Ann Badillo Coaching

Don't Just Do Something, Stand There! 10 Princplies for Leading meeting that Matter

I contributed a case study to this book based on some work I did with HopeLink, a start up in Silicon Valley during the heady internet boom of 2000. See Chapter 5 entitled Find Common Ground, page 85 of the Weisbord and Janoff book.

The acceleration technique of backcasting from the future creates an opportunity for people to tap into their deepest hopes and heartfelt dreams for the future. When a meeting calls for future scenarios you can ask people to put themselves X years in the future and imagine their dreams as it they have been realize; describe structure, policies and relationships in the present tense; and look back to the single most important step they had to take x years earlier to get started.

This book is much more than a menu for how to run meetings more effectively. It is filled with strikingly simple and practical steps to make a gathering of any kind more humane and productive.

But in a deeper context, it embodies a particular theory and philosophy of leadership and planning that recognize that every person does the best they can with what they have, and that people come equipped with the capacity for extraordinary cooperation if given a chance to use their own experience and wisdom.

See Future Search.org

The Acceleration Offsite

Accelerate Your Work and Learning.

Gather your team and get more work done. Release from locked up thinking and elicit the best insight, ideas and perspectives from your team and decide on immediate course of action. This program is ideal for high priority projects, initiatives, and year end planning and can be customized for any organization that needs to accelerate results quickly.

• Blend learning and real work
• Surface needs and explore new concepts
• Think the unthinkable
• Collaborate in new and different ways
• Drive action planning
• Get 3 months of work done in 1 day

 

90 Day Executive Onboarding Plan

Day 1

** Making connections with the right people
** Learning specifics of the business
** Obtaining clarification of expectations
** Clarifying and understanding cultural identity
** Identifying key job fit issues at this level

Month 1

1. Identifying learning priorities
2. Identifying  executive's risk profile
3. Identifying cultural alignment issues
4. Identifying corporate job expectations and devising 90 day strategies
5. Attaining clarity of relations with the boss
6. Investigating team restructuring issues

Leadership Skill #6: Emerging

Emerging, and understanding the patterns of emergence and the zone of emergence, is the
sixth leadership skill. This is what happens when we come together as a system and see
patterns and interconnections. This is about feedback and self-organization and adaptive
learning.

It's important, as leaders, to create a time and place for your team, for your people, and
for your organization, where they might have a zone of emergence. Where do you have a
place for your patterns to unfold, to make connections, to connect the dots? This is really
the place for innovation and creativity to occur. I think blogs are a particularly interesting
zone of emergence. The whole blogging phenomenon is an online zone of emergence. In
teams that still have the ability to sit together, there'll be somebody's cube wall or hallway
where stuff will start to get posted—diagrams, drawing, comments, reports and
pictures—and you're able to visually map what it is that you're trying to figure out, be it a
new market, a new industry, a new product introduction, or a new service.

These zones of emergence happen in lots of different systems, from biology to geography
to societies, all the time. As leaders, I’d encourage you to be really aware of emergence.
Again, how do you create a zone of emergence for your team?

Leadership Skill #5: Futuring

The fifth leadership skill is what I call futuring, or scenario thinking. This is how we
bring the THERE here. Often, what we want to do is be able to anticipate the future, and
scenario thinking is really about both anticipating the future and rehearsing the future by
creating alternative future environments in which we can recognize warning signs, avoid
surprises, adapt and act efficiently. Executives and leaders like to run scenarios; it’s a
favorite module and technique that we use in our work. Run a win scenario, run a lose
scenario, run a wild card scenario at whatever level of the organization you're at, and see

where the thinking goes. This is probably one of the most active processes or modules to
use to think about what it is that you’re really trying to predict or anticipate in the future.

So futuring is an important skill to have. There's a technique called back-casting, where
you allow yourself to be in positive future. So pick a date in the future--go to 2010, and
you're in a successful win, whatever your win is. And think back and tell your story from
success about your wins and free your team from any type of negative constraints. Let
them tell you how they got there in a positive environment.

What will emerge out of this process of back-casting is sequencing and order. How did
you get there? What did you do right? Who came along? What connections were made?
Back-casting is a really, really powerful technique when used as part of scenario thinking
and futuring. 

So now what happens? What’s next? What happens when we're scanning, and what
happens in the creative process, and what happens when we’re engaging other voices,
and when we’re iterating and futuring, is that something starts to emerge.

Leadership Skill #4: Iterating

The next leadership skill is iterating.

Once you get all these people in a room, and you're going through your creative process,
recognize that iteration is an important part of the process. Ask the same question three to
four times throughout a design session or a working session. 

The practice of iteration is really comes from the school of architecture and design
science. I've been able to live with many designers in my life, from architects to
landscape designers. I'm married to an architect. I've worked with amazing designers and
have watched their creative processes. I have come to understand that the higher order
really emerges when we iterate over, and over again--multiple times and multiple tiers
and multiple iterations. A whole system will basically evolve to a higher order when you
work iteratively. Use rapid iteration to break, churn, and to get inside the problem. So,
iterations will evolve, and then you can design and build and use So, iterate, iterate,
iterate.

Leadership Skill #2: Create the Problem or the Stage of the Creative Process

The second leadership skill is creating the problem—or what I call framing the problem—and then understanding your creative process and the stages of the creative process. Frequently, when I go into an organization or I sit with a person, we're fully immersed in a project, and we only later discover that the real problem that we are trying to solve is a symptom of another whole problem. It’s crucial to get to the point of understanding! Try to grasp the problem that you're really trying to solve, and as you frame this problem, keep making sure that you’re are going after the right problem.  What are the current or existing conditions in the organization? Getting clear on these conditions is an ongoing process—because these conditions are always in a state of flux, and they will change, with the creative process, over time.

The next question you will ask is: what is your vision for the ideal future state? In creating the problem, take into account your personal insights, your experiences, your views on reality. After that, the problem is framed when you discover the gap between the reality and your vision. And there is where the work needs to happen. This work involves a creative tension and the interplay that goes on between vision and your current state. They will tug at each other. That’s fine; this is part of the overall creative process of
creative tension.

Leadership Skill #1: Scanning

Leadership Skill #1 Scanning

The first leadership skill is scanning. 

What we know—and what I typically observe when I go into organizations, or when I'm sitting with my private executive coaching clients—is that we're all really good at focusing . We know how to narrow down options. We know how to create option plans. We know how to do timelines. We know how to negotiate and sequence.

What we're not very good at, and what we need to learn more of in a strategic thinking capacity, is how to scan. Interestingly enough, as leaders, scanning is frequently asked of us; that is, the ability to find new opportunities, to solve problems, and to get out of the box. Still, my observation over the last, several years of doing this work is that it is really hard for us to scan. And so I want to spend a little bit of time talking about this.

Download SevenLeadershipSkills.Badillo.pdf

First 90 Days/Leadership Acceleration Coaching//Executive Onboarding

• Critical success strategies for new leaders at all levels
• Assess your strengths and weakness
• Diagnose your situation & understand challenges and opportunities
• Align expectations with your boss
• Secure early wins that establish credibility and build momentum
• Build your team and connects with influential coalitions

Recent  Articles:

Business Week: How to Take the Reins at Top Speed: Finding Traction In The First 100 Days

The Economist: Executive Onboarding

How to Read a Book

When I was with the Knowhere Store in Palo Alto, I learned a very valuable skill called, "Inspectional Reading".

The purpose is to use time most effectively when collecting data from a book or publication.  Skim data systematically and discover:

1. What kind of book/article/etc., is it?
2. What is it stating or questioning?
3. How does it fit in with my priorities?
4. What can I learn from it?
5. Do I want to study it in depth?