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Creating a systems-based leadership model for your business is an iterative journey, in four phases, split into two parts. The first part starts by gaining a comprehensive grasp of the fundamental traits and the practical dynamics of your daily operations and future objectives.
Ideally, the business leadership and key team members will have completed the Possibility Process: A New You course to prepare for the calibre of conversations that will sustain the work with the entire organization
Subsequently, collaborative meetings with your team are held to formulate new goals and opportunities for advancement. The second part consists of iterative phases that start by describing frameworks for the improvements or innovations in your operating processes and communication structures. The implementation, testing and verification phase puts the theory into practice and provides the validation and data for the next action framework. Each iteration serves as both an enhancement and a shared win for the team, propelling them seamlessly into the subsequent phase.
"Systems-Based Leadership isn't focused on merely documenting procedures. Instead, it revolves around establishing consistent and replicable systems that cater to employees' needs at every point of development. It involves providing them with the appropriate tools, communication frameworks, skills, and knowledge essential for optimal performance in their respective roles.
The Discovery phase is designed to get to the source of what is happening in the business. Everyone in an organization, from the business owner to managers, to the most junior employees, will have their own opinion about âwhat-is-or-is-not-working-in-the-businessâ, including remedies and explanations for âhow things got to be this way.â In almost every case, everyone is misdiagnosing the patient.
The Discovery phase goes beyond the surface-level impressions and symptoms and figures out the fundamental root causes of each problem. This allows us to get a sense of the scope of the project required for the transformation of the business and culture to occur. This is important because business owners and managers often misdiagnose the problems they see.Â
Discovery is about helping leaders separate tangible symptoms occurring within the business from the less obvious core issues that set in motion a series of cause-and-effect reactions that ultimately lead to the symptoms that are perceived as the problem. However, once leaders begin to see this inter-relatedness they canât unsee it. It is the beginning of their ability to apply systems thinking to trace the line from symptom outcomes to the causes of the problems.Â
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You canât fix the system from within the system that broke it. Internal decision-making and patterned behaviours produce unintended consequences and hold the current reality in place like gravity.
The Alignment milestone of the engagement is about re-engineering the business and the culture for optimal performanceâbefore the work begins. Working backward from desired outcomes we design a series of practical learning experiences for people and structural mechanisms needed by the business to support new ways of thinking and acting across the organization. Think of Alignment as a set of blueprints or construction drawings to disrupt business-as-usual and show how your business will be reinvigoratedâpeople, performance and profitâacross 16 interconnected dimensions to produce breakthrough business results.
The Action Framework phase engages your team as co-creators in a dynamic process of experiential learning where participants learn by doing through a staged approach.
You choose the appropriate scope of work that is realistic and manageable for your operations relative to peak seasons and competing demands for your time and attention, given the measurable outcomes you want to achieve through each 90-day power cycle.Â
Throughout each power cycle, DCE will support you and your team, so that you never have to figure out the complexities of systems thinking on your own. DCE offers live coaching, business consulting, group facilitation, and asynchronous support throughout our engagement.
This enables you and your team to seamlessly learn new ways of being and apply highly effective techniques and approaches to executing ideas, including problem-solving, managing projects and process development.
The tangible application of the new systems, procedures and ways of being provides the context for measurable feedback about what is working, and where there is room for further development. Â
At the core of this dynamic is what DCE calls Discovery Learning: an inquiry-based technique that imparts valuable skills in the way the human brain takes in information and stores it for recall and application in a practical workplace setting. Each sprint builds upon the last as your team applies new tools, frameworks and strategies for continuous process improvement. Know-how from world-class entrepreneurs is transferred into the hearts and minds of your team through these structures. Success is measured by tangible results and cost-effective solutions to operational problemsâmeaningful learning outcomes your team and business need to succeed. In addition to transforming the culture and performance of your business, you will be left with valuable intellectual property that increases the market value of your business.Â
Each 90-day Power Cycle rolls over into a new 90-day cycle. Qualitative and quantitative feedback will be evaluated to guide the team discussions concerning what can be tackled for the next 90 days â this process of planning, executing, assimilating and evaluating builds momentum and team cohesion. In each iteration, the framework for each power cycle is based on a familiar Possibility Process blueprint, this means that the whole team becomes familiar with the process and can work the tools with increasing ease. This sense of agency allows each team member and their functional areas in the business to actively participate to leverage their institutional/embedded knowledge in the process of creating systems.
Occasionally, the possibility process team leadership will decide that a power cycle will roll over into a new discovery phase. Typically this happens after a few years, and it is time to take a deeper look at the enterprise, or there is a substantial change in the competitive environment, business operations or management.
Just because you want a specific outcome for your life or business doesn’t mean you’re actually ready to make it happen in reality. We have a self-assessment quiz to find out if this kind of work is suited for you
We are happy to have a conversation learn a bit about you and what you are looking for.Â
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