I went to my Town Council sponsored "Community Consultation" workshop this week, advertised as "Your chance to set the Vision for the new Town Planning Scheme".
Being a professional facilitator of workshops and community consultations, who uses words and the syntax of words as tools of trade, I was reminded at the workshop of the ability to use careful language in a manufactured syntax to obtain a predetermined result.
The workshop was formatted as a scenario exercise or game. The first part of the game was set by a video presentation that showed a vibrant town centre and an explanation that in order to achieve such a vibrant town centre whilst in competition with other, nearby "attractive" shopping and cappuccino strip town centres, we needed to increase the population. We were then led to an exercise which asked us to prioritise four ways to increase population:-
1. Using the Town's history and stories;
2. Encouraging "adventurous" out of the ordinary shops to open there;
3. Creating interesting public squares and spaces; and
4. Organising street events like markets and festivals.
This was an interesting exercise and everyone played the game by discussing and ranking the options into priorities. However it occurred to me that the language had...
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A Branding Opportunity – Hit or Miss?
Here's something that just happened to me, which I think is a branding opportunity gone amiss, and only somewhat recovered. I am doing home renovations and have to have 2 sensors of the home alarm disconnected, and booked a technician for today (the last day before work starts). I'm waiting and no technician arrives, so I phone the alarm company. I explain the situation.
Alarm: I rang and left a message saying the tech couldn't come today....
Me: Where did you call?
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Let’s all stick to our own knitting!
I'm about to insult lawyers.
The rest of you - you needn't cheer quite so raucously. I only choose to use lawyers as an example of a highly trained group of professionals, skilled and experienced in what they do and good at their multi-faceted jobs, but because of that, think that they can self-handle other aspects of their business where different specialist skills and experience are required.
I could have chosen accountants, or doctors, or engineers (there, some of you are not so comfortable now are you?).
One of my clients is a firm of commercial lawyers specialising in insolvency. In their business they run the constant risk that their clients cannot pay. To give them their due they always perform at their best and never stint on service, despite this possibility, but now and then, they get caught.
In one such instance they worked for an owner of advertising billboards scattered around the suburbs. Having satisfactorily won the case for their client they found that the client is cash strapped and unable to pay them, asking for a payment plan over a year or so. Clearly not a good situation. The senior partner, true...
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Leadership Vs Management
Harvard Business School change management guru John Kotter outlines the fundamental differences between Leadership and Management as follows:-
- Establishing direction vs Planning & Budgeting
- Aligning people vs Organising and staffing...
- Motivating & inspiring vs Controlling & Problem-solving.
In Kotter's view, while management produces an order of predictability, order, and the capacity to attain desired short term targets, the qualities of Leadership prodeuces change, often to a dramatic degree and often potentially useful change to create a future vision.
In my consulting, I use my own process called vision-driven planning, first creating a vision for the group (in great detail, to the degree that it is internally viable and credible) which is then quantified through a Balanced Scorecard approach ("If we were to achieve our vision, how must we look and behave in the area of..."). The quantification of the vision is converted into Performance Measures, and then these are redirected as Strategies.
It works exceptionally well for SME's in creating what I call a "POP" or Plan On a Page. However the obstruction I usually see is lack of "Leadership" in that often the SME owners and managers are extremely concerned with the now...
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