Category Archives: Business

Zeroing in on Delphi: When Complex Issues Require the Most Effective Approach

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In today’s business environment, management consulting firms must be ready to address client challenges and needs that will transform their delphi picbusiness by 10 or 100 times.  Tools and methods must be scaled up to ensure applicability to the widest possible audience globally.

The Consulting Workshop Series provides a good understanding of the 10 methods of conducting Workshops that are custom designed to fit specific workshop objectives.  Different methods are developed for the purpose of providing organizations the most appropriate tool necessary to support organizations to achieve their strategic goals and targets.

If it is the management’s goal to expose all opinions and options regarding a complex issue, then the Delphi Workshop Method is the perfect approach to undertake.  By using Delphi, organizations can gain the benefits of pooling and exchanging opinions to learn from other’s views.

Understanding Delphi as a Consulting Workshop Series Method

Delphi is a structured communication technique originally developed as a systematic interactive forecasting method that relies on a panel of experts. Its main objective is to expose all opinions and options regarding a complex issue.

Delphi is most effectively used in technology forecasting, as well as business forecasting such as sales of new products.  It is used in the implementation of multi-stakeholder approaches for participating policy-making.  It is also effective in patent participation identification and public policy issues such as economic trends, health, and education.

A dialectical process, it has been designed to provide the benefits of pooling and exchanging of opinions to learn from other’s views.

Discovering the Delphi Approach

 Delphi can be approached in 3 different angles. Depending on the objective of the activity, we can determine which is the most strategic way to approach Delphi.

  1. The Conventional Delphi. Called a pen and paper Delphi, it is aimed at a consensus of the most probable future by iteration. It has three main characteristics: the anonymity of the participants, the structuring of information flow, and regular feedback. These three key characteristics help participants focus on the issues at hand.
  2. The Policy Delphi. The Policy Delphi is a tool for analysis of policy issues. It is employed to generate the strongest possible opposing views on the potential resolutions of a major issue. Generating a consensus is not its primary objective and survey questionnaires are given greater emphasis.
  3. The Delphi Conference. A Group Delphi, it allows for more discussions and debate. In the Delphi Conference, participants forego anonymity. Time constraints may require a fixed number of cycles and consensus can be increased from one to two rounds of voting.  The Delphi Conference often takes less time than the traditional Delphi.

In undertaking the Conventional Delphi, the Policy Delphi, and the Delphi Conference, organizations must be keen on following the right procedure in undertaking any of these Delphi.  Because of its different approaches, the steps that are undertaken also varies. Taking the right step is necessary for better understanding and clarity of flow, as well as optimizing the use of Delphi in achieving the appropriate results at the end of the activity.

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Learning the First Tool of the Consulting Workshop Series: Charrette

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In today’s business environment, management consulting firms must be ready to address client challenges and needs that will transform their charrette pic2business by 10 or 100 times.  Tools and methods must be scaled up to ensure applicability to the widest possible audience globally.

The Consulting Workshop Series provides a good understanding of the 10 Methods of conducting Workshops that are custom designed to fit specific workshop objectives.  Different methods are developed for the purpose of providing organizations the most appropriate tool necessary to support organizations to achieve their strategic goals and targets.

If it is the management’s goal to cultivate creativity and innovation with their organization, then the Charrette is the perfect method to undertake.

Understanding Charrette

Charrette is one method of conducting consulting workshops that can generate consensus among diverse groups of people and form an action plan. Charrette provides time for a deep intellectual exploration of matters significant to the success of the firm. Charrette allows people to work not only at their own pace but also on projects that matter most to them.

This is one method that can effectively assemble practical ideas and viewpoints at the beginning of a planning process. It encourages input and collaboration from a wide range of participants.  When the process is mature, it can facilitate decisions on difficult issues and resolve indecisions or deal with dead blocks between groups.

Charrette can effectively lead to developing feasible projects and action plans with specific practical steps. It can be applied to development, design, and planning projects and identify potential funding sources for projects.

The 3-Phase Approach to Charrette

Charrette must be done in phases with each phase directed towards attaining a specific objective.

 

Each phase is undertaken following a specific number of steps. These steps are necessary to achieve the specific objective of each phase and reach the ultimate goal of the entire workshop using Charrette as one of the methods in the Working Consulting Series.

A Purview on the Pre-Charrette Phase

 The Pre-Charrette Phase focuses on developing and working with a Steering Committee. A Steering Committee is vital as it serves as the coordinator of Chafrette activities. The committee will be the one to establish a timeline and meeting schedule, as well as a preliminary list of issues the Charrette will focus on.

Once a Steering Committee has been organized, the organization is now ready to take on the 5 specific steps underlying the Pre-Charrette Phase.

  1. Issue/Problem Identification
  2. Identify and invite Charrette participants (team)
  3. Develop community relations and public awareness
  4. Assemble support information
  5. Logistics

Before undertaking these 5 specific steps, there are preliminary preparations that must be undertaken. First, there is a need to hold an organizational meeting with the Steering Committee and the Charrette facilitator to set the goals and arrange a basic schedule. It is essential that the Steering Committee must hold a regular meeting to ensure that all necessary preparations are being made.

A well-executed Charrette will set the pace towards a fun and productive opportunity for the organization to build and visualize its future.

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The Consensus Conference Approach: When Consensus Building is the Goal

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In today’s business environment, management consulting firms must be ready to address client challenges and needs that will transform their consensus conference pic 1business by 10 or 100 times. Tools and methods must be scaled up to ensure applicability to the widest possible audience globally.

The Consulting Workshop Series provides a good understanding of the 10 Methods of conducting Workshops that are custom designed to fit specific workshop objectives. Different methods are developed for the purpose of providing organizations the most appropriate tool necessary to support organizations to achieve their strategic goals and targets.

If it is the management’s goal to generate consensus and options regarding a controversial topic or issue, then the Consensus Conference is the most appropriate method to undertake.

Understanding the Consensus Conference

Consensus Conference is a 3-day intensive program that provides a vehicle for organizations to meaningfully influence policy decisions. Strategically, its application spans a broad range of uses.  It can be used in the development of new regulations, generating new debate and understanding, consolidating politics, building bridges between interest groups and perspectives, and removing organizational silos.

Consensus Conference is also useful for combining many forms of knowledge and a method for obtaining informed opinions.  Interestingly, the Consensus Conference provides a vehicle for organizations to meaningfully influence policy decisions, conflict assessment, clarification of attitudes, and assessing the relevance of an issue.

Approach to Consensus Conference

The Consensus Conference starts with Planning and the Recruitment & Selection of Panel. Thereafter, significant issues relevant to the topic of concern are discovered, drawn, and documented during the first 2 weekends prior to the Consensus Conference.

Consensus Conference

  1. Planning. The primary objective of the Planning stage is to determine the Management Staff and Advisory Committee. This also includes defining the scope, topic, and allocating budget.
  1. Recruitment & Selection of Panel. At this stage, the planning team starts screening and onboarding members of the Panel. Potential members of the Panel are qualified in accordance with established criteria.
  1. First Study Weekend. The First Study Weekend is the start of a steep learning curve for the members of the Panel. It is the beginning of relationship building between the Project Management Team, the Facilitator, and the Panelists.
  1. Second Study Weekend. The Second Study Weekend takes on the agenda planned by the Panel during the First Study Weekend. At this stage, there is further development of competence for the final week and shifting of control of the process decisions and facilitation to the Panel.
  1. Consensus Conference. The main event, the Consensus Conference provides the avenue for discussion on topics and issues of great importance and impact to the organization. Its primary objective is to influence policy decisions and assess the relevance of issues undertaken.
  1. Dissemination and Evaluation. One month after the Consensus Conference, a Final Report is prepared and disseminated to policy-makers, departments, and individuals in the organization. A debriefing is conducted 1 to 2 months after the conference. An evaluation is conducted 1 to 12 months after the conduct of the Consensus Conference.

Conducting a Consensus Conference is intensive. Hence, it is necessary to gain mastery of the approach to allow organizations to effectively use Consensus Conference as a tool for assessing an identified critical topic.

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Consulting Workshop Series 101: Tools to Generating Effective and Innovative Ideas

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Whether the focus is a strategy, operations, tax, finance, HR, or IT, management consulting firms have become a staple of corporate life. FromConsulting Workshop Series pic1 defining strategic directions to simply serving as an additional pair of hands for outsourced work, management consultants have become inextricably linked to the success of most large organizations.

However, festering underneath the myriad consulting offerings, methodologies, and tools, management consulting firms are exposed to vulnerabilities that are unraveling the consulting business model. It is the same kind of dramatic disruption that is affecting other companies and other industries.

An industry becomes susceptible to disruption when it becomes entrenched in its longstanding solutions and financial structures. Management consulting firms are not immune to the dynamics of disruption. In an industry where the basis of competition becomes efficiency versus innovation and new solutions, disruption is just around the horizon. While many consultants and consulting firms have established practices advising clients on strategies to leverage disruptive trends and technologies, only a few apply these to themselves.

In today’s business environment, management consulting firms must be ready to address client challenges and needs that will transform their business by 10 or 100 times. Tools and methods must be scaled up to ensure applicability to the widest possible audience globally.

The Consulting Workshop Series 101 provides a good understanding of the 10 methods of conducting Workshops that are custom designed to fit specific workshop objectives. Different methods are developed for the purpose of providing organizations the most appropriate tool necessary to support organizations to achieve their strategic goals and targets.

The Importance of Mastering Consulting Workshops

Consulting Workshops are tools used to maximize performance, align strategies, and actualize potentials of organizations. Management consulting firms leverage workshops as an effective way to rapidly reach decisions within client organizations.

Workshops usually last 1 to 5 days. They are typically used to gather stakeholders who normally don’t cross paths–e.g. stakeholders from different departments, different business units, and/or different regions. Within the workshop, the consulting firm plays the role of both facilitator and external subject matter expert.

The 10 Primary Workshop Methods

The 10 Primary Workshop Methods promote the conduct of a consulting workshop that is strategic and systematic to achieve its purpose and objectives.

  1. Charrette. The primary objective of Charrette is to generate consensus among diverse groups of people and form an action plan.
  1. Citizens Jury. The Citizens Jury method leads participants to come up with a decision that is representative of average citizens who has been well informed on the issue.
  1. Consensus Conference. Its primary objective is to come up with a consensus and a decision on a controversial topic.
  1. Delphi. Delphi is a method that exposes all opinions and options regarding a complex issue.
  1. Expert Panel. The Expert Panel synthesizes a variety of inputs on a specialized topic and produces recommendations.
  1. Focus Group. The primary aim of the Focus Group is to expose different group opinions on an issue and why these are held.
  1. PAME. PAME is Participatory Assessment, Monitoring, and Evaluation. PAME is basically used for evaluating and learning.
  1. Planning Cells. In Planning Cells, participants are made to learn about and choose between multiple options regarding an urgent and important action. In the end, an action plan is developed.
  1. Scenarios. Scenarios are used for planning and preparing for an uncertain future. This is basically vision-building.
  1. World Café. World Café is a consulting workshop method that is used for generating and sharing ideas.

Each method of conducting workshop differs in terms of objective, topics, participants, and time. Understanding the differences and purpose of the Consulting Workshop Series Methods will allow organizations to conduct the workshop with the greatest impact where one is desperately needed.

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7 Key Imperatives to Design a Breakthrough Customer Experience

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Customer presents cardThe constant advancement in technology has raised the expectations of customers in terms of their interaction with companies. This digital disruption is also forcing businesses to develop new capabilities and explore innovative ways and means to deliver improved Customer Experiences.

Organizations can overhaul their Customer Journeys by embracing latest digital insights and practices. To develop a truly exceptional, breakthrough Customer Experience, organizations should work towards adopting 7 key imperatives:

  1. Develop Customer Empathy
  2. Design the Complete Customer Experience
  3. Reinvent the Customer Experience
  4. Lead the Way with Industry Rules
  5. Become an Agile Organization
  6. Continuously Improve and Iterate
  7. Foster a Culture of Collaboration
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An organization does not need to execute all 7 of these imperatives—it varies from case to case depending on the circumstances, market, and customer requirements.

Let’s, now, discuss the first 4 imperatives in further detail.

Develop Customer Empathy

Many firms use surveys and face-to-face interviews to gather firsthand customer insights to enhance their Customer Experiences.

However, when designing Customer Journeys, in addition to customer data, companies need to understand their customers’ behaviors deeply and put themselves in their customers’ shoes. This entails knowing the complexities the customers face during various journeys and developing new ways to understand Customer Journeys—for instance, by making researchers accompany customers while shopping, by asking customers to report their activities and provide feedback as they interact with various offerings, and involving customers to provide their input on early versions of proposed offerings.

Design the Complete Customer Experience

Most people consider that design pertains only to good artwork, outlook, and appearance of products. However, it involves not just the look and feel of a product but also the way it operates. To render breakthrough Customer Experience, companies need to fundamentally shift the way design is perceived—not just the user interface design rather designing the overall Customer Experience.

Great Customer Experience design encompasses crafting every interface the customers have with the provider from the minute they consider a purchase. It warrants enrolling all people that can make a difference to the customer (especially from the operations and IT units), mapping out customer touchpoints, and transforming fundamental systems and processes.

Reinvent the Customer Experience

Improving current Customer Journeys enables achieving incremental cost reductions and quality enhancements. However, to improve Customer Journeys there is a need to shift the way Customer Journeys are perceived—from merely addressing the issues in a Customer Journey and streamlining a process to completely transforming the entire Customer Experience.

This should be done by carefully deliberating on and thoroughly analyzing all journeys from a customer’s perspective, drawing inspirations and studying benchmarks from other industries, and addressing customers’ needs.

Lead the Way with Industry Rules

Financial institutions are, to this day, quite cautious of utilizing technology to verify customers’ identification documents for deposit account opening. Compliance teams at these institutions often resist the efforts to transform customer account opening journeys, as they exercise extreme care to ensure regulatory compliance. Some banks make the customers fill their applications online but ask them to visit a branch with the completed paperwork, resulting in a cumbersome Customer Experience that is no longer acceptable as we enter the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Leading organizations strictly adhere to laws but demonstrate to the regulatory authorities how technology has helped them break the status quo surrounding regulatory compliance and develop innovative solutions to manage risks and compliance better.

Interested in learning more about the other imperatives key to developing a breakthrough Customer Experience? You can download an editable PowerPoint on Breakthrough Customer Experience (CX) here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

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Are You Able to Maximize Impact of Customer Experience on Value Creation?

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customer buyingDigital-savvy startups are disrupting markets and threatening conventional businesses.  They are doing this by utilizing technology to offer new products and services and providing tailored yet uncomplicated experiences for their customers.

Likewise, large traditionally-run firms will have to keep evolving their Customer Experience approaches to secure additional avenues of revenue and to stay competitive.  To accomplish this, they will need to develop capabilities to effectively utilize insights on customer preferences and design offerings as per the customers’ preferences.

Many organizations, today, are undertaking Digital Transformation programs to improve their Customer Experiences.  However, a majority of these Digital Transformation initiatives fall short of securing their maximum value potential due to focusing only on improving specific touchpoints instead of confronting the entire customer journeys—spanning across several departments and channels.

To make their Customer Experience sustainable and to become Customer-centric Organizations need to clearly transform their ways of doing business, operations, and employee behaviors.  It is critical to improve these fundamental support processes before embarking on initiating any Customer Experience optimization initiatives.

Customer Experience optimization facilitates in gaining more satisfied/paying customers, additional value, and better retention rates.  Research reveals that the companies that have higher Customer Satisfaction levels can achieve four times growth in value compare to those that rank lower in Customer Satisfaction.

Customer Experience (CX) Approach to Value Creation

The following pragmatic 5-phase approach to Customer Experience Management and Value Creation is of great benefit to organizations aspiring to enrich their Customer Experience, achieve clear-cut differentiation, and capture the most potential value:

  1. Understand What Customers Value
  2. Simplify and Streamline Offerings
  3. Link Customer Value to Operational Drivers
  4. Focus on Most Important Customer Journeys
  5. Adopt Continuous Improvement (CI) Thinking

Let’s now delve deeper into the first 3 phases of the approach.

Understand What Customers Value

Ascertaining the key drivers of Customer Satisfaction is the foremost step in improving Customer Experience.  A flawed approach—that many companies still employ—at the onset of a Customer Experience optimization initiative is to reduce costs associated with internal processes and exploring customer pain points.  This doesn’t assist in maximizing Value Creation.

Customer-centric organizations, on the other hand, devote their time in developing a clear understanding of what really matters to their customers.  This helps in deciding where to focus, rationalizing their processes, and creating new experiences for the customers to generate additional value.

Great Customer Experience necessitates much more than just satisfactory interactions.  Customer Satisfaction should be mapped along the entire customer journey—spanning multiple functions and channels—as customers use various channels to communicate with companies before making a transaction.

Simplify and Streamline Offerings

Alongside rationalizing the processes, it is equally important to carry out a detailed analysis of the brands, offerings, and price structures is essential to tap value from Customer Experience.  After all, even the most pleasing Customer Experience cannot offset an unpredictable or exorbitantly expensive product.

Once these fundamentals are in order, organizations should investigate which interactions and Customer Journeys carry the most significance in a Customer Experience; evaluate how the organization is rated in each journey; identify and focus on the operations that need to be overhauled to improve the overall Customer Experience.

Link Customer Value to Operational Drivers

Technology and customer input provides the stimulus to streamline offerings and Customer Experience.  However, the real value comes from linking the Customer Experience to core operational processes.  Seeing journeys from the customer perspective aids in focusing on what they need and linking internal processes, structures, and KPIs to customer facilitation.

This necessitates deeper insights on elements that are of most value to the customer across a journey, pinpointing drivers of business costs and revenues, and—most importantly—inculcating the right mindsets across the organization.  This detailed evaluation of customer journeys facilitates in determining operational improvements that bear the most positive effect on Customer Experience.

Interested in learning more about the other phases of the approach to managing Customer Experience?  You can download an editable PowerPoint on the Customer Experience (CX) Approach to Create Value here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

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Winning Your Way against Organizational Silos the Strategic Way

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Staying competitive in the face of increasingly accelerated disruption can be a challenge to 21st-century companies.  Many companies have removing organizational silos picstarted to rethink and retool their offerings and operation.  This kind of transformation, however, requires a collaborative effort from all parts of the organization, no matter how different their processes, systems, and cultures have been in the past.

Often, the transformation effort falls flat due to problems that arise when disparate parts of the company fail to work together with a shared sense of mission. Most large companies have divisions, or even groups and functions within divisions, that operate in silos.  This can be for a good reason.  In the knowledge economy, professionals need to work with people who possess similar professional skills to fulfill specific mandates.  Organizational silos can exist to harness knowledge-based skills or specific job functions, or they can be geographic.  In many industries, silos are vital to productivity. But when an organizational transformation is needed, it is a different story.

Silos, during Business Transformation, mean that the very parts of our company that must work together are unaccustomed to doing so, and are even unable to communicate with one another.  They are culturally misaligned, inherently mistrustful, and territorial.  These problems can complicate change efforts, or delay or derail the delivery of their benefits.

Understanding Organizational Silos

Conventional wisdom holds that silos are flawed business construct: a legacy of command and control leadership symbolizing outmoded and inefficient management. But, in truth, silos can help establish boundaries and maintain order.

During normal operation, the positive effect of silos outweighs the negatives. However, during transformation, silos can be stubborn obstacles to creating a more effective path to growth and profitability.  Organizational silos need to be deconstructed during times of significant change to support growth.

Breaking Down Silos: The 7 Strategies

When faced with potential market disruption, siloed companies must take action and break down these silos. There are 7 Strategies to Breaking down Organizational Silos that companies must take. These strategic interventions must be undertaken to achieve change.

Strategy 1: Align leaders

The first strategy in breaking down silos is Align Leaders.  When there is a warring, competing agendas among Leadership and there is confusion among the rank-and-file about what to do day-to-day to enable organizational strategy, then this action is most effective.

Strategy 2: Create cross-functional teams

Strategy 2 is more geared towards encouraging individuals to think of the future state and collaborate.  Most often, siloed teams struggle with cross-functional problems. As such, there is a failure of individuals from different functions to successfully work together.

Strategy 3: Create clear roles and responsibilities

Creating clear roles and responsibilities is a third strategy that aims to clarify priorities and expectations. It can be a challenge when teams are confused about what are the priorities and expectations. As a result, employees do not know what to do, whom to listen to, or how to balance the demands of a day job with a new company or team needs.

Strategy 4: Co-locate teams

Strategy 4 is co-locating teams. It can be a challenge if the organization is global as well as the teams.  Often, global teams run into complexity with scheduling and limited time together.

Strategy 5: Create Joint Incentives

Strategy 5 is creating Joint Incentives.  A challenge often faced is cross-functional teams do not work well together.  When cross-functional teams do not work together, there is cliquishness that can border on high school lunchroom behavior when confronted with new team members or new ways of working.

Strategy 6: Create a “two in a box” Leadership

Creating a “two in a box” leadership is the 6th strategy. When there is a single leader, this can create political challenges.  The choice of a single leader coming from one of the silos can appear political and this can generate resistance.

Strategy 7: Clarify decision rights

The 7th strategy is clarifying decision making rights. This is an effective strategy when consensus is not reached. When consensus is not reached, there can be conflict and when there are two leaders, a standoff can result.

Understanding the 7 Strategies will enable organizations to effectively break down silos. Being able to break down organizational silos can revolutionize organizations to achieve successful transformation. This can be achieved by learning how to balance the effect of organizational silos, as well as knowing how to effectively implement the strategies of breaking these down.

Interested in gaining more understanding of how to remove Organizational Silos? You can learn more and download an editable PowerPoint about Removing Organizational Silos here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

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Optimizing Productivity by Leveraging the Organizational Health Index (OHI)

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bright-cardiac-cardiology-433267The typical approach to improving productivity focuses on assessing variance in quality, time, rate, service, or cost, around which management systems develop incrementally or revolutionary.

Organizational Health Index, on the contrary, focuses on improving performance through improved alignment of organizational systems. For example, by improving competence of key components such as mindset, work design, technical expertise, or relationships; or through improving the interface between work processes, or the interaction between work practices.

Simply put, the capability of an organization to achieve its strategic goals and their alignment defines an organization’s health. The Organizational Health Index (OHI) leverages logical consistency to manage the organizational health. OHI entails quantifiable evaluations, diagnostics and recipes for success that allow the leaders to calculate and accomplish the organizational health goals, required to sustain long-term performance.

Organizational health refers to the need to address soft (leadership, direction or culture) and hard factors (accountability, reporting lines, or controls) affecting performance. The organizational health index is an ongoing continuous improvement system applicable across an organization. The OHI measures not only the current health level, but also determines the next steps for an organization. There are numerous advantages to the organizations implementing it, including:

  • Benchmarking organizational health against the rivals.
  • Aligning the organizational systems, units, and people by communicating shared goals and priorities; and highlighting and plugging the disconnects.
  • Improving organizational performance by pinpointing variances and opportunities to improve health and drive business success.

The OHI Diagnostic Framework provides a road map for leaders and managers to improve organizational health. It measures the organization against the 9 most critical health outcomes; these outcomes comprise both hard and soft organizational elements. Careful measurement of these 9 elements has a proven link with improved financial performance and earning above-average EBITDA margins:

  1. Direction
  2. Accountability
  3. Coordination and control
  4. External orientation
  5. Leadership
  6. Innovation and Learning
  7. Capabilities
  8. Motivation
  9. Work Environment
Org Health Index
There are 37 management practices under these 9 health outcomes, developed to help companies identify the behaviors most critical to their health journey:

Direction

  • Shared Vision
  • Strategic Clarity
  • Employee Involvement

Accountability

  • Role clarity
  • Performance contracts
  • Consequence Management
  • Personal Ownership

Coordination and Control

  • People Performance Review
  • Operational Management
  • Financial Management
  • Professional Standards
  • Risk Management

External Orientation

  • Customer Focus
  • Competitor Insights
  • Business Partnerships
  • Government and Community Relations

Leadership

  • Authoritative Leadership
  • Consultative Leadership
  • Supportive Leadership
  • Challenging Leadership

Innovation and Learning

  • Top-down Innovation
  • Bottom-up Innovation
  • Knowledge Sharing
  • Capturing External Ideas

Capabilities

  • Talent Acquisition
  • Talent Development
  • Process based Capabilities
  • Outsourced Expertise

Motivation

  • Meaningful Values
  • Inspirational Leaders
  • Career Opportunities
  • Financial Incentives
  • Rewards and Recognition

Work Environment

  • Open and Trusting
  • Internally Competitive
  • Operationally Disciplined
  • Creative and Entrepreneurial

Years of research have shown the healthiest companies to align with 1 of the 4 recipes for organizational health. These recipes constitute concrete management practices and activities for the organization to implement.  Leaders need to acknowledge and align to the recipe that is appropriate for them. They can use these success recipes to plan and implement a change program that results in sustainable outcomes. The 4 recipes for organizational health are:

  1. Leadership
  2. Market Maker
  3. Continuous Improvement
  4. Talent

Interested in learning more about the other recipes for Organizational Health and the OHI Diagnostic Framework? You can download an editable PowerPoint on Organizational Health Index here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

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Taking Your Facilitation to the Next Level: Master the 12 Workshop Facilitation Techniques

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Dynamics of every workshop is unique – a unique set of techniques is needed for workshop leaders to achieve expected results.Workshop Technique Facilitation Volume 1

Facilitation is going to be a key component of work in the future as employers and society face bigger and more complex problems and ideas. However, facilitation is never an easy task. It requires a certain level of facilitation skills which can be enhanced by mastering the use of Workshop Facilitation Techniques.  Note that Workshop Facilitation requires different techniques and skills than normal (smaller) Meeting Facilitation.

Using a variety of techniques will help people engage fully in workshops and meetings. In organizations, workshops and meetings are normally undertaken to discuss and address problems and issues while, at the same time, intended to come up with the best ideas and solutions. This can only be achieved when we get to involve more people. But when people vary in things like how we take in information most easily, whether we prefer to speak in large groups or small ones, how much reflection time is needed to make up our minds, this calls for a range of different activities that will engage people to be active generators of ideas, information, and solutions.

The Dynamics of Workshop Facilitation Techniques

Workshop Facilitation Techniques are practical applications of the principles and concepts of group dynamics, behavioral psychology, and communication science essential to facilitate progress and success.

These are essential tools for workshop leaders to facilitate workshops such as Design Planning Sessions, Joint Requirements Planning Workshop or Strategic Planning Workshops. Workshop leaders must employ various techniques to accelerate the capture of planning, analysis, and design information, as well as ensure that participants work effectively together.

Failure to effectively harness the knowledge of participants and manage participant behavior can lead to the inability to accomplish a set of pre-defined objectives that can hamper organizational effectiveness.

Discovering the 12 Techniques in Workshop Facilitation

There are 12 Techniques in Workshop Facilitation. Learning to identify and use the proper technique will maximize workshop facilitators’ capability to engage participation, harness and integrate ideas, and effectively promote in-depth thinking to achieve the workshop objectives and purpose.

  1. 1-2-4-All.  A technique that facilitates rich conversation in small groups and integrates small groups ideas around an important issue or question.
  1. 25-to-10 (Crowdsourcing). A technique for quickly generating and rating ideas.
  1. Card Sorting. A technique of gathering and organizing ideas that draw on the knowledge of the whole group.
  1. Field Trip around the Room.  A technique used to organize how members of the group discuss several topics and integrate ideas on how to address them.
  1. Gallery Walk.  A technique that gets the whole room on its feet to take a walking tour of posters for flip chart pages that reflect each group’s answers to questions.
  1. Knowledge Café. A method that fosters discussion about topics important to participants.
  1. Popcorn Report. A technique for eliciting comments from those who feel moved to share.
  1. Speed Consulting. A technique that draws on experiences of participants to advise another participant on how to address specific problems.
  1. Speed Networking. A technique that gets all participants to reflect on a question and share their insights.
  1. Storytelling. A technique of sharing the knowledge that incorporates the context, emotion, and tacit knowledge.
  1. TRIZ. A technique that helps groups think creatively how to solve a problem or improve a complex process.
  1. Voting with Your Feed. A technique for engaging participants to express their views for or against a position by moving from one side of the room or the other.

Each Workshop Facilitation Technique has its own specific objective and application. Their approaches may be different but there are also some techniques whose approach may be a bit similar. Regardless of what technique is used, what is important is that participants are completely engaged and the objectives set forth are met.

In the end, an effective Workshop Facilitator is one who makes use of various techniques to keep the discussion moving. When tension or discussion comes to a halt, the facilitator must be prepared and know which technique to use to continue the learning and continually make it happen.

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Leveraging the Innovation Effectiveness Curve: Your Key to Growth

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For many companies, developing new products is a hit-or-miss proposition. Successful innovation–the kind that leads to customer engagement Innovation effectiveness curve pixand profits–is rare and hard to achieve. Some have tried investing intensively in research and development.

In a recent study conducted by booz&co. on public companies representing almost 60% of global R&D expenditures, it was found out that there is generally no correlation between R&D spending and financial metrics such as sales or profit growth. Open innovation has been resorted to by some companies but this, too, does not necessarily lead to higher innovation returns. A strategy of tacit benchmarking has also been pursued. Near the average amount of R&D spending has been invested but this led to a greater number of minor product line extensions with often diminishing returns.

On the other hand, there are companies that do best at dreaming up great new products while spending less to do it. One of these is Apple, which commits 5.9% of sales to R&D, less than its industry’s average of 7.6%. This shows that, when it comes to innovation investment, the key question is not how much to spend but how to spend it.

Indeed, innovation success depends on mysterious factors. But there are companies that can overcome these hurdles and regularly product high-yield innovations. The answer is the use of the best approach in determining which innovation success and why others fail.

What is Innovation Effectiveness Curve

The Innovation Effectiveness Curve is the marginal return on innovation investment. It represents the individual innovation profile of the company. It is the value and quality of a company’s innovation portfolio.

The Innovation Effectiveness Curve is done on a project-by-project basis. It contains data about every active project in the pipeline of the company. Each point represents a return on innovation investment for a particular project.

Organizations must be able to understand their project portfolio and diagnose their innovation practices and capabilities to be able to create an Innovation Effectiveness Curve. This is essential as the height of the curve provides a definitive verdict on the power of the innovation capability to drive returns and generate growth.

The 3 Core Properties of an Innovation Effectiveness Curve

An Innovation Effectiveness Curve must be Comprehensive, Stable, and correlates with Growth.

  1. Comprehensive
    An Innovation Effectiveness Curve that is comprehensive has a holistic view of R & D, marketing, strategy, and operations. These are activities that directly bear upon the creation and launch of new products.
  2. Stable
    When the Innovation Effectiveness Curve is stable, it remains consistent over time. The overall shape of the curve remains the same despite changes in innovation projects.
  3. Correlated to Growth
    An Innovation Effectiveness Curve must correlate to growth. There should be an established connection between the effectiveness of innovation efforts and the growth of the company.

When the 3 Core Properties are in place, this makes the Innovation Effectiveness Curve a very powerful analytical tool. On the other hand, when these core properties are not in place, the Innovation Effectiveness Curve falters. This is a signal that growth is slow or may slow down. This is one occurrence not one organization would like to happen.

Interested in gaining more understanding of Innovation Effectiveness Curve and how your organization can strategically use it as a powerful analytical tool? You can learn more and download an editable PowerPoint about Innovation Effectiveness Curve here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

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