This is an old story. I was working for one of the big consulting practices, and I remember we all went to Ireland to advise a company about their long-term strategy. Like any great consultants at that stage, what we did was to ask everybody to get into a room, and then we said to them, “Let’s think about what this organization could be like in ten year’s time.” Over the space of a day, we filled up about fifty flip charts with all the things that they could do for the future.
That was great; we were really energetic, and there were lots of ideas. Then, at the end of the day, we stood in the middle of the room and looked around. There must have been two hundred thins that we could do in the future. And it struck me so forcibly then—and actually it’s been a huge learning for me—that there just isn’t any reason to generate masses of ideas like that. What you have to do is to know, of all the things that you can really work on, what the one, two, or maybe three or four things are that are really going to make a difference.
I guess for me it’s a bit like saying that the garden is full of weeds and some of the weeds are actually flowers.
ACTION POINT: Identify one to three things that will make a difference in your organization this year and five years from now.
No comments:
Post a Comment