Meet Chloe, Business Energetix's Management Muse.  When she joined us in 2006 as the official Office Dog, we quickly realized she had talent far beyond the scope of her position.  Read on to see how she serves as a constant source of instruction and inspiration for exploring the challenges of management.

 

Today Chloe is giving a big shout out to the new kids on the block.  Meeting them was another big adventure in the life and times of the Management Muse.
 
We live on the outer edge of an urban area and a generation ago, our home was part of a large ranch.  Now the ranch land is covered with homes, trails and parks.  The original farmhouse, now designated an historical site, still stands a couple blocks away.  It's now home to the new kids.

 

As we were checking out the new neighbors, Chloe's interest locked onto the kid goats.  She hunched down and crept forward, nose twitching and eyes focused on this bearded thing approaching from the other side of the fence.

 

By:  Marti Benjamin, MBA, Professional Certified Coach

 

Recently I was part of a discussion among coaches about encouraging our clients to see what is-often called reality-or what if, the vision or dreams.  The 'what is' vs. 'what if' question seems like a false choice to me.  The combination of 'what is' and 'what if' offers the most powerful position for making effective plans.  
 
Over the past few months, it has been suggested that we tune out the distressing economic news and refuse to buy-in to the fear and dread of the global recession.  That strategy seems to create more stress than it avoids; the business-as-usual model isn't working well and in ignoring the current climate, it is difficult to see what adjustments would make a positive difference and create a different outcome.  Albert Einstein is credited with saying, "The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them." He also defined insanity as doing the same thing and expecting different results.  Ignoring 'what is' has proven to be a poor coping strategy and an even worse business model.
 
The better alternative:  to see 'what is' and make sense of it so we can act to create a picture of what might be, the 'what if' view of the future. Karl E. Weick[1] developed a theory for a cognitive process to build new knowledge and improve decision-making. 
 
In Weick's Sensemaking model (1995), the most profound question comes at what he calls the Noticing stage:  is the current situation the same as or different from situations in the past.  What is different?  Failure to grasp the difference leads to poor and ineffective decisions and even disastrous actions.  You may be seeing this dynamic play out in business today.  Customers shift from quality consciousness to cost sensitivity, creating a different market and a new reality for those providing goods and services.  For the businesses that fail to recognize that difference, they find revenues are declining and marketing expense increasing as they try to chase an ever-shrinking pool of buyers whose priority is quality consciousness.  While no business owner relishes the idea of compromising quality, the different customer priority suggests a new product line or methods to maintain quality and reduce cost in order to respond to the cost sensitivity.
 
Weick describes the role of leaders in inexplicable times in his article, Leadership When Events Don't Play By the Rules.  He offers the acronym SIR COPE to describe leadership in uncertain times. 

Social:  we make sense of things in conversation with others; encourage conversation 
Identity:  shift the identity from victim or fighter to new identities such as sounding board, source of resilience, companion, explorer; the new identities are more powerful in creating new possibilities
Retrospect:  help people find words that connect with demonstrated strengths; "help them talk their way into resilience."
Cues:  help people expand the range of cues they allow into their story; add new perspectives, look at the situation from different angles; incorporate the cues that don't fit into the pre-determined beliefs and assumptions of 'what is'
Ongoing:  we need workable, plausible stories of what we face and what we can do; new inputs, new opportunities and new setbacks require that the stories be constantly updated
Plausibility:  help people get their first plausible story about the events or situation and then to revise it, enrich it, replace it; being without a plausible explanation, even one that is inaccurate, is too uncomfortable for creativity to arise
Enactment:  "Most of all, in inexplicable times, people have to keep moving.  Recovery lies not in thinking then doing, but in thinking while doing and in thinking by doing.  No one has the answers...As a leader, help people keep moving and keep paying attention." (Weick)
 
In making sense of situations and events that defy our usual expectations and explanations, a new definition of 'what is' forms the foundation for building the view of what might be, the 'what if'.   
 
Here are some questions to start you thinking about the 'what is'.  Hopefully, within these questions you will find the seed for an inspired 'what if'.

All the BEST,
Marti Benjamin, MBA, Professional Certified Coach
Karri Benjamin, MBA
Chloe, Management Muse

Business Energetix--Success Coaching