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.

Finding the Flowers Among the Weeds II

But how do you do that?

Of all the things that you can do, which are the four things that will really make a difference to your organization? Thinking back on that, the lesson on for me was that you just have to focus. There are so many things you can do, so you have to just focus on the three or four things that will make a difference.

But how do you do that? Well, those three or four things have to be very tightly aligned to what it is you’re trying to do as an organization. They have to be aligned to your business strategy. They have to be big things—things that, when employees look at them, they say, “I feel really excited about that; I feel really engaged in that.” I guess for me, the capacity to know what a weed is and what a flower is, is really one of the most important things I ever learned.

ACTION POINT: Focus on a handful of ideas that align with the business strategy in a way that employees can become excited and engaged.

Finding the Flowers Among the Weeds

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.

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.