Be Different or be dead

April 5, 2021

Why ‘planning on the run’ is important for business survival

Source: Pexels

Why ‘planning on the run’ is important for business survival.

‘Planning on the run’ describes the process of creating a business plan for your organization in the moment you experience and react to unexpected forces bombarding it and forcing it from its intended course.

Your business plan was finalized in January and here it is April, and you find yourself in a pandemic with restrictions imposed on you that render your current plan obsolete.

You absorb the body blow and then it’s time to create a new future given the new times you find yourself in.

COVID-19, unfortunately, is just one example - albeit an enormously serious one - of the continuum of random events that have impacted organizations for the past several years and will likely to continue in the future.

There are other examples ‘acts of randomness’ that have had serious impacts on businesses:

— a surge of online shopping.
— the growth of digital media.
— the rise in popularity of streaming video services.
— overnight job losses due to COVID-19.
— competitor consolidations increasing business vulnerability.
— changes in regulations that put business models at risk.

Random, unforeseen change is the new normal for businesses, and planning on the run is the only way they can adapt and survive.

In our new world everything is temporary:

▪️ Opportunities are here today and gone tomorrow.
▪️ Business continuity is gone; it’s a thing of the past.
▪️ Trend lines are meaningless.
▪️ Extrapolation is a waste of time.
▪️ History is not a teacher of what will likely work tomorrow.

Organizations that do not learn how to plan on the run are destined to be victims of stochasticism; they will die at the hand of discontinuity.

Planning on the run is an art form, it is not a science based on algorithms that try to connect independent variables to predict an outcome. It relies on leadership who understand that a number of human factors determine how well an organization responds to the unforeseen.

Source: Pexels

These 5 actions will launch you to plan on the run.

1. Business plan — when you construct your business plan, establish a short term planning horizon. The days of 5-year plans are over.
The 5-year plan worked when relative continuity of those factors that influenced organizational performance prevailed.

Your business plan should reflect discontinuity, which argues that brief truncated planning periods be used.

My suggestion is to think about your plan as having 24 X 30-day plans. The emphasis on days as opposed to years will force you to closely monitor the execution of your plan and to be able to pivot when things aren’t working out the way you planned.

2. Precision — Get your plan ‘just about right’. There is no such thing as a high degree of precision when you’re in the middle of a storm, so why try to get your plan ’perfect’?
In times of crazy change, any plan is out of date soon after it’s published in any event.

Let’s ’head west’ should be the principle that guides your strategy development when you’re up to your waist in alligators.
Your plan should be notional in terms of strategic intent; define a vague idea about where you want to go and refine it as you discover whether or not it’s working in the chaos that surrounds it.

3. Results — monitor and measure the key results of each 30-day plan period as soon as the month is over.

It is essential when organizations are squeezed by overwhelming pressure that success or failure be tracked in real time; in this world you can’t afford to wait another 30 days to have results reported — your reaction time to any pressure is compressed and you may be dead by then.

4. Values — Look at your organization’s values. If they don’t cover the critical importance of reaction  to unforeseen events, they’re incomplete.

About the only thing that can be accurately predicted by organizations looking decades forward is disruptive change, so if nimbleness and reaction competencies aren’t an integral element in the culture of the organization it is not likely to survive.

This requires that all people-functions be recreated in the image of reaction: the people recruited and trained for every function in the organization must have the inclination and ability to react to the unexpected in a way that leans forward into the opposing force to produce a positive outcome.

In the new normal, individuals who are reticent to reacting to ‘body blows’ pose a risk to organizations; they cannot be tolerated.

5. Customers — Invest any resources you may have available in activities that impact the customer.

Maintaining loyal customers in the face of chaos is critical. Make sure you are paying enough attention to the elements that are critical to providing great customer service — good service is not good enough when customers are experiencing the pain of change just like your business is.

And redefine sales to be service with the emphasis of ‘taking care’ of people rather than pushing your products at them. Being sensitive to their pain will earn you the right to have their business which they will give you unabashedly.

Planning on the run is the new business planning process. It’s the only model that will work in the kind of world we’re now in.
‘Planning in motion’ is replacing traditional approaches buried deep in business management pedagogy.

Those organizations who take leadership of this new mode of orchestrating their business will succeed; those that do not will fail and likely die.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 4.5.21 at 06:24 am by Roy Osing
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April 3, 2021

Why great people often do things that surprise everyone

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Why great people often do things that surprise everyone.

You’ve heard these types of comments before as descriptors of an individual who attracts a positive rating from leadership and is viewed as someone with potential to go further in the organization.

“He can be counted on to deliver consistent results; he’s dependable.”

“She’s predictable; you get few surprises from her work.”

Predictability can be a negative

Predictability is often, if not always, looked upon as a strength; an attribute that leaders find “comfortable” and desirable.

Over my career, I noticed many predictable employees found their way up the career ladder, but these people didn’t add the greatest value to the organization.

In fact, I believe the easy and comfortable employee robs an organization of long term value because of their restrictive and conservative ways.

Here’s my thinking.

Unwelcome bedfellows

A high comfort level implies that predictable employees follow the approach expected by the organization’s “establishment”; they follow the rules that govern acceptable behaviour.

Meeting leadership expectations can sometimes be unwelcome bedfellows to breakaway thinking and achieving glorious results. The best result can sometimes be achieved by NOT following the prescribed direction exactly, but by following your gut — but it requires risk taking and the conviction of your ideas.

Predictable behaviour prohibits breakaway results.

Boredom

In many ways, being relatively certain of an outcome is uninteresting; the “amaze factor” is absent.
The capacity to discover something unexpected is stripped away, denying a result that presents a new opportunity that emphatically changes the direction of the organization.

While you are busy doing the expected, you’re not on the outlook for creating a surprise that vaults your performance to another level.

Learning from what is achieved WHILE it is being achieved and then taking whatever action is implied by what is learned is severely restricted.
Predictable behaviour is boring.

Equations

Acting involuntarily to a prescribed set of rules and behaviour means predictable folks’ actions can be formularized to a certain extent.
An equation — or some other tool that creates a relationship between inputs and output — can be used to determine the outcome of their actions with a high degree of precision.

It begs the question “If an algorithm can be constructed that use a person’s action(s) to predict an outcome, why use a human in the process?” You don’t need human value-add; use software to create it.

Predictable behaviour limits the human factor.

Originality

Predictability suggests compliance and risk minimization which stultifies innovation and creativity.

People look for rules and governing policies to guide their behaviour and approach to problem solving rather than finding the appropriate method to solve the problem at hand.

Original thought is missing in action in favour of dutifully following the rules and practices of the organization.

Predictable behaviour quashes originality.

Contingencies

Individuals who operate mechanically have difficulty creating a new approach to a challenge or problem if the accepted method doesn’t work.

A Plan B mentality escapes the predictable one; inefficiency and frustration are produced by continually attempting to reapply the same approach in hopes of achieving a different result.

Predictable behaviour misses the need to recover when Plan A doesn’t work out.

Predictability does help some individuals be successful in a controlled environment, but there are long term opportunity costs to the organization that are always ignored.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 4.3.21 at 06:24 am by Roy Osing
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April 1, 2021

Why goosebumps should tell you the best one to hire

Source: Pexels

Why goosebumps should tell you the best one to hire.

A key element of the business plan that many organizations use to separate themselves from their competition is to create memorable experiences for their customers.
To blow ‘em away and leave them breathless with how they’ve been treated.

The problem is, however, is that these same organizations haven’t figured out precisely how to do it. They’re excellent at declaring the aspiration but fall short when it comes to delivering on their intent.

And as a result their customer service intent is no more than a helium-filled shallow promise with no evidence to back it up and their performance is unaffected.

Typically memorable experiences are created by people, notwithstanding the relatively unsuccessful attempts - in my view - that many organizations make using technology to do it.

Hire the right person

The most important and basic way of achieving this objective is to recruit people who ‘love’ human beings. People that have the instinctive desire to serve their fellow homo-sapiens. To take care of them. To satisfy them regardless of what they want.

Hire the right person into a service position if you want to dazzle the customer or leave them breathless from the service experience they’ve had with you.

I’m not impressed with the quality of some people recruited into customer service positions because many of them are incapable of delivering even a mediocre service experience.

Why? Well, many of them have been placed in the position because of their seniority in the company, or because they are looking for a career move and they want to try customer service.

And as a result, these people find that they really don’t ‘like customers’ with all the complications they bring and they would really rather be doing something that didn’t involve interacting with other humans (and the customer who engages with this person suffers).

How does this happen? How does an individual who would rather be writing code, taking inventory or preparing financial statements ever get a job in customer service?

The decision making process to select people for service jobs is imprecise and severely flawed and in too many instances unqualified and unwilling people are let loose with your most precious asset — your customer.

So how do you fix the problem? How does an organization ensure they are hiring individuals who are not only capable of delivering mind-blowing service, but also look forward to doing it with every fabric of their body?

Can you train someone to like a human?

Many would say that you can train people to do it; certainly that’s what many human resource managers generally believe — why else would they use seniority as a criteria to place people in customer service?

The fact is, however, despite all the good intentions of cross-training, you simply can’t train someone to like someone else.

You can give them ‘how to have a smile in your voice’ training and teach them how to grin at others and use other tools intended to deal with customer better, but you can’t train a person to bring all the honest emotional energy to the table that is required to create a memorable experience for another person.

People who love people are born to do it, and so the challenge is to discover them and embrace them in your organization as they truly are the custodians of the loyalty moment when a customer decides to continue doing business with you (and to tell others how great your organization is) or to leave for another service provider.

So how do you spot these people who naturally care for — ‘love’ — other humans?

You have to start with the usual task of filtering through the profiles of potential candidates, looking for content that relates to serving customers as opposed to merely stressing academic achievements or other hard accomplishments.

Most people avoid what they believe is the soft stuff as it relates to their background, but for the delivery of remarkable service, the soft stuff is absolutely essential.
And check their references to see if others commented on the candidate’s capability to effectively deal with others with care and affection.

Source: Pexels

The interview

But the critical element of the hiring process is the personal interview and I discovered an effective tool to separate the individuals who could really create magical experiences for others from those that talked a good game but who didn’t have the attitude or inclination to do it.

Ask two simple questions

Here’s a rather simple but so effective way of separating the human being lovers from the ‘fish’ who may have been through some type of customer service training program.

▪️ First, ask the prospective employee “Do you love human beings?”.

They will realize that this is a bit of a trick question but will not know where you are going with it. It’s a fun question to ask as the interviewer to say the least.

Most people will say ‘yes’ in varying ways, ranging from the declaration ‘absolutely’ to the positive inference ‘sure’ and the questioning ‘of course’.
However, to satisfy the real intent of the question, you need to dig deeper.

▪️As a follow up question, pose this: “Tell me a story that will show me that you love and care about your fellow humans”.

The responses you get from this question will define two types of candidates: one, ‘The Intellectualizer’’ and two, ‘The People Lover’.

The Intellectualizer has figured out what you are up to with the question and conjures up a story with their mind that leaves you cold.
Their answer draws on logic — what they believe you expect to hear from them — and therefore it’s dispassionate to the point of being superficial and phoney.

Those that don’t have the innate desire to move people emotionally with their answer should be ushered out of the interview.

The natural-born People Lover, on the other hand, thrills you with a story that leaves you warm all over.
Their story paints a vivid picture of someone who cares about other people and who is creative at finding ways to deliver unforgettable memories for them.

This was the question that separated the people who really got what it took to serve others from those who had only a theoretical understanding of what it too to be a caregiver.

Do you feel the goosebumps

Those that were born to serve leave you with goosebumps while they tell their story. Their story is rich with detail and the threads that bind it together were all about the importance of connecting with people on the emotional level. And their authenticity pours out with every word.

These individuals were the real deal. I hired them with minor interest in their other qualifications. And they always did me proud the way they dealt with our customers.

And many eventually found their way into higher level positions in the customer service organization to provide the leadership necessary to sustain this strategy that was extremely effective is gaining and maintaining a competitive advantage for our organization.

So if you really want to achieve a service strategy based on remarkable and memorable experiences, hire the People Lover who will leave you with goosebumps.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 4.1.21 at 04:39 am by Roy Osing
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March 29, 2021

6 easy ways to know when to quit and walk away

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6 easy ways to know when to quit and walk away.

We are all, at some point, faced with the decision: do I stay or do I go?
It could be in a relationship or it could be in a particular job role and generally results from reaching a tipping point of some sort. Something has happened to you and it triggered the question.

So, how do you decide whether walking away is the right thing for you to do?

Here are 6 filters that in total should help you decide if adios is the right call.

Check your energy reservoir

How much energy is it taking to continue doing what you’re doing? Are you constantly having to call on your energy reserves to push ahead?

Everyone has an energy reservoir which represents a backup level of energy to draw on when required. And the issue is whether or not it is as full as it once was, or has its level been reduced.

If your reserves are down, there are 3 implications:
— there’s less to draw on when you need it for future challenges;
— it will take longer to replenish when expended, thus requiring a longer recovery episodes when needed;
— you may want to reconsider how you use your scarce reserves and decide that your current activities have a lower priority than they once had. Your incremental payback from tapping your reservoir is diminishing every time you draw from it.

If you conclude that you’re not receiving a large enough return on your energy investment, a “go” answer is the highly likely response to the question.

Check the people around you

Do you still enjoy their company? Are they as interesting as they once were or are they getting too predictable for you? Do you like being with them or do you find yourself not looking forward to being with them?

If you are staring at a negative reply to this question, you’re leaning for a “go” answer.

Check your support symmetry

Sometimes having strong symmetric support for your efforts is worth the investment in time and energy you have at your disposal.
But ask yourself these questions:
— do you support others and they don’t support you back?
— do you find others return the support you offer them unconditionally?
— are their specific individuals in your bubble that speak of support for you, but act in an unsupportive manner?
If you conclude that asymmetric support for you exists in too many of your colleagues, then a “go” light is your most probable outcome.

Check for toxicity

Is the working environment toxic? Are there a needless number of contrarians trying to force their own self-serving narrative and agenda?

Divergents can be positive if their modus operandi is to seek out-of-the-box solutions to common problems.
But if their purpose is to be disruptive, the negative energy and emotion they create warrants a “go” conclusion.

Check your emotion barometer

Do your emotions run high when you are among your colleagues? Do you find yourself anxious and short tempered while engaging with them?
Conversations that send you to emotional extremes — anger, over reaction, shouting — are personally taxing and are often unproductive from the team’s perspective.

If you feel you’re on an emotional tightrope constantly with your immediate circle of contacts (958) then the “go” door is probably slightly ajar.

Check your appreciation meter

Do you feel that your teammates appreciate your efforts or does it look like they expect that you’ll just keep barrelling along doing more than what is expected?

Often, “Nice work” or “Good job” from those who witness your work go a long way to making the effort you put in feel worthwhile. And when you never hear the words, there’s an emptiness you feel which gradually results in a ‘to hell with it’ attitude.
If your hard work is falling ‘on deaf ears’ maybe you’re closer to a “go” than you realize.

Wrap up

It’s rarely a single factor that decides anything. Usually it’s a combination of a number of seemingly small things that make you decide to either stay in a relationship or role or leave it.

If you’ve given yourself a “go” on most of the above filters then perhaps a “gå” is in order.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 3.29.21 at 03:29 am by Roy Osing
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