LIGHT TOUCH CHANGEREFRAMING LEADERSHIPA highly interactive program designed for senior executives

and business leaders who want to learn the crucial 21st century leadership skills that are critical for all leaders.

LIGHT TOUCH CHANGEREFRAMING LEADERSHIP

This is a highly interactive program designed for senior executives and business leaders who want to learn the crucial 21st century leadership skills that are critical for all leaders.

So many leaders are facing situations and challenges they have never faced before, the old ways of doing things are being fundamentally challenged, the established rules no longer apply. They know if they don’t find a way forward, it could severely jeopardise their organization. We can see this in politics, business and our universities — they are all facing threats not seen before.

All this in a society of rapidly evolving change that is threatening to leave anyone behind who can’t adapt fast enough.

Reframing Leadership teaches you the core skills in how to adapt, change and think differently to compliment and enhance your existing quality leadership skills.

1 Daniel Kahneman Thinking, Fast and Slow

What you will learn is:

l To think and look at things differently i.e. be able to truly innovate and see new opportunities

l To think; and I mean really think hard, new and challenging ideas — what Daniel Kahneman1 calls ‘Slow Thinking’

l To be able to solve problems and address issues not encountered before without falling back on what has been done in the past — and do it fast.

l To actually deliver appropriate change quickly, that delivers the desired outcomes without wrecking the organisation.

This program is highly intense and practical, participants will be actively working on core business issues throughout the program and should leave the program with clear next steps that need to be taken to achieve their goals.

The aim of this program is to give you the skills of designing small, highly significant change interventions that will allow your strategies to be implemented quickly, smoothly and faster than you were expecting. You will be learning these skills by simultaneously working to design highly targeted yet small change interventions to your current strategies you can implement quickly and safely back in the workplace.

Reframing Leadership 3

Specifically you will learn how to:

l See the world differently: By learning a methodology and mindset to challenge assumptions, open your blinkers and see new opportunities that you have previously not seen.

l Innovative and elegant thinking: This can be described as a Kahneman Slow Thinking Session on steroids — we call it ‘Hasten Slowly’.

l Take your strategy apart and re-build it: Reframe it and turn it into something doable and useful.

l Challenge and remove assumptions: To find elegant solutions that were previously ignored or overlooked.

l Design small nudge changes to big issues: Learn how to change behavioural patterns that allow a whole host of new opportunities to become available.

l Design small, fast, elegant solutions: Learn how to find the small, elegant, clever tactics to large long standing strategies or issues that deliver results quicker safer and easier than previously thought.

l Design out resistance: The more you get rid of resistance the more effective you’re going to be.

l Use a new ‘lens’: To look critically at situations that challenges and flushes out assumptions. This can be easily and simply used with individuals through to whole leadership teams.

l Identify and build on strengths: Find strengths (usually not seen or available before) within an organization to minimize disruption and speed up change.

Innovative and

elegant thinking

Expectations of the Program

You are expected to have the core mainstream leadership and management expertise under your belt already. This program does not cover this material — it is assumed knowledge.

Be prepared to have some of your assumptions challenged and be open to new ideas. Some of this you will have heard of before, the full combination you won’t have.

You will receive a phone call from the session leader before the program to answer any questions and to get clarity about the issue you are bringing to the program — most of the time the issue you want to work on is not big enough.

The key criteria is:

l You have to be responsible for achieving the strategy or resolving the issue

l You have to have enough detailed knowledge of the situation so we can work on it

After the program you will receive an individual two-hour follow up session with one of the facilitators to ensure you are comfortable with the material covered as well as the implementation of your strategy.

This program is designed not to be a cost. You are expected to get a significant Return on Investment, not purely from the skills and knowledge gained but from the strategy/issue you resolve.

“The best training program I have ever been on” Bill TOYOTA

“The material and skills were highly effective and way beyond what I thought possible—I walked away with

a way forward to a million dollar plus issue that I really did not think was possible”

Margarite HEAD OF A LARGE FAMILY BUSINESS IN CANADA

DAY

AMWhat is change and how can it be most accurately defined?

Psychological blinkers — how to view the world differently.

Linguistics: including how language constructs our world and how to use video descriptive techniques.

Psychological frame and frame analysis.

l Behaviour = control

l How to identify what people are controlling for

Introduction to benevolent scepticism,

Challenging Assumptions: Techniques to provoke thinking

Not letting that be the problem: Problem Solving Mountain: Negotiating the problem and defining ‘What Really Needs to be Different?’

PMWorking in pairs

Participants working on their strategy with each taking turns to define in as much detail what needs to be different in order to achieve the strategy.

Coaching will be provided throughout the process. At the end, they will have developed version one of what they want to be different.

Reframing Change, Thinking Differently1

Reframing Leadership 5

I’m still extraordinarily thankful for the work you did as a facilitator with myself and my team three years ago. It wasa great experience. One of the most beneficial and professionally delivered courses I have experienced.

Couple a great presenter with relevant worthwhile content and you have an extremely high standard of course. Kelly IBM

Phil is my secret weapon. David TOYOTA

His great strength is that he helps you find your own answers by asking the hard questions. His greatest skill is that without prescribing ‘the solution’ he enables you to identify the flaws in your initial formulations of how to handle complex situations. John UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY

DAY DAY

AMReview of where each person is up to with the implementation design of their strategy.

Pattern theory, including:

l Pattern = culture

l Constraints

l Exceptions

l Contexts and context markers

l Identifying contexts of competence

l ‘Always’ and ‘never’ triggers

l Predicting and disassembling patterns

l Crow bar techniques to shifting the viewing

l The ‘surprise list’

Negative Description Design techniques and practice session.

AMReview of where each person is up to with the implementation design of their strategy.

Introduction to Shimmering and Contrario Planning.

Contrario = Constraints + Scenario Planning.

This includes:

l How to design resistance out

l Catherine the Great principle

l Identify and risk checking tactics

l Bench testing for unrealised constraints and unintended consequences

PMWorking in pairs:

Using the new knowledge and techniques to keep defining and redefining “what really needs to be different” and what that looks like in video descriptive detail.

It is assumed that participants will develop version two and three of the desired outcome which will become more and more specific.

PMWorking in pairs:

Contrario Planning Session

Shimmering back and forth from the desired state to the current situation, participants carefully explore different scenarios by inserting and/or removing constraints to bench test possible solutions.

‘Buttering’: This is the active solicitation of ‘yes buts’ to assess the viability and effectiveness of possible solutions.

Shifting Patterns and Contexts2 3Elegant Solutions

How can major change can be brought about by taking small actions?

When it comes to change, it is the quality of change that is critical, not the quantity.

Light Touch Change works on the assumption that any problem or issue, no matter how long standing or challenging can be resolved with small, highly targeted tactics. There is over 50 years of research and practice to back this up. The core philosophical work underpinning Influential Leadership challenge many of the long held, but incorrect, assumptions about change. By challenging these assumptions, new options and possibilities are opened up that previously have not and in fact could not, be considered.

With successful change what you don’t see is the ‘Big Bang’ or the ‘Big Launch’. Profound lasting change happens quietly and effectively. Only afterwards do people realise that things are now different and working so much better. Resistance and fight back become a thing of the past.

In Jim Collins’ book Good to Great, at the point when their target companies began their meteoric rise, none of the leaders instituted any ‘big-bang’ type of change program. There was no blinding flash or turning point. There was just a constant series of highly effective tactics that achieved extraordinary long-term results.

Those leaders were good thinkers and analysts. They were purely interested in achieving their goals as effectively and efficiently as possible.

Why are you so pedantic about words and language?

Everyone thinks they are being practical and focusing on reality. In fact reality can be described in a myriad of different ways depending on the assumptions and language used. You will hear people use phrases like, “teaming”, “re-engineer”, “processes”, “value add”, “effective communication”, “increase profits”, “customer focus”, “work/life balance”, etc. The problem is that while we think we understand what it means, the reality is that they are mid to high level abstractions and can mean a multitude of different things.

They are all high-level abstractions with many ways of interpreting them. The challenge is to be able to get down to a factual description of the situation, to identify what can be known to be true and what is just an interpretation. The risk of not doing this is assumptions never get identified and inadvertent misunderstandings prevail. There is a skill and a discipline in being able to focus on this level of detail and facts because most people spend so much time living in a world of abstractions and misunderstandings.

Why is Benevolent Scepticism so important?

Benevolent Scepticism is a critical part of being this work. In order to get through the assumptions and abstractions that are influencing us all, good leaders actively do not believe the situation until it can be indisputably demonstrated to be the way it is described — invariably of course it isn’t. Benevolent Scepticism is an active stance and is probably one of the most difficult things to do — it takes much practice. Active scepticism is not saying the other person is stupid or incompetent; it is saying that assumptions need to be checked and that there are other ways to view the situation. It is one of the most effective ways of identifying assumptions and finding new solutions to a situation.

The importance of this cannot be under estimated.

What is meant by releasing change?

The reason that things are as they currently are, is that there are a whole lot of tangible and intangible constraints operating. Things like, the local repeating patterns, the unconscious assumptions that people are working on guiding their behaviour, issues that people assume are important, the local cultural rules, etc. In many ways this can be summarised as the informal rules of how we behave in a particular context. All these are operating to maintain the status quo; whether this is good or bad, it is just the status quo.

By not addressing these local rules very little useful change actually happens. Many traditional change strategies only address the formal ‘rules’ or ‘structures’ rather than “what really goes on around here” and therefore make little real impact.

However if we do address the constraints holding the local rules in place then change is released; think of moving the log in a logjam that allows the rest to move. Influential Leaders spend a great deal of time focusing on what the local constraints are and then identifying how to move them to ensure that the desired change is released with minimal downside.

What is Primary Change and what is Secondary Change?

According to Watzlawick et al, Primary Change is all the things that we do, large and small, cheap and expensive, complex or simple that at the end of the day fail to achieve our desired outcome.

By contrast, Secondary Change is all the things that we do, large and small, cheap and expensive, complex or simple that deliver the outcome.

Primary change usually occurs when people have not done their analysis well enough and have not worked out in enough detail what part of the repeating pattern needs to be changed — hence despite lots of energy and time being put in — nothing really changes!

Light Touch Change FAQ

Reframing Leadership 7

How much executive time is spent unintentionally achieving Primary Change?

In reality, effective change is always dependent upon a person’s perception. What this means in practice is that change interventions are designed so that those who need to see a change do so and are happy with it. At the same time, in order to reduce resistance, there will be people who must not see a change or must interpret it in a very different way. Interventions are then simultaneously designed to that this happens and therefore resistance is reduced to virtually nothing — this is at the heart of Tactical Analysis work

Why is there such an emphasis on patterns?

Personal and organisational behaviour is very patterned — in many ways we are very predictable, however change the context and the patterns change. You know you’re in a pattern when you get that sense of ‘here we go again’, the ‘same old same old’… If the ‘same old same old’ is fine, and often it is, then don’t fix it. However, when we do need things to be different, ie, that vicious cycle creating havoc, the correct ‘key’ to the pattern needs to be found to change it in such a way that it cannot be the same again.

It is important to not only focus on identifying the negative patterns, but how to intervene in them simply and quickly so they lose their power.

The challenge with patterns is that all parties involved believe, with conviction, they have done “everything they can”. When you actually count these, the number of things tried usually numbers less than 10! And all 10 provoke the same type of reaction in the other party (primary change at work) and of course the pattern carries on.

The secret to pattern intervention is identifying a small, seemingly insignificant, behaviour that is different from the original ones and which provokes a different and more desirable behaviour in the other party (secondary change). Identifying the secondary change tactic can only be done by looking at the situation very differently and in a highly detailed manner — this is where benevolent scepticism is critical.

Why not use models of leadership or organisations?

No leadership or organisational model can ever provide information with the required level of specificity or relevance to the current situation. Leadership frameworks may provide an indication of the ‘type’ of action that may be required, for example, coaching, being a role model, focusing on the bottom line, driving change, but there are many, many different ways of ‘coaching’ and ‘driving change’. Getting this detail right is crucial to success. Equally, getting it wrong can and often does lead to not much being different.

This is the difference between having a broad strategy and knowing the specific tactics to effectively implement it.

The shift that needs to be made is to stop following sets of rules. Stop with the recipes, forget the ‘in this type of situation you do X’ or ‘in this type of situation you do Y’ type thinking. All this does is lead to very automated, clumsy and ineffective change.

What is being suggested is that good leaders remove their blinkers, challenge the prevailing assumptions and develop skills in being able to analyse each situation with its unique patterns, contexts, constraints and personalities as it is. From this they are then able to identify what is the best way to intervene to achieve the desired outcome with minimal fuss and downside.

Basically, trade-in the models of what organisations should do, the latest fads and ideas, trade them in for good thinking and analysis. People should be thinking about what will really make a difference to the situation in a way that helps people do their job and achieves the organisation’s goals.

All the information is at hand in our heads and also in the heads of people who work for us — if we are but prepared to tap into it.

Alexander the Great, possibly the most successful military commander in history, demonstrates this well. When he was being educated, by Aristotle no less, as well as learning military tactics and leadership, his key learning was how to think, debate and analyse well. It was clear that he and his future commanders were going to be in situations that were completely unpredictable and that no previous knowledge, models or experience was going to be much help. Therefore his ability to think about what was required for each specific situation, using and analysing the information at hand to the maximum, was the premium skill required.

He went on to conquer the known world by the time he was 33.

Surely desperate times call for desperate measures, large restructures, transformational leadership etc?

This is fine as long as the leader is prepared to see the company go to the wall when one of the ‘desperate measures’ backfires because it was a stupid thing to do.

So often, leaders limit themselves to a few, often crude, methods that don’t deliver and in fact do more damage.

At the end of the day much of this is common sense isn’t it?

Yes — but not common practice!

For more information contact Philip Pryor +61 411 882 064 or philip@morphthink.com

“We think, mistakenly, that success is the result of the amount of time we put in at work, instead of the quality of time we put in.”

Arianna Huffington (CO-FOUNDER AND EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, THE HUFFINGTON POST)

© 2016 Morpthink Pty Ltd