s these factors that determine how people will view you in the future—and how you will view yourself. By itself, a map of the future is just words. But when you take those words and create your impossible vision for the future, you will have a powerful platform to launch any project and produce any outcome you desire.

  Your declaration of the future is called a vision, not a “for certain.” It’s a vision of a possibility, and that possibility opens up opportunities. Mapping the future is the tool for shaping what is not yet created and may not seem possible from your current perspective. You are shaping it into a brand-new way of looking at the world—your new perspective. With your vision, you’re beginning your journey through the funnel, through chaos, and through disequilibrium. It’s got to be big and bold enough that it will cause you to actually struggle with it as a possibility.

  What is the declaration of the future that you are committed to and that represents who you see yourself being as your future unfolds? Can you put it into a few words? My own vision for the future will never be attained.

  I’m committed to the possibility of a world where people love what they do and have what they want in every dimension of their lives.

  Will the world ever see that? Probably not in my lifetime and probably never, but it’s my vision, my stand for what’s possible, from my perspective. It expresses a possible future I’m committed to. It’s what drives this book, all the work I do with clients, my courses, and my software.

  The impossibility of it makes it big enough—bigger than me for sure—to be worthy of my efforts. It calls me to be; everything I am focused on is in service to that vision of the future.

  Steps 3 and 4: Declare what is ultimately possible in that future, and identify the overall outcomes you are committed to

  * * *

  So, what future would you be willing to have? I mean really willing. Even if you can’t actually see yourself there, where would “there” be? Swing out and think big. Thinking is free. Can you imagine something that your mind actively resists envisioning? Listen to yourself, because that is the future you want to create.

  When you say to yourself, “Oh, I can’t do something like that,” then you know you’re on the right track! Perhaps you’re being held back by a concern for what others would think of you for envisioning this future. How many people do you think told Steve Jobs he was crazy to think he could build [insert any Apple product here] or told Howard Shultz he was crazy to think he could sell coffee for several dollars a cup, change the way people build community, and change the way farmers sell commodities? These two guys changed the world for all of us with crazed notions of what was possible. Believe me, if
they were able to do it with their crazy ideas, you can, too. There is nothing they can do that you can’t. “Can’t” is not a word for this work.

  When to Move On to Stage Two

  In Stage One of the ConnectionPoints™ Promise-Based Execution Management process, you break ties with the past because that past can’t comprehend something called a future. Let go of your fears and limitations, and invent a new possible future for yourself and your company, one that will likely scare you. Stop listening to your past.

  You can look at Stage One on your downloaded Process Map.

  You’re ready to move from Stage One to Stage Two when you have identified a vision for your future that is not possible to imagine in your current world.

  The Discovery Stage

  In Stage Two, you begin to venture into your past so you can tell the truth about it and—most important—release your attachment to it. For now, your future looks exactly like your past, but that is going to change.

  Here’s what you will do in Stage Two:

  Reveal the conditions underlying all effort and results.

  Take the curse off the future, putting everything on the table for questioning, challenging, and revealing.

  Discover current results.

  Discover current thinking, beliefs, and perceptions behind current outcomes.

  Discover the negative viral meme that’s undermining and sabotaging employee performance (your Execution Virus).