Imagine this dilemma: You work in technology and you want your organization to invest in a new product. Leadership wants a business case to support the allocation of dollars. But… this product would be totally new to the market. There is no available data or precedent supporting your instinct.
So…what do you do? Why, you mock up a prototype for few to zero dollars! You quickly whip up the product (it might not even function) and you put it out there for consumption by customers. If they bite… well, there’s your case.
This approach is accepted as commonplace in the world of technology.
Yet in the face of any organizational change or shift…why are we so hesitant to leverage parallel thinking?
We’re going to help shift the thinking on this, in the context of Activation .
Take an organization with which we are currently running our Activation Program . They’re a healthcare organization that brought us in because, while nothing is “broken” per se, they believe their teams simply aren’t collaborating effectively, yielding inefficiency, repetition of work, and internal competition and conflict.
Through our Discovery work with their teams, we’ve identified five major obstacles to their ability to collaborate effectively – from communication to conflicting team goals, over-engineered processes, and more.
The leadership team has been receptive to our findings, which they’ve deemed clear and compelling… and they want to implement solutions. They want to invest in leadership training and organizational redesign and more. BUT… how do they know it will work? How do they build the business case?
And here, dear reader, is where the power of prototyping comes in.
Keeping in mind that our bias is always for # Microchange , we’ve encouraged our client to build their own business case slowly. Rather than investing in large-scale solutions, let’s prototype leadership together.
As such, we’ve recommended the following experiments… or prototypes, if you will:
Readers. Do the differences between the left and right columns of this table resonate?
Related: The Power of the Vent: A Leader's Greatest Asset
We can and we should prototype our leadership solutions. Because the truth is – there are no definitive right answers. What will work in your organization must be identified by your organization .
And that’s the beauty of Activation . It poses the questions, extracts the themes, and identifies the specific solutions that will enable and empower your team, your organization to be firing on all cylinders.
Want to talk Activation? We’re here anytime for that. Give us a holler .