Too often strategic planning is something people do periodically. They focus on making plans and then put them away in drawers. Design thinking, with its use of observable experimentation and bias to action, takes them out of the drawer and turns them into initiatives instead of just plans.
Mindset can change the meaning of the values of a culture
One of the interesting insights I’ve gleaned from my recent listen of Carol Dweck’s book Mindset is that things can take on very different meanings when you also consider whether they exist within a fixed mindset culture or a growth mindset culture.
It is as important to develop resilience for the rough times as it is to develop a culture of success
Though we want out businesses to be a steady trajectory of strength on strength, we all know that that in reality it can be peaks and troughs. Goals sometimes missed or delayed. I think we have all seen environments that become toxic under these pressures. With finger pointing and fear permutating the culture, progress slows even more. If you build resilience into your teams, then it encourages the team to stick to the values of collaboration, determination and adaptability under any weather.
Collaboration actually enables ownership rather than erodes it
In a truely collaborative culture, people are able to freely ask for assistance and feedback at the moment they need it, receive feedback free of criticism or opinion, and then decided what to take on board or not. With everyone doing the same type of sharing, we each individually move the whole forward.
Do different teams in a company have different cultures?
Does it then present a challenge to create a shared culture across the company that everyone can buy into while still supporting the individual needs of each team? Part of the solution can be to do more cross-functional projects where people can focus on shared outcomes together. These need to be strategic, prioritized and must also be useful.
Are your business goals outcomes or objectives, or both?
Measure both, even though you are looking for different things and do it different ways. We use metrics and KPIs to measure the performance of outcomes. We often track and evaluate how we execute on objectives.
