Mike Russell

Suggestion: do your end of year reviews, retrospectives, lessons learned, and the like BEFORE holiday breaks, if you usually do it afterward.

Advantages:

✅  “Closes” the year before holiday, leaving your mind free to enjoy the holidays without background bothers and the potential stress.

✅  Allows your mind to work on things in the background … potentially providing new insights that a prolonged rest period can generate.

✅  You can make changes now that take energy and mental effort that might drain/reduce momentum at the beginning of the year.

If you do your annual review combined with planning before the end of the year, make room for an additional short plan review at the beginning of the year.

Why do that if you just “did” planning? To check if the second advantage above – new insights – means you may need some changes to your plans.

Don’t “race” into and out of a holiday period … let the holiday work for you while you don’t work 😀

“Learning to live with ambiguity and uncertainty is a necessary precondition for more opportunity. If you want to “win,” you need a pretty significant amount of ambiguity and uncertainty in you life.” – Taylor Pearson

(from a 2022 detailed article by him about the OODA loop https://lnkd.in/etDD3u32)

Does his statement resonate with you or repel you?

The key question is: whether or not Taylor’s statement is true or at least somewhat true.

His statement is probably the opposite of what people aim for. The common aim is more likely to reduce uncertainty in any form.

He suggests seeking or injecting uncertainty if you don’t have enough!

Is there uncertainty in your business? In your life?

How can you manage it?

Work with it?

Leverage it? (his main point in the quote)

 

P.S.

Lots of debate about “agile,” “agility,” etc. – including OODA as a specific approach – on LinkedIn and elsewhere. Including the theme that “agile” – whatever that means to the proponent – is dead.

“Agile” or OODA or whatever isn’t the underlying issue.

Uncertainty and what you do about/with it is.

Saw a LinkedIn article about “How can you develop your leadership skills with limited resources?”

It didn’t have my answer.

Answer: do volunteer leadership.

Bonus answer: this is a really GREAT way for youth to try out and improve leadership.

Benefits:

1. Learn by doing and getting real-world feedback … far, far more effective than just reading, taking courses, etc.
2. Leading volunteers is one of the hardest forms – if not hardest – forms of leadership. Doing well in this environment will position you superbly for better leadership in any non-volunteer organization.
3. You will identify quickly and accurately areas of current strengths and where you need development to improve as a leader … real-time assessments 😉 You can always augment with other formal assessments, reading (check the library and loads of free stuff online!) as needed.
4. If possible, find a senior leader or someone else to help mentor and coach you as you learn. Use online resources like ChatGPT, Claude, and other to feed situations you’re facing and get ideas … a form of online coaching (just don’t take the “advice” “as is,” just as you wouldn’t for anything else the AI LLMs provide!).
5. This is the lowest cost, highest payback development you can do. Time will always be an investment for developing skills, no matter how you go about it. Time actually leading is like gold for development.
6. Working in a volunteer-based organization will also expand your network in different and interesting ways.
7.  And, if a cause you support, furthers the cause!

Are any of these happening to your company?

❓ We aren’t acting fast enough to hold our ground, much less get ahead of our competitors

❓ We’re not sure how we can harness or even survive AI

❓ We want to grow, but where to start?

❓ We need to cut costs and take other measures to succeed … but any changes – or even hints of changes – are viewed with suspicion or fear of layoffs

❓ People aren’t willing to volunteer improvement ideas

❓ People wait to be told what to do

❓ Our chances of success have been dramatically reduced due to people problems

If so, you’re not alone. You’re also not in company you want to keep!

You need to move faster and respond better to survive and thrive.

However, you can’t work on everything at once. Time and money are scarce and maybe even consumed by just coping with the current condition.

Figure out what to work on first.

You must focus on a first few things that will make the biggest difference for your company now. The 80/20 levers that get your breathing room and accelerate success.

Want help?

Contact us to help you get out of the quicksand. Get a quick, free company self-audit to pinpoint your specific focus areas and get traction now.

If you own or run a business and want it to get bigger, you might think a lot about money coming in and money going out. But there’s this big word, “organizational development,” that might sound like it’s only for MBAs, not for your business plans.

Imagine how a snake grows: when it gets too big for its skin, it sheds it all at once and gets a new one. People grow differently; our skin stretches and changes slowly over time.

Your business might be more like the snake right now. You’re busy selling things and making them, and you might not think about teaching your team or making new rules until “later.”

But what if you suddenly hit a wall? You can’t grow your business anymore because of internal problems like:

❌ The people who help run your business can’t handle more work

❌ There’s no one ready to take over if leaders leave

❌ Your business set-up can’t handle more work or is making things harder

❌ The policies you had when your business was small might cause problems now that you have more people and more “business”

When you hit these problems, it’s like you’re the snake that needs new skin. You’ll have to work a huge amount on your business, like building your team and making new ways of working, so you get past the roadblock.

Fixing these things usually takes much longer than you’d like … especially training new leaders or finding people from outside to help.

Also, trying to correct everything fast and at once usually breaks even more things. Do it the easier way, along the way.

Therefore, if your business is growing fast or you want it to grow fast, you should start thinking about these things NOW. You want your business to grow easily, without big crises.

Make plans to help your team get better and for operations changes that promote growth. If you think your leaders might struggle, help them get ready and think about who could take over in the future as people move up … even for your role.

You might need to ask for outside help to figure out what your business needs and how to make it better … or even for perspective.

Remember, working on these things will take time from you and others in your business. Make sure you plan for that when you’re making growth plans.

Revisiting the “seven social sins”:

❌ Wealth without work.
❌ Pleasure without conscience.
❌ Knowledge without character.
❌ Commerce without morality.
❌ Science without humanity.
❌ Religion without sacrifice.
❌ Politics without principle.

If we change “religion” to “values,” then this could also be a “seven organizational sins” list.

What do you think?

Are organizations sufficiently “social” that these apply?

What changes, if any, would you make to fit today’s organizations?

 

Origin: the list became widely known after being published by Gandhi in his newspaper in October 1925. The list had been sent to him (with “worship” instead of “religion”) after a sermon by Frederick Lewis Donaldson at Westminster Abbey in London earlier that year.