‘Unblocking execution barriers to scaling’ — workshop sneak peek
Ask any leader of a scaling business and they’ll tell you it can be both exhilarating and hugely demanding.
So on July 21st I was thrilled to lead a one-day intensive with leaders from a range of scaleups. The aim was to unpack the challenges, and explore fostering a culture of collaboration and execution. I was also fortunate to have a highly experienced co-facilitator with some great stories to share, Simon Bristow.
Below is a peek at some of the key themes of the day.
The game-plan was to cover some core insights and tools — some of which I’ll outline below — and then use these to work through real challenges surfaced by the participants.
We also used the participant’s real-life challenges to guide us. We had so much we wanted to share, if we had covered all the content we turned up with, we probably would have been there for about a week! Thankfully, we had a fantastic group of attendees, which made for some lively and highly interesting discussion.
“Today’s workshop was a great way to tap into a very rich range of expertise and experiences, reflect deeply on your company’s current ways of working, and brainstorm ways to improve your working environment for better engagement, productivity and impact. A great session, highly recommended!”
Below is the flow of the day, and some of the key ideas we covered:
Part 1: Unpacking Scaling — balancing action and innovation
‘Scaling’ is the inflection point experienced in a system as it grows. For example, in organisations as people are added to the team, complexity also rapidly grows. Things like coordinating across groups, and finding ways to keep the vision and values alive suddenly become both harder and more important.
Some of the key relevant strategies here include:
- Short goal-cycles and an experimental approach
Fostering experimentation, and ethos of calculated risk-taking, helps foster entrepreneurial spirit and learning orientation within the organisation as it grows. - ‘Work Out Loud’ Philosophy
Transparency is a cornerstone of effective leadership, and particularly key to enabling collaboration, autonomy and reducing information bottle-necks. - Cadence for Continuous Alignment
Designing an effective communication rhythm into how the organisation operates helps to ensure the right people have the right conversations, and that information flows swiftly.
Part 2: Unblocking Your Op Model — a blueprint for success
Visualizing the operating model can be hugely powerful for understanding and optimising how the organisation fits together. By mapping the value chain across the organisation, leaders can identify and address blockers and opportunities.
Part 3: Executing Change — where the rubber hits the road
Bringing all of the above together using structured learning-centric approaches — such as the Lean Change ‘insights-options-experiments’ cycle — helps to create a dynamic culture of execution.
“Really engaging course with interactive exercises and ideas ready to implement or experiment with”
Ultimately, of course, the success of the workshop hinged on the fantastic energy and insights of the leaders who attended. So Simon and I are hugely grateful for the range of perspectives and insights attendees shared from a diverse backgrounds and organisations. We’ve committed to check back in over the next few weeks and can’t wait to hear how the ideas developed are being implemented!
If you’re interested in workshops or services like this, do let us know or drop us a line. We are always happy to chat.
