Creating culture...

We want your objectives to become part of the way people habitually operate. Here are some of the ways that we do this:

• Get your vision into business processes
• Tell key stakeholders what's happening and why
• Encourage traditions, conventions and behaviours which reinforce the objectives
• Keep the intention clear

We want your new objectives to be an enduring legacy, so we will also pay attention to all those systems and processes in an organisation, whatever the size, that exist to preserve the status quo.

All of these processes are surrounded by communication and governance mechanisms: manuals, training, newsletters, reports, and management meetings. All such mechanisms will become vehicles for embedding your objectives.

Using networks...

We will use your organisation's formal and informal networks to send and receive news of your new programme, to notice the changes we are trying to accomplish, and encourage it in conversations, meetings and communications. The skill here is to have a clear, stated intention, to take decisive action in the stated direction, and to pay attention to what happens so that we remain alive to new possibilities and can restate your vision.

Yet getting simple things done in organisations can be far from straightforward. Anyone who has run a business knows the importance, and difficulty, of consistent action at the working level.

These small operational changes are sometimes lost in the large-scale approaches to change. But they are not just details. It is these small actions which make the difference. Action means that you have to stop dreaming of all the different possibilities and start working on just one of them. This takes an effort of will. To see how we mobilise into action, view our Action Framework here.

What is an action?...

Since action is needed to make change happen, The Ideas Distillery enables you to clearly distinguish action from those activities which might just look like action:

Action is finite: It has a beginning, middle and end.

Action is self-eliminating: Once you've done it, it's done, and doesn't have to be done again.

Action is usually irreversible for all practical purposes: An action usually takes about as much effort to undo as to do. If it's easily reversed, then nothing much has happened, and no action has occurred.

Action takes effort - it won't 'just happen anyway': If it 'just happens anyway' it's not an action, it's an inevitability.

Action closes down options: Doing this means not doing that. If you want to check that a proposal to do something is genuinely an action, ask: "If we choose to do that, what are we choosing not to do?" If it's a genuine action there will be a real answer to that question.

Accelerating Action

Creating culture...

Using networks...

What is an action?...