People won't commit if they don't know where they're going

We need big trust to go with someone and not know where they’re going.

'Trust me, it’s a great restaurant.'

‘Believe me, you’ll love this holiday location.’

We may think people will just follow us or they're at fault because they don’t 'engage or buy-in'. How do we lead so people will change with us as we launch something, try something new or zig when everyone else is zagging?

To reduce anxiety and uncertainty and build trust and understanding use sensemaking. We have some of it in our nature (how we make sense of things) but we can learn more so we become insight seekers and rapid sense makers in this world of complexity and uncertainty.

Do this:

1️⃣ Create a map of what’s possible, what the potential is

2️⃣ Talk through that map, share it with others

Like this:

In my recent Sensemaking skills workshop, a participant created a map about change in the educational sector she works in. She shared and talked through the map with the team. A topic that used to create resistance now had understanding, intrigue and curiosity.

✅Ace!

What do you have to convey:

- Your own thinking and ideas?

- A new product or service?

- A plan or vision for the future?

Why engagement is harder to do these days

If you’ve watched a movie, tv series or binge-watched anything, you’d know how compelling and enticing this entertainment and communication medium is. Filmmakers are like sensemakers and storytellers on steroids or high performance supplements.

So every day in the workplace, we’re now dealing with a tougher audience.

Our meetings, workshops, planning and strategy sessions have a tough audience who are used to higher quality productions, scintillating storylines and rich and complex characters who do weird and intriguing stuff. It's engaging and entertaining!

No wonder people are bored in everyday boring meetings and workshops. They’re comparatively... boring. Nothing exciting happens; it’s the same meeting as last time; and it doesn’t engage or excite us the way these other drugs of engagement do.

We must lift our game.

To be engaging we must be more engaging.

We don’t have months to work on a script, lighting, story arc or edits. We need to think, design and engage people in ways they now like to be engaged.

The stuff we used to do isn’t doing what it used to do. Next episode starts in 5 4 3 2 1….

TL; DR 'Too long; didn’t read'

We’re drowning in it! Information overload from packs, keynotes, talks, sessions, webinars, meetings, presentations, conversations aarrrggh NOT TO MENTION OUR OWN THOUGHTS and Netflix binges, podcasts, audio books, Spotify playlists oh and pretty journals.

How do we take in more ...or just make better, quicker sense of things?

If you move from a mess to a list, to a pack, to a pic... all of these have pros and cons but the one that wins the race, the journey, the transformation is… the MAP.

We already enjoy a daily use of maps:

• Where is my food delivery?
• Why did the driver go down that street?
• Which is the quickest route to the cafe?

Maps have gone full circle (full globe?) from being crusty old, folded-the-wrong-way paper, to books of maps, to apps of maps. We know what maps look like and use them all the time. They guide and show us the unknown, unseen.

So it's too bad (and so silly) that more leaders don’t use maps instead of weighty wastes of slide decks that sucked weeks of time and tinkering from us. It could have all be done in 1/10th of the time, with 10x the impact ... with a map.

Do you map? Here’s one I prepared earlier :-)

Making sense of the strategy

It is one thing to get the leadership team, board and executive together to plan and identify and prepare a strategy.

Then comes the work of trying to embed the strategy - or in other words... make people follow it.

Getting people to buy in to new directions, new ideas and changes in strategy requires sense making. We can’t just pump out some ‘comms and marketing’ in an effort to ‘sell’ the message, create the urgency and ‘cascade it’ down throughout the organisation. These too often vanilla flavored communications have motherhood statements, cliches and corny ‘Ra Ra’ slogans. (I know; I used to write them in my previous roles in leadership communications!)

But they're tired and dated in our world of clever internet memes that burst forth every day!

As you plan for next year and decide when and how your senior leaders are getting together to do the all-important strategic work, be sure to include in that planning how you’ll make sense of it for people.

Sensemaking Your Strategy is a thing. Don’t leave it to cliched comms and marketing.

Put a sensemaking filter over the strategy so it makes sense to the people you expect to bring it to life.

How many revisions are enough?

Reworking, editing, checking, changing. How long do we spend working on the next version?

Documents, reports and presentations travel up and down a company's hierarchy to be changed, edited, revised, and approved. Changes are made but it’s still not sent out or shared. It’s time for another round of changes.

And another round.

Up and down it goes.

The heart of the message gets lost and in its place, a wordy banal message like every other. All in the pursuit of accuracy, control, correctness, getting it ‘right’, perhaps to counter the the fear of it being ‘wrong’ or imperfect.

But it can never be perfect because things change. And we are human.

The tinkering is a cover, it’s stalling and fear. Hours working and reworking, writing and editing, tinkering. And the waiting ... the waiting in between every revision.

It’s not productive.

Want a gain in productivity? Check how many versions that report or document has been through; how many hands have been on it, eyes that have seen it, how many times it's been checked, revised and re-checked. What’s really going on here? How many revisions will be enough before it goes live?