Impacto: Working with key influences

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Enrol people in the shortest possible time, clarify and address barriers, and deliver messages in a way that tests understanding and commitment.

Schemes, dreams, plans, goals, changes and everything else we do requires other people to lead, follow or get out of the way. Each of us runs into the puzzle of how best to communicate a tough message to someone important in our lives. How to bring about the most understanding in the shortest time.

How to create allies instead of skeptics and enemies. How to best gain other’s best thinking about the challenge at hand. How to ensure sustainable support. How to be in charge of the communication, however charged. How to test for the other’s understanding. When to go faster or slower.

Impacto is our offering to aid with these challenges. It is a process map with five domains: Purpose, Urgency, Destination, Success Path and Commitment. Each domain is a necessary part of a communication which lets others know what we are up to and why, and how we want them involved or not involved.

Impacto is both a framework for thinking and a design and delivery process for communications which enrols people in our cause. It gives us a way to develop understanding in the other person, layer by layer. It gives us frequent, natural opportunities to stop and assess whether common understanding and agreement is developing. To go no faster or further than the other person is prepared to go. It gives us a plan for orderly retreat, if we have overstepped the other person’s ability to hear us. It puts us in charge of the process. It builds allies It is strategic enough to communicate upward. In fact, it is essential preparation for anyone seeking support from higher organisational levels.

Rarely does anyone begin Impacto at the beginning and go to the end, filling in the blanks. Each domain is deeply interlinked with the others. An addition or modification in one will ripple through the others. The design process may well be jazzy, meandering,
helter skelter, a free for all. Eventually, a story will reveal itself on the map Larger threads appear. The domains align themselves. This can take an hour or a day or two, depending on the complexity of the issue and the clarity of your purposes.

To get started, find the domains where you feel you have some material, some interest, and some energy to state the case. Put down whatever you have. Emptied of this, take a stab at a domain which remains thin or empty. At the invention stage, do not concern yourself with how well the story hangs together. More important now to get everything you believe you know and want on the map.

Acknowledgememts

Education Scotland has licensed the Transition Leadership tools and the Three Horizons toolkit for the specific and sole purpose of improving Scottish Education and the partner services that support it. We are delighted to have partnered the following people and organisations in this venture: Executive Arts Inc.; James R. Ewing, ForthRoad Ltd.; International Futures Forum and Graham Leicester.

Transformap

Transformap: Working with underlying assumptions and beliefs

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Map out and clarify thinking amidst uncertainty and confusion, enabling others to shift their thinking and make headway.

The TransforMap is a guide for making headway through the uncertainty, confusing feelings and conflicting thoughts which accompany significant change. It is a basic structure for conversation with yourself or another person embarked on change.

Changes can seem pretty messy because we have so many conflicting thoughts, feelings and urges going on in us at the same time. When someone says, “Things are changing”, it is generally worth asking what they mean by that. Over the years, thousands of answers to that question have seemed to emanate from three different and very distinct ‘Voices.’ Each voice has a particular language and an affect associated with it.

All three are at work at once, as if three different people are talking inside our head. Hence the confusion. At any time, one voice will be dominant. Usually people begin with Voice 1, Ending, move to Voice 2, ReInvention, and wind up in Voice 3, Realisation. While there is an overall sequence, we are wherever we are at any moment. So the TransforMap may be entered wherever your interest or feeling or need demands.

Each voice has an emotional expression, a thinking expression and an action expression. Therefore, there are nine domains on the map. Each represents a legitimate and necessary point of view and must be heard, fully, to genuinely complete a transition. Whatever comes up has a place to fit and a positive reason to be there. Everything is helpful because everything is real. There are no ‘bad’ or ‘good’ voices. Just voices. When, individually or in teams, we are caught up in the struggle with a transition, the map takes all the feelings and thoughts and activity and gives each a place to rest. It all fits. The sooner they are all heard, the sooner we move on to the rest of our life.

For those who are facing a change in the future, the map is a great planning and awareness tool. The map predicts the type of material which will come from ourselves and others when the change hits. We also remember the processes of past changes and learn what our natural responses are so we know them when they reappear.

For those leading a change, the map is predictive of what to expect and helps the leader:

locate where he or she is in the process
move along as quickly as possible
develop empathetic personal stories
appreciate the dilemma of those who have not yet engaged the change
develop a creative communications plan for the whole system

This is a starting place to understand the domains of the three voices and use them effectively in conversations with another person or a group, reducing waste and angst, building spirit and vitality, and moving business and lives along.

Acknowledgememts

Implemento

Implemento: Designing for Implementation

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Design action plans that confront reality, engage resistance, and provide hindsight.

What to do when there is nothing apparent to do? Where to head when everything seems temporary, uncertain, chaotic, un-clear?
What to do when there is everything to do? A vast possibility for taking action. Where everything is a priority.
What to do when impaled on the proverbial horns of a dilemma? Where either choice is equally the right choice?
Where either choice is equally the wrong choice?

The above conditions challenge us to find a new perspective on things. To rise above the apparent dilemma, to act on some deeper faith that things work out. To clarify our intentions, and take action in the midst of uncertainty. To act out of the reality of what confronts us, rather than acting out of past experience.

Implemento combines a rigorous situation analysis with an opportunity for innovation and ‘making it up.’ These two activities generally reveal a surprising perspective and clarity in the matter. The ‘what we know’ that we did not know we knew. Implemento prompts us to create scenarios for the future based on an action which we believe would be best given the conditions at hand. ?

If it’s a dilemma, we take one side and go with it. Then take the other side. If there are a million choices, we take a couple. If there are no choices, we make up something and run with it.

The trick with Implemento is not to second guess what will happen. Take the plunge. To let our imagination run riot. To take the time to reflect on the sum of our stories and build a comprehensive, multi- faceted, strategy for taking a first step.

Implemento offers the curious possibility of beginning with a molehill of directions and plans, giving that molehill to Implemento’s structures and your imagination for an hour or so, and discovering a mountain of purposes, insights and steps to get on with the right stuff.

Acknowledgements

All, Three horizons

The Three Horizons, part 1

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*This text is taken from the Education Scotland’s Promoting Innovative Practice and Transformative Change Document

The three horizons approach, in the form of a strategic thinking board game kit, aims to provide you with a helpful approach to exploring the creativity and imagination that change demands. Learners can be part of this process and their insights harnessed too. This kit sets up three perspectives called the three horizons. These perspectives relate to the present and the future. They will help you to re-organise your knowledge, ideas and aspirations so that you may look at them again with a fresh eye.

Using the kit can help you to:

see both the present situation and the emerging future differently
formulate aspirations about the future you desire
create a shared vison of what you can achieve: and
relate a shared vision of possibilities to how you plan for improvement

Change is a double-edged sword. Its relentless pace these days runs us off our feet. Yet when things are unsettled, we can find new ways to move ahead and to create breakthroughs not possible in stagnant societies.

Leading in a Culture of Change

We live in a rapidly changing world. Our shared aspirations are for education itself to drive that change and, in an ideal world, get ahead of it. But deciding how best to prepare learners for their future, and
to do better in the present, is a demanding task requiring determination, especially when the future is uncertain. We can gain inspiration from a variety of sources, and we can bring intelligence, expertise, experience and knowledge to bear in a focused way. This may sound daunting, but thinking about future possibilities is energising too. And we do it all the time.

The kit has been designed to be used in three stages:

A strategic conversation that envisions the future: this phase enables you to engage in a conversation about the way things are today, things that are happening in the external world and in the worlds of policy and emerging practice that might impact on the way you do things at present, as well as the things you really aspire to in the future.
Improvement planning: takes the results of that mapping of the landscape and explores the implications for improvement planning that focus on the things you need to change in order to move towards the future you desire.
Tracking progress: uses an overview to review the activities you planned and undertook to become a reflection on where you are the next year and so on. It helps you to keep track of how near you are getting to your planned transformation and your longer-term vision.

Read The Three Horizons part 2

Acknowledgememts