CLEMENS RETTICH » Planning

The Ultimate Business Improv

Clemens Rettich — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 11:39:31 +0000

The biggest misconception about improvisation is that it is all about making stuff up… that anything goes.

The reality is that good improvisation, whether it is jazz, classical Indian music, or improv theater, is always grounded in a strong set of rules and guiding principles.

A new improv game for business

The next time you are onboarding a new recruit, here’s a little improvisation I would like you to undertake. The rules:

Confirm that the candidate has the basic skills (and only the basic skills) required to do the job
Present the candidate with the current written objectives for your organization. In no more than 20 minutes, explain the role the candidate’s position plays in achieving those objectives.
Give the candidate your SOP (Standard Operating Procedures) and tell them to look them over for the rest of the day, and to report back to work in the morning, ready to go.
Tell the candidate that this will be your last conversation with them for 30 days.

Now let the candidate improvise their day-to-day performance based on the rules we have set. What do you think the results will be? If poor, will that be your fault or the employee’s?

I think we know what the answer is.

With the exception of a few passing conversations in that first month, this is exactly what 80% of all employers do.

Wait, no that’s not true. Most of them don’t even go this far. Remember what I said at the top about rules and guiding principles? Most employers ask their new employees to play my game without the clear objectives or the SOP’s. They don’t have written objectives or SOP’s.

And then they wonder why employees just don’t get it! They blame it on education, the ‘Gen Y’ factor, gender, age, socio-economic background… anything but their own failure to provide the necessary structure for success in this improvisation, and for the success of their teams in general.

Why this game matters to your business

I have written a lot about the requirement for positive feedback in a successful work environment. At the heart of an effective positive feedback strategy is the requirement that the employer and all of the team members are crystal clear on organizational goals are and what everyone’s role is in attaining those goals.

This game is a litmus test for successful positive feedback strategies and healthy team management practices in any organization. Here’s why:

Hiring at the top of the skill curve is not cost or culture-effective in most organizations. Hire at the sweet spot of ‘talented-but-but-limited-experience’ and you will be able to develop team members who are not know-it-all, cost-you-an-arm-and-a-leg, prima donas. Just bright, cost-effective raw talent, ready to learn.

Systems and clear goals are not optional if you are recruiting to that sweet spot. Employers always tell me they don’t have time to train. Why are you training each and every single employee over and over again every time you have turnover?? Where are your systems?

The game I described is not some artsy exercise in ‘getting in touch with something.’ If your organization can’t pull that off for real, you are either recruiting below the talent and training sweet spot (note: not talking experience here) or your SOP’s and goals are sloppy or non-existent. That is not the new employees’ fault.

You need rules, guiding prinicples, and clear objectives to manage a positive feedback strategy that doesn’t deteriorate to the vague good jobs and pats on the back that employees and employers alike love to ridicule.

Your (quality of) life depends on this. Unless your business is able to play The Ultimate Business Improv Game well, your valuation as a turn-key business for sale will suck. And you will have to eat cat food when you try to retire on its sale. Learn to play this game right . Now.

I help organizations improve communication through leadership & management-level workshops & coaching. Check out my website to learn about the different ways I can support your organization.

There’s more! Looking for success in your small business? Read my Small Business blog at Small Business Fundamentals (www.smbfundamentals.com).

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Act Fast! Fairy Tale in 60 Seconds

Clemens Rettich — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 19:50:48 +0000

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A little girl is taking dinner to her grandmother. A wolf intercepts her and finds out where she is going. The wolf arrives at the grandmother’s house first, eats the grandmother, disguises himself in her clothes, and waits in bed for the little girl. The girl arrives, is a little bit suspicious, impolitely comments on her grandmothers’ appearance, and is promptly eaten. Drowsy after his meal, the wolf falls asleep. A woodcutter arrives, slices the sleeping wolf open, rescues the grandmother and the girl, fills the wolf up with rocks, and sews him up. The wolf wakes up thirsty and goes to a well for a drink. He drowns when he falls into the well, weighted down by the rocks in his belly.

Kind of a boring retelling of the story, right? Quick but not much fun.

But watch a group of participants in an improv workshop try to act a story like this out at the same speed. That is a lot of fun.

Fairy Tale in 60 Seconds

This game is very simple and a lot of fun. A group of players appoints a narrator. That narrator gets a suggestion for a fairy tale from the audience or the facilitator. The narrator and the players have 60 seconds to get together, review the story, assign roles, and knock around ideas for making the performance fun.

When the first 1 minute is up, the players and the narrator have 60 seconds to tell the entire story. They have to cram in as many details and unique twists as possible.

Want to add more frantic energy to the scene? Have someone shout out “30 seconds left!”, “15 seconds left!”

A fun variation is to do a famous movie like Casablanca, Star Wars, or Avatar, in 60 seconds.

This is an excellent game for really understanding what it means to coordinate, plan, and execute on a deadline. For me this is a great demonstration of what I mean when I say “Exceptional planning requires listening, and exceptional execution requires experience and trust.” These games don’t require much experience, but they require a huge amount of trust.

Take-Aways

This game has great take-aways for teams:

Deliver! I have seen more teams blow this game not because they recounted the story badly (though that is a consequence), but because they didn’t use their 60 seconds of planning effectively! You get in a timed huddle, and you find out quickly who has control issues, who is OCD, and who doesn’t trust their team-mates to perform in the fire. When you have 60 seconds to plan something, get right to the heart of it. Save your objections and trust each other to make it happen when the curtains open.
Edit. This is a great way to teach people how to get to the heart of a story. One of the reasons I don’t ‘believe’ in formal 40-page business plans is because they are 5% core goods, and 95% fluff & fiction. If you can’t sell it in 2 or 3 pages, either you aren’t clear on what’s at the heart of your potential success, or the person you are pitching to just doesn’t get it. This game teaches your team to get to the heart of it, and fast!
Act. No one ever got any better at anything by just planning it. We get better at things when we act, risk, commit. Do your due diligence, get good feedback, and then act. You don’t become a world traveller by looking at maps. You just have to get out there. And each time you do, whether you crash and burn, or nail it, you will get better.
Trust. As long as you have maximized the planning opportunity, you are going to do just fine if you trust each other. When you are all literally on the same (and only!) page, you just need to do your part and trust that those around you will do exactly the same.
Listen. Don’t over-plan the details, but do listen for opportunities to make your partners look good. This is not your time to upstage or grandstand. You will almost certainly slow the scene down. Listen closely for a cue to act, get in, do your thing, and get out. This is about the getting a product or concept delivered on time, its not about you.
Wrap! Either you can end this or the facilitator will. Nothing rocks the house more than a team wrapping up the full story 1 beat ahead of the facilitator calling “time”. On any project, or in any presentation, few things impress people more than a team’s ability to find an ending, and bring all the threads together ahead of deadline.

Want to take the blah-blah-blah out of your next retreat or management seminar? To learn how an improv workshop with me can do that, contact me at clemens@clemensrettich.com. Improv takes great communication and management strategies, and makes them real and unforgettable.

Music of the Spheres: A Model for Business Planning Part 1

Clemens Rettich — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 18:07:27 +0000

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You can’t do everything. So how do you decide where to put your time and energies?

One challenge I have as a coach is supporting my clients in developing lists of priorities that keep their process moving forward, without overwhelming them.

An inspiring article by John Jantsch called The Logistics of Time suggested an interesting approach. In this article, John explores the idea that every business has three clocks it must attend to: Real Time, Deal Time, and Meal Time. While my thinking has deviated from John’s original premise, the basic idea remains the same: that there are three cycles of different duration in a business. John proposed marketing ‘clocks’: real-time monitoring of the environment; relationship-building, converting, and closing deals; and building the long-term security of your meal-ticket by focusing on the deeper work of your vision, mission, and values.

I have re-framed the concept as three cycles: the current cycle, the growth cycle, and the deep cycle.

I have a life-long interest in music and acoustics, and I see these three cycles as being like sound waves. In acoustics we look at things like frequency, or oscillations per second, and period, the distance between one peak in the wave and the next. The two are related. A high musical note has a high frequency (measured in thousands or even tens of thousands cycles per second), and a short period. A mid-frequency wave (think alto saxophone, or the middle keys of a piano) has slower oscillations (the middle ‘A’ on a piano is 440 cycles per second) and longer periods. In music the notes described as low, or bass notes, are measured in 10’s of cycles. The lowest sound normally audible to humans is about 20 oscillations per second.

I have applied these cycles to business planning. I think of the frequency as the ‘pitch’ or ‘business’ of the activity, and the period as a measure of how far into the future the planning cycle looks.

The current cycle encompasses those activities that maintain the operation and deliver on products and services already sold. This cycle includes accounting, operations, logistics, human resources. There is a great deal of repetitive, predictable, and reactive activity. This cycle isn’t sexy, but failure to attend to it, to commit time to its maintenance and tuning, means early and catastrophic failure. The ‘period’ for this cycle is very short: somewhere between hourly and monthly.
The growth cycle captures everything that gets the next sale, hires the next employee, or plans for the next equipment upgrade. In this higher-frequency cycle, the focus areas (pricing, networking, promoting, acquiring, evaluating) require more creativity, and imply a greater degree of risk, than the current cycle. The period of the growth cycle is monthly to quarterly.
The deep cycle is about the long, slow, deep building that ensures the sustainability of the business. The period of the deep cycle is between 18 months to 5 years.The deep cycle is about building foundations (the lowest note in a harmony is called the fundamental), and planning for significant new directions in the future. This cycle may contribute nothing to current revenues, but is where great leadership makes the greatest impact. The deep cycle is about imagining and envisioning new markets, new services, new methods of delivery, and sometimes entirely new business models.

When a business assigns the right degree of focus and optimum level of resources to each cycle, it creates a harmony (an idea also introduced by John). The question is: what are the optimum levels of focus and resources required by each cycle? What do you think? Thinking in terms of money, time, and human capital, what level of investment is appropriate to each level?

Read Part 2 Here…

I provide support for small to medium-sized businesses in developing growth plans and ensuring execution. I have clients throughout Western Canada. Contact me at clemens@clemensrettich.com

Holiday Time: Your Time?

Clemens Rettich — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 22:47:06 +0000

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Image by Clarita

With the holidays just a few weeks away, here are some basic tips to help make that holiday time your time…

Leave white space. Whether you are commuting to work, traveling to be with family, or scheduling social events, be generous with your time allocations. Leave white space around your commitments by not booking things tightly.

Be clear and committed. This time of year can involve conflicting demands. Know where your commitments lie before the invitations and demands start to pour in. You can’t be everywhere, so make choices that underscore where your values really lie.

Lists matter. The sheer number of things that come at us at this time of year can stress even the best memories. Unless you have a personal assistant, use lists. My favourites are alarmed lists on my smart phone. Focus on giving attention to the present instead of trying to remember future details.

Go dark with intention. Seriously. Don’t just be generous with your time allocation for important events; give yourself the gift of doing absolutely nothing. Get your calendar out and black out 25% of the time (minimum 1/2 day blocks) to do nothing. When someone calls or writes to get together, do *not* schedule them into that time. I promise you will start your New Year with an energy you haven’t felt for a while.

Have a wonderful holiday that is what you need it to be.

Looking for another great holiday time tip? How about buying a gift certificate for a family member or client? Do it online here. Get them the gift of planning that actually works.

From Board-Feet to Sustainable Relationships?

Clemens Rettich — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 23:40:09 +0000

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Image by siilur

A corporate fixer who makes a commitment to listening to rank-and-file employees? A major British Columbia lumber producer who will focus on quality over quantity? I know… I shouldn’t hold my breath.

On the other hand, an article in a Vancouver Island paper (Cowichan News Leader) “Meet Western Forests Products great new hope” makes me want to be a believer. Steve Frasher is a corporate fixer who was brought in by Western Forest Products in June of 2009. As new president & CEO, he has a mission both straightforward and daunting: bring the company back to profitability in the midst of the worst business environment the BC lumber industry has ever seen.

What stood out for me in this article were not the business facts of WFP or the BC lumber industry. As a BC resident, I have heard them all 100’s of times before. What caught my attention were the values and approaches of Frasher himself.

Both Frasher and the job WFP have ahead of them provided an opportunity for me to pause and reflect on why this sounds promising, and what may be some key strategies to take away.

Three items gave me pause.

1. It’s never happened before! A spokesman for WFP is quoted as saying that Frasher is going to do something that has never been done before: he is going to talk to people. Yup. It sounds like for the first time in this 140-year old company (including its earlier incarnations) of about 3,000 employees, the boss is finally going to talk to the troops. I know this is over-simplified, but probably not by much. To quote a WFP spokesperson: “He talks to people and wants to hear what’s important to them and that’s not something that’s happened at Western before…”

While it is easy to be flip about this, this is worth noting and watching for two reasons. Firstly, an organization like WFP has a deeply entrenched culture that is almost certain to resist Mr. Frasher’s efforts. 140 years of being ignored tends to make people a little suspicious and cynical. The first signs of weakness or deviation, even if legitimate and temporary, will be seen as signs the effort was phoney from the start.

Clearly defined and communicated early success indicators will help to off-set this.

Secondly, making people feel like they are truly heard, while balancing what needs to be done even if people disagree, is tough even in healthy organizations. The ability to tell someone you understand and value their input, and then go and do the opposite of what they suggested without losing their loyalty, is one of the hallmarks of truly masterful leadership.

Absolute transparency and clarity in the decision making process significantly raises the chances of success in this.

2. Let me make this perfectly clear. That last approach sounds exactly like what Frasher is proposing. To quote him: “These people know what to do, so we’re going to understand our markets better and we’re going to pull fibre through mills where each one will have a marketing plan, the employees will know what the plan is and they’ll know the (goals) every day.” Exactly.

Making every level of the organization aware of what the plans are and what individual and division-level contributions are expected to be is a powerful an necessary element of a change process. If Frasher and WFP’s middle management layer are able to sustain this level of transparency and engagement for the duration, that will be a victory in itself.

When things go off the rails, as they surely will, it is critical that management takes the bullet and avoids finger-pointing. It’ll be a hard slog as it is, but people with little power in the process taking the heat for failures is a sure way to quickly demoralize the team.

One thing I was looking for in this, but didn’t see, was a reference to employee/team motivation or rewards. Keeping your job is certainly motivation for a while. But as the months and years tick by, and the inevitable setbacks occur, consideration of recognition and celebrations is critical. Even success has its pitfalls: if there are early successes, and bonuses, promotions, and other benefits accrue to senior management but not to front-line workers & managers, the cycle of cynicism and declining productivity will start all over.

A powerful form of recognition is to let people know explicitly what role they have played in any success. Giving credit where credit is truly due makes hard work worth it.

I suspect Frasher knows this as well as anyone, but it would be interesting to know the vision here for WFP.

3. Quality not quantity. Western Forest Products has been divesting itself of non-core assets. This is often the right decision as it brings focus back to the operation. At the same time Frasher is refocusing WFP’s core business model. He is looking to match demand with quality product rather than working on volumes and margins. In his words, “We’re going to focus on quality as opposed to quantity.” Frasher claims “It’s not a dramatic change, but it’s a change that will help us become a successful, sustainable forest company.” I’m sorry, but any time I hear a company who’s very lifeblood is a commodity say that they are focusing on quality and sustainable customer responsiveness, that’s dramatic.

As I wrote in What if your Business Disappeared Tomorrow? businesses operate on a commodities-to-relationship continuum. At one end businesses treat products and services as a commodity: driven exclusively by considerations of price, margins, and volume. At the other end are businesses that treat each transaction as arising out of, and contributing to, a relationship driven by quality of experience (for customers and employees).

Businesses with a commodities mindset are vulnerable to competition because they are unremarkable and entirely reproducible. They are always looking over their shoulders to see who is coming up behind them. A competitor will inevitably emerge who is able to do the same thing for less money.

A business built on creating unique relationships strives for a culture that sees customers and employees as partners. These businesses are far less vulnerable to competition because they focus on creating unique experiences that are difficult to reproduce.

Typically the latter business model is consistent with being a premium provider, where things like lower volumes, customization, time per transaction, lower wait times, etc. result in higher costs.

For a business literally in commodities to make a deliberate shift towards relationships and quality is dramatic. It has impacts on everything from marketing (influencing decisions about product, pricing, placement, and promotion) to operations, investor relations, and human resources.

In all three areas this is exactly the kind of shift Frasher seems to be proposing. I am intrigued and interested to see how this plays out.