Alignment in uncertain times (and magic!)

Have you recently signed off on or campaigned for a new project or budget?

I regularly encounter stakeholders where budget discussions particularly, alongside general matters, are quickly entrenched in ‘positions’ instead of ‘interests’ *

The underlying reason for the allotment gets left by the wayside, and it’s regularly a struggle for clients to take a step back and look at the bigger game.

* Positions vs Interest is from ‘Getting to Yes - the Harvard System for Principled Negotiation’, by Fisher and Ury, something I’ve been using for over the past decade, check it out on Amazon.

This bigger game is only in focus when your team has clear alignment.

And things are complex, very complex!

So if you know what game you’re playing, and you can all see it, the next question that arises is;

What strategy are you using to win?

Does that bring up a tremor in you, or are you locked on course and getting great results?

Interestingly some of the recent meetings I’ve been having with clients are 50:50 for those who are really secure in their direction, and now we’re moving to tell their stories, and those who admit before they get to the market engagement layers, we need to work on the strategy side of things.

Work through strategy?

Yikes, that must take months and you've already got a 3 or 5-year strategy locked away in a draw right?

No, it doesn't take months - it takes days, and sorry to tell you though if your strategy is focused on 3 or 5 years, it's likely quite useless.

Your strategy has to be an organic, pragmatic, living framework within which all decisions are made consistent with the nature and direction of the business.

I'm certified in Sentient Strategy?, which is a process to formulate your strategy quickly, then to use it immediately for as long as conditions warrant, and to make changes rapidly as conditions change.

If you’d like to chat about it, send me message or give me a call on 0402 017 700, and you can do a free self-assessment on your strategy using my Investor Trust Score - https://bit.ly/InvestorTrustScore.

One of the questions I keep seeing bring people unstuck is 'Our why, scale and impact in the world is obvious, and others are leveraging this knowledge'.

How would you rank yourself on that question, out of 10?

You can’t prepare for magic

I’m finalising another large project, which with review and suggestions on the business strategy, then industry and competitor research.

Then we workshopped the company’s tone of voice, and I consulted with their existing design agency to update the logo and styleguide.

Storywise over the past weeks I've been reducing 6 hours of unscripted filmed interviews with six people into a base of 72 short Q&As.

From these I've produced 18 videos of a possible 40, then structured these into themes and arranged them in an information architecture for a new website, complemented by a series of stakeholder surveys.

As the final video stage, I've been aggregating and arranging the sharpest bits of footage into a woven narrative that paints the business proposition, told through the unscripted energy of the participants.

I use unscripted interviews because this is the best way to get genuine insights out of people.

Why?

You can't prepare for magic!

It needs to be drawn out in conversation, dug for, have a light shone on it and then captured in the moment.

It's fleeting, beautiful and unique to each person I'm talking to.

I also have people talk to me through a glass prism, meaning they see my face instead of the lens, and are then looking straight into the camera (and at the viewer) in the final product.

Seriously who wants to stare at the side of someones face when they are supposed to be talking to you, can everyone stop settling for this as an industry standard and respect the viewer more?

I've now finalised the footage transitions between speakers and added foley.

Foley is background sound effects, such as waves and ambient noise, because you don't record audio when flying a drone over a beach, you add it in post production!

How it started

How it’s going

And the magic.. this is the aggregated highlight of the best bits, where I’ve used leading questions to have each team member speak to aspects of the business strategy and fundamentals of customer engagement, so I had what I needed to bring it together as a capstone on the smaller stories.

The feedback I got yesterday?

“Literal chills haha! This is exactly what we were hoping to see - no notes!”

Pretty good! I’m getting better at this, it’s been 14 years so far :D

***

Is it a lot of work? Absolutely.

Could it done be quicker, cheaper, faster at lower quality? Of course..

Though if this set of communication tools moves millions, if not billions of dollars towards better outcomes, and gets used again, and again, and again, why not put the effort in, the first time?

The next stages involve putting things through web design and development, then operational integration with the team to bring it all to life, and a launch, though that's another story!

So I put it to you, as Mohammed Qahtani did so eloquently in the video below;

'Words are power, words could be your power' -

Reach out if you'd like to chat about capturing yours.

Mohammed Qahtani is a Saudi Arabian engineer, won the Toastmasters International World Championship of Public Speaking in 2015, after several eliminating rounds that took six months with 30,000 participants from more than 100 countries.

Go Matildas! Yes to the Voice. Speak to you next Thursday.

Please click like to show me you're reading, and consider leaving a comment about an aspect of your story your business and team are really aligned on :)