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

“The drive to do something because it is interesting, challenging, and absorbing - is essential for high levels of creativity”

Daniel Pink

When I sit behind a closed door with a CEO, my job is to bring a clear set of sound architectural principles we can rely upon.

The CEO is deploying expensive intellectual capital to deliver a strategy in outrageous volatility at astonishing speed against outstanding competitors with fast evolving tech.

They are rarely ‘telling people what to do’ and ‘cascading the deck’ is unlikely to cut it.

They need people they’ve never met to WANT, deeply, to take brave new Decisions and Actions that will deliver their strategy – whilst the CEO is asleep on another time zone.

Given this, the first architectural principle I can bring to the conversation is that we are designing for intrinsic motivation and a profound connection to the strategy. We are not designing a better command system or a set of values.

If you want intrinsic motivation, and a profound connection to the strategy, there are structural things that we must do.

Certain conditions are necessary to develop intrinsic motivation in others and specific elements must be in place for people to understand and believe in the strategy. Where these are missing, we can make ground very fast.

Intrinsic motivation – the drive to do the thing because I want it done - requires three elements to be present:

• Purpose

• Autonomy

• Mastery (growth, challenge and progress)

We can use a variety of data to measure for this and we can use very precise tools and trainings to improve the situation quickly.

Like building design, the architecture of transformation and performance is complex. But it is neither mysterious nor a dark art.

As a starter for you: If you want to build autonomy in others, don’t own or fix their problems. You can start by asking questions about ‘what will you do to solve it then?’  instead of giving answers.

Anybody can start playing with this change, this afternoon, with colleagues, friends and family.  

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Book Of The Week

Daniel Pink’s ‘Drive’ is still the best primer I have discovered on intrinsic motivation for practitioners (rather than academics).

Even better, you don’t need to read the last portion of the book. Here he goes into practical applications of the academic findings and, with respect to Mr Pink, of whom I am a big fan, I am not convinced he’s on the money. The first part alone, entirely worth your money.

It is a compelling thesis on what creates intrinsic motivation, why it does, and why you need to be aware of this if you run a business where you need your people to be creative and adaptable to solve problems – even when nobody is waving a carrot or a stick.

My Week

My CXO clients are giving me fabulous puzzles to solve. Details always remain confidential, but a powerful theme over these weeks has been using story to communicate and connect to strategy and accelerate change. Intricate, long term and creative work with a huge impact.

This week I was invited to address a global insurance team who gathered in London and a global pharmaceutical team gathering in Amsterdam. Thank you to both of my hosts for looking after me so very well and creating wonderful events.

In both presentations, I invited the room to relax, go inside themselves (together) and increase their freedive breath hold with me. This is a new experiment and it worked beautifully.

The improvements in breath holding are not the thing. The win is a team from four corners of the globe taking a moment to close their eyes, reflect on the strategy and their ‘bold actions’ and breath together as one.

In London and Amsterdam, the groups became a single organism as they synchronised and slowed their breathing before committing, together, to bold change.

Having taken soundings from a number of DARE readers, the feedback has been to write a shallower, shorter newsletter or to make it fortnightly.

So, from this week onwards, your DARE newsletter will become fortnightly rather than weekly.

We are doing important work you and I. So we continue to dive to the depths!

Write YOUR story 🖋️

Jim