THE 10,000 HOURS NEWSLETTERS
January 2019 Newsletter
News, Views and Deliberations from 10,000 Hours – click here for our Newsletter
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News, Views and Deliberations from 10,000 Hours – click here for our Newsletter
read moreBig Law has its own share of the disruptive headwinds and this high-profile firm sought to change the culture of the partnership. The classic challenge of being able to bring a whole-of-firm solution to clients while also being able to manage uncertainty and ambiguity. A series of workshops and group sessions surfacing the challenges they experience with their teams and their colleagues. These savvy participants are wary of 3rd party providers for lacking intellectual rigour and relevance. We are in our 3rd year of this ongoing project.
A comprehensive and ongoing project of working with the leadership team’s fitness for the hard challenges of flattening revenues, new unproven areas to invest, and new arrivals into an established leadership team. Wrapped around that some Human Centered Design projects across a wide range of projects involving diverse stakeholders inside council and outside in the community.
One of the largest capital works projects in our lifetime. A huge build with high profile stakeholders, avid media scrutiny, rapidly scaling teams. Leadership team offsites using our proprietary Uncertainty Landscape to contextualise the different work faced by leaders. And then providing the necessary container for the work of building the team’s ability to face into their challenges in real time, not after the meeting, but in the meeting. Now they work faster, see conflict as a precursor to productive dialogue and novel solutions.
… which calls for the delicate facilitation of two collaborative yet unavoidably competitive parties trying to work together. Off-shore parent companies say “Play Nice” and we facilitate that process.
… who scoured the landscape for a provider who can bring innovation methodology as well as teach the political adroitness to navigate a massive organisation that doesn’t want to change. We built a self-sustaining team of internal capability to teach future cohorts how to try new things in new ways with people and systems conditioned to old things old ways. We taught a fluency to most of the organisation, proficiency to some, and mastery to a select few who now keep it all going.
… and after a global search for a sales capability provider engaged us to help their commercial professionals win more business more often. Over two years in APAC, UK/EU, and NAMER we taught the knowable and unknowable parts of professional selling in the rapidly moving SaaS context. We taught the managers how to foster skill acquisition in their current teams and any subsequent hires who missed our sessions. We also built a sales playbook for the current and future team.
… which meant we firstly immersed ourselves in the knotty context at play. Tribes, factions, currents and under-currents washing through the team and the business generally showing itself in a 22% engagement score. An SLT engagement to group coach the team in real time as they work on their challenges. No abstract concepts to take away and apply. Working on real stuff, in real time. The team found it’s way to build fitness to tolerate the productive discomfort of uncertain discussions that offer no easy answers. The ROI? Speed. They move faster through hard challenges.
A senior leadership confronted by early signals their traditional business model may be in decline and with it long-term relationships under pressure. Over a series of SLT workshop sessions we framed the uncertainty, contextualised the different challenges they faced, and safely surfaced and explored the contentious choices faced. Robust dialogue, vigorous debate, giving way to clearer air, aligned plans and a way ahead. 18 months after we started the group now enjoys open-mic comedy nights together before their SLT sessions the following day.