DARE is the mental model for high performance and change.

You write your story through your DECISIONS, ACTIONS and RESULTS and a thorough EVALUATION of how you did.

A new Result requires new Decisions and Actions.

Thought Of The Week

“Greater uncertainty ahead brings the absolute certainty that you will need courage, speed, adaptability and tolerance* in your organisational design.”

*How far you can stretch things/make errors before you break something.

How do you prepare your organisation for a future that is more uncertain than ever?

This question has dominated my shared airport rides, dinners, meetings and design engagements with senior leaders in the past decade.

While the nuance will change the core principle is constant:

“We need to move from a slow command-and-control machine to a courageous, fast moving, adaptable organism.”

From that foundation, I watch leaders then move forward in one of two directions:

Direction 1 Command that everybody is fully empowered to do as they are told - faster. The leader then broadly resumes their previous calendar of activities.

Direction 2  Design a shift in decision making authority and begin building the courage in others to own and take those Decisions and Actions. The leader and entire exec team then change their calendar actions.

So what are those of us engaged in designing and building the shift to ‘organisms’ actually doing?

We are creating a situation where each individual human, each cell in the organism, has the drive, skill, strategic clarity, permission and courage to Decide and Act to deliver the best Result and the psychological safety and humility to Evaluate their progress.

Architecting this shift requires two things: 

1               Helping (requiring) each individual cell to discover the courage and mindset to DARE (unlearning decades of ‘command and control’ emotional responses and narratives).

And

2               Changing each leader’s mindset to one of ensuring clarity and consistency of: Results required; permissions to act; safety in the case of errors as we learn; and constant inspiration towards building a future that matters.

It is a symmetrical change.

It’s detailed work, but as a high level measure of where you are at, let’s end with a question for reflection.

An outcome of our design work is an exec/senior team that DESIRES feedback at the end of each visit to their meeting room by a more ‘junior’ colleague.

They are hungry to know whether their colleague felt clear, empowered and inspired to act when they left the exec team meeting.

How would you / your senior leaders rank on this metric?

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My Week

I have spent 25 years watching businesses move from start-up to maturity. The moment when you must hire people, often subject matter experts, from bigger, slower organisations to join the carefully nurtured community of disruptors is a critical juncture.

This week I was in Barcelona with a team from Travelperk, Spain’s most exciting tech start up on many measures. They delivered a masterclass in navigating that ‘critical juncture’ and the commitment onstage from senior leaders and from Atomico, their PE Partners, was inspiring.

I particularly enjoyed COO, JC Taunay-Bucalo’s straight-shooting and wonderfully personal presentation. He gave a powerful set of permissions to everybody in the room to challenge in the pursuit of high performance and to expect and accept a degree of chaos as they did.

You can follow JC and his adventures through his LinkedIn account here.

Every success to you all and thank you for your hospitality.

I am in Oman at the start of next week with an ambitious leadership team embarking on a rapid growth journey through a major transformation. Then to Ukraine for the Lviv Bookforum and on to Kyiv. Much of this week has been filled with preparation.

And I am finally regaining my own consistency in training after a disrupted summer. No excuses. Dropped (50% of) the ball. Now I’m back on it. You can follow me on Strava and please give me some stick if I fail to show up!

Book Of The Week

In Barcelona this week “Working Backwards” by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr was mentioned. It is a book I devoured a year or so ago.

You may or may not like Amazon or it’s founder Jeff Bezos. You cannot dispute their courage, speed, adaptability or tolerance.

So how was that built in by design? Especially as they began recruiting experts from other established, slower cultures to accelerate their speed and growth. Working Backwards helps to explain how they did it.

NB: This is a technical, careful book. It’s more “Good to Great’ and less a Walter Isaacson style page-turner biography of a founder.