Who or what is killing your company? How do I involve the whole team in change? When does communication work? Find out in the newest treasure.
Let’s start with Nugget #1, a provocative contribution of the duo Förster und Kreuz. I like the picture of the boat. Many companies actually spend an enormous amount of time and money on preventing risks. The checklists grow continuously and the processes become more extensive. In itself it is not bad to translate learnings into processes. If you put all your focus on it, it can happen quite quickly that someone comes around the corner and takes away the base of your business. So you do well to do it yourself before someone else does. Since my industry is currently changing, the proposed exercise is more than relevant. I’ll add it to my creative backlog. Have you done the exercise before? What was the result? How did you deal with the findings?
(5 min, text, German)
You have identified the need for change, but how do you approach change now? How do you manage to use the creative power of the whole team? In Nugget #2 Daniel Dubbel from DB Systel introduces the method Open Space. I have already successfully used Open Space myself within the framework of the Innovation Club and described my experiences in the article Sparks. I can fully confirm the experiences. For me extremely powerful is the voluntariness and that people automatically fit to projects. This generates a lot of energy, true to the motto “Those who are there are the right ones”. My biggest fear was nobody pitches topics, but this never happened. I can also subscribe to the benefit of networking. For us, Open Space had generated plenty of connections across silos. I find the participation of managers interesting. Especially in very hierarchically structured companies, I could imagine that the participation of managers can be an obstacle. Attendees might wait until the highest-ranking executives pitch a session. On the other hand, this can also generate a lot of momentum by motivating people to participate and getting more funds for the implementation.
So just try it out. I’m looking forward to your experiences.
FF057 Open Space in the company (70 min, audio, German)
Something harder to digest is Nugget #3, but worth the time. Conny Dethloff put a lot of effort into modeling communication channels in a team. Surely one will not be able to model reality completely. Nevertheless, I find the approach to calculate the number of ways of ideas successful. The visualization alone shows very nicely that you have to communicate new ideas quite often. The goal of Conny to make communication more tangible has definitely been achieved. The article reminded me of Lars Vollmers Improvisation theater/game on complexity. I enjoyed this game at the Wevent Leipzig. You communicate very simple messages in a circle of participants and experience for yourself what complexity means. How do you make communication visible and comprehensible? I am looking forward to further tips and tricks.
Communication (10 min, text, German)
That’s it for this week. Happy Weekend!