THE OPERATING STATES OF AN ORGANIZATION

I learned about these "operating states of an organization" a long time ago and was reintroduced to them recently by a new friend and consultant, Peter Roche. These are some of the best business production and management ideas/rules I've ever come across and share them with you today:

1. Formulation: Demonstrating to yourself and others that you are ready and able to produce the required result.

2. Concentration: Demonstrating to yourself and others that you can be counted on to produce the required result.

3. Momentum: Demonstrating that you know the leverage points that multiply your results.

4. Stability: Demonstrating that you know what to do to produce results (which includes the ability to correct) and can be counted on for stable production.

5. Breakthrough: Demonstrating that you can produce expanded results by operating within a “sourceful” structure.

6. Mastery: Demonstrating that you can train others to recreate your results and go beyond them.

Emergency: Slipping back one operating state

Danger: Slipping back two operating states

1. Formulation - Characteristics and Necessary Actions:

Create the project and the accountabilities,

? Announce “the project” – what it is (as outcomes), by when, and who is involved,

? Members declare themselves – as accountabilities:

i. What I can be counted on for?

ii. What can I count on others in the “project” for?

? Create the “project”

i. Timelines

ii. Dependencies

iii. Resources

? Establish lines of communication, committed listening and speaking

? Create a foundation of relationship from which to go to work

? Put in ground rules and agree practices

? Do not question people’s commitment

? Find out what’s wanted and needed - today - that will make a difference

? Produce it - be in action - move

? Look at “what’s so – the facts”- not your thoughts, feelings, opinions, or good

idea bank.

2. Concentration - Characteristics and necessary actions:

A high input/low output phase – 10 in and 1 out

“Fish or cut bait" – no spectators or commentators

Concentrate

? Overcome inertia

? Box yourself in (and others) - make public promises

? Give yourself (and others) no alternative. Black and white - no ambiguity or

equivocation

? Follow the instructions

? Force of will - determination and intentionality

? Trust, yet verify

? Time for leadership – from everyone

? Tighten discipline - get it done

? Establish your right to the job. Make it your own

? Clear-cut simple statement of short-term results to be achieved. Usually imposed

from outside

? Concentration of attention - only what’s necessary, one thing at a time

? Intensity and focus

? Keep your word - no matter what

? Wrest control into your own hands

? Economize - no unnecessary “doingness” - eliminate unnecessary conversations,

actions and distractions

? Toughness - as in resilient - you can take it. Can stand toe-to-toe with difficulty

? No reasons, discussions, or explanations - grind out results

? No room for recreational complaining and tantrums

? Just produce results

? Promote strengths, encourage winning atmosphere

? Coming out of concentration, you have become someone who can be worked

with – coachable, correctable

? Speaks, “This is what I said I’d do, this is what I did”

? Take care of yourself, eat properly, exercise, sleep, stay connected with family,

friends and interests

? Don’t drop out compassion.

3. Momentum - Characteristics and necessary actions:

A high output phase -1 in and 10 out

High activity; Expand participation; Look for leverage points

? Unleash energy, swing out, risk taking

? Spontaneity

? Inspire versus manage

? Very high activity

? Expansion of participation. People enrolled in participating and enrolled in

enrolling others

? Promote the project - let people know it’s working

? Produce and produce, then produce some more

? Elevated level of communication - more sense of being in communication and

communicating

? Clean up the wounds and hurts left over from concentration

? Direction and guidance versus domination or force

? Expand out - creating more work, more, but not as hard

? Make what you want well thought of

? Consciously create momentum

? Look for points of leverage, focus on multiplying points - multiplying yourself

? Clean up the integrity and the loose ends

? Watch the discipline doesn’t go out - or disappear – and operate from "nothing is

handled" - yet.

? Focus comes from communication not orders

? One input in - many outputs out

? Communicate with staff to inspire them and have them get results from others

through inspiration and acknowledgment

? Live in the question, “What will make a difference?”

? People who are participating being concerned for the accomplishment of the

project not just producing a result or following specific instructions

? See that people are more self-determining

? Have people move from objectives imposed from the outside to aligning on the

objectives by choice.

4. Stability - Characteristics and necessary actions:

Results becoming reliable

Get structured

? A lot of definitions - define people’s area of responsibility and accountability

? Structure/plan/organize. Establish a network of accountabilities - define responsibilities and accountabilities and delegate – as if readying to franchise

? Don’t tamper with what’s working and don’t drop anything out

? You are building a surplus

? Manage (work your tail off)

? Train and develop people

? Plan for what’s next

? Structure things. Organize yourself

? Delegate

? Empower people

? No longer doing or watching everything

? Devise measures, milestones and statistics for every job – what’s six sigma for

everything?

? Team work – like the Harlem Globetrotters

? Strategy - look at the whole, see what works, generate a context. No more

process, and not from top down. Organize from understanding the whole - you

need to know what the whole is

? Understand the nature of an organization – what parts are mechanisms and what

parts are organisms

? Statistics - if they go up, find out what you did and standardize it; if they go

down, find out what you stopped doing (or did) and put it back and stabilize it.

Understand and know procedures

? Now you need to know the nature of what you are doing; up to now, it was work

like mad to produce results. Now it’s understand the nature of an organization

that translates intentions into reality - then manage that. Focus on communications - that translates intentions into desired outcomes

? Doing what works - you need to know what it is that works

? Once you get above stability you need to be able to think and act in ways in

which people don’t ordinarily think and act. You need to be able to just think

and act without starting from figuring things out, without thinking about the

relationships between things.

5. Breakthrough -Characteristics and necessary actions:

Put in place “sourceful” structures – that enable the results to happen

"Infeasible" as an opening for action

New dimensions into your reality

? Give up why it happened and who did it

? Put your attention on what produced the results

? You must provide a “sourceful” structure. What enables results to happen - not

what happened

? Sourceful structures viewed from a lower state looks strange - as three dimensions

looked through 2 dimensions

? That which was familiar is no longer familiar

? The way of knowing something won’t work anymore. Recognize the old

structure is inadequate

? See “infeasible” or “impossible” as opening for a breakthrough

? Create new dimensions to your reality

? Declare “this shall be”

? Make “unreasonable” requests

? Get out of your structure and come from “source” to handle your structure

? Vigilance - there is a fascination with the results and a tendency to take your

attention off what was producing the results

? Up your operational ability - up your “on-top-of-it’ness”, and not up your

control

? Less judgmental, less “this is the way it is”

? Not much attention on self. “Self-concern” achieved by completing, dismissing

or handling decisively things about self

? Clean up messes.

6. Mastery -Characteristics and necessary actions:

Train others to do what we can do

? Demonstrate that you can train others to recreate your results and go

beyond them

? Give your job away

? Take on something new - start in formulation with new venture/project