It’s a New Year again, and early January is always a good time to reflect.

Last year (around this time) I wrote about “Setting yourself up to win…in 2018”, with 7 examples of preconceptions that in my experience lead to failure – and what you should do instead.

The last preconception was thinking that your potential is fixed, which I believe is a good subject to dive deeper into – especially in the context of whether you are realising your potential, and “operating” on the right level professionally, so to speak.

Throughout my career and various leadership assignments I’ve seen many people underestimating their potential, with a blind spot for what they could truly achieve. And I’ve seen just as many people with a pretty good idea about their potential, but not really doing something about it, or not knowing how – which often turns into a huge (and recurring) regret, especially as you get older.

So, I’ve always seen it as a leadership task to open people’s eyes to what their true potential is – and then help them achieving it.

Many people hold the belief that “operating on the next level” requires working longer hours, which, however, is not true for the typical (and already hardworking) knowledge worker. If you are already working long hours, the best performance lever is not putting in more hours – with vastly diminishing returns – but getting more value out of the efforts you already put in; that is, increasing your impact and value creation.

Steve Jobs believed that the range between what the average person and the best person could achieve, was 50 or 100 to 1. I share that belief and it is a massive multiplier. While everyone cannot (and doesn’t have to) operate on that performance level, most people can improve their performance, and in my experience, and as evident in our training classes, we see average potential improvement factors around 2.5x. That is a lot of additional value creation, which can empower you and change your professional and private life.

Imagine the impact of the additional value creation. Assuming you increase your value creation by a factor of 25% (1.25x) from Monday to Thursday, you can have Friday off – for the rest of your life…

Read the full article here

Review the book cover here: Book Cover

Kind regards,

The Business Model Excellence Institute

Download the first 30 pages of the book here: Introduction

Imagine if you could see your company’s performance and potential without prejudice, from multiple angles and perspectives, having all the required information, drawing on relevant insights, experiences and knowledge, and on this basis always make well-founded and wise decisions. How would that impact the company performance – and your own? We like to believe that we are completely rational, and are basing every decision on all available facts, but while the human brain is extremely powerful it is not immune to faulty judgements. Our mental behaviours are based on subconscious information processing procedures which in today’s increasingly complex business environments quite often will lead to faulty judgements. The brain can only see what it is prepared to see, and it is hard-wired for pattern recognition and linear thinking. Thus, if we want to assess the true performance and potential of company performance, we need to break these fixed and linear patterns, and learn to see things differently and from multiple angles simultaneously….

This is the first article in the series of assessment articles, taking outset in the Strategy Sphere.

Download the full article here: Learning to see

“Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them”.

Have you ever heard about wicked and tame problems? Wicked problems was a term originally used to describe problems in social policy and planning that were difficult or impossible to solve. Wicked problems are hard to grasp, define and explain, and there is no “right” solution and clear-cut definition of success and boundaries. The full magnitude of the problem is only realised when the solution has been developed and implemented – sometimes years later. There are always many interdependencies, perspectives and stakeholders, and as the solutions are developed, new and unforeseen issues surface. Furthermore, wicked problems cannot be compartmentalised and solved in isolation. Think of, for example, global warming and climate changes, which are wicked problems fitting these criteria.

A tame problem, on the other hand, has a well-defined and stable problem statement, a definite stopping point, it can be addressed in isolation, etc. Tame problems are not necessarily simple, but they are solvable with traditional problem-solving methods. Building a bridge is a tame problem, and so is playing chess.

Companies are some of the most complex systems on Earth, and wicked problems exist on all levels in the organisations – strategic and tactical – and many organisational layers struggle with them every day. Most large-scale initiatives are wicked problems – such as large IT ERP projects, M&As, restructuring, design and deployment of strategies, etc. – as each challenge is tricky, complex and unique. However, this is not always realised by the stakeholders, and the consequence is that the problems are tamed. Taming is when the complexity and scope of a wicked problem is being artificially restricted and reduced, and the true underlying root causes are not properly addressed.

The consequence of taming is project failure (delays, added costs, overruns, etc.) and a significant part of strategy failures relate to taming the challenges facing the company…..

This is the second article in the series of assessment articles, taking outset in the Operational System Sphere.

Download the full article here: A wicked game

Read the interview here: Interview_with_the_author

Read the press release here: Press release