Finding the Flowers Among the Weeds III

“How important do you think this is to the long-term success of this organization…"

I’ve engaged with organizations many times in blue sky thinking, but what I learned was that while having that many ideas was great, you had to find a way of synthesizing and filtering them down. The question is, how do you do that? I guess there are may ways, but the way that I learned to do it is by setting up a three-by-three grid. On one axis, I asked the executives, “How important do you think this is to the long-term success of this organization; very important, important, or not particularly important?” Then we went back to the same items, and I said, “Thinking about that item, where are you now? Are you already doing that, have you started doing it, or haven’t you even thought about it?”

What we got was this wonderful matrix. In the top right-hand corner were things that were very important for the long-term future but that people weren’t doing anything about right now. We called those the areas of risk, and I think that’s a great way of distilling from a large amount of data right down to things that are important. The reason they’re really important is that they are things that are important to you for the future, but they are things that you are not doing now.

ACTION POINT: Identify those ideas that are important to the organization for the future, but that you’re not working on now, as areas of risk.