Value — Align — Scale — Enable (VASE) Explainer
Draw attention across the center of your initiative to sustain relationships and momentum
Momentum is not easy to achieve when you are wobbly. I’ve seen — no, felt — many initiatives lacking something or doing too much of something else. It ain’t great.
Through many strokes of luck, and by perhaps being drawn to the right people who were asking the right questions, I’ve also experienced the flow and balance in an initiative that enabled less wobble, and a lot more momentum.
Over time, I’ve built, reconfigured, renamed, and restructured the value chain that was apparent to me in building this momentum, and by proxy, trust. I wanted to describe what my team paid attention to for success, to orient and reorient us when we sense the wobble.
📝My first blog about this effort includes a little more backstory.
None of it is novel. However, depending on the people involved and how they decide to work together, some of it will simply get ignored or neglected.
Eight (8) Facets of Effectiveness
I’m still playing with what to call this and taking tips. Please leave a comment if you’d prefer different language.
Appropriate practices:
- We need tools, methods or practices to inspect, build, test, and improve what we create.
- We need small-ish groups of diverse people to function well together as they explore potential.
Service orientation:
- We need to look closely, with deep attention to the moments that illuminate realities within the system.
- We need to look broadly at the journey and holistic functions that shape the flow toward outcomes.
Governance and Leadership:
- We need enough structure — norms and policy — to guide our thinking and interactions and work that also allows us to flex with dynamics.
- We need the right conditions to make responsive decisions that guide people and resources involved.
Activated ecosystem:
- We need to communicate clearly and provide momentary signals so that people can navigate on their own, yet collectively.
- We need to nurture safe, connected spaces for the power of networks to leverage what we are learning and building.
All of this comes together as a whole set of interrelated parts that can be any shape, colour, or size to suit the context people are in.
When each of the halves are viewed on the axis, higher order capabilities emerge.
- When appropriate practices and service orientation are addressed, we get VALUE delivery.
- When an organization is service oriented and the leaders are paying attention with effective governance, we unlock ALIGNMENT to support prioritizing objectives that lead to outcomes.
- When practices are combined with an active ecosystem and communications are flowing well, we see SCALE of learning that can leverage and amplify what teams produce.
- And when an active ecosystem of peers validate their experience together and leadership is paying attention and aligning governance… we ENABLE the whole system to do more.
When I saw this, my eye’s nearly shed a tear. What I had sensed but found difficult to explain to people really started showing up.
If you could imagine sitting across a table with the framework at the center, in conversation with others, you start to see congruence there too.
Inside and Outside view
The active ecosystem quadrant is meant to focus conversation about what we need to do as an organized group of people with our networks in this effort. It is the inside view of the initiative.
Across from it, you see space holding service orientation. This is the outside view, where we surface empathy for people we are serving with the initiative.
Relationships and Structures
Across the centerpiece we see practices at the team level (the unit of delivery) opposite to leadership and governance.
It is pretty obvious how a wobble emerges when any of these are missing or out of balance.
I originally had norms and policy as culture. After a conversation with Pieter de Vos, a fellow facilitator and change maker, he pointed out that culture is probably everywhere, and that the circle would balance out if it had policy, as structure, there. Brilliant 💥 (Thanks Pieter!)
The Relational Gap
I want to point out where I see a common gap that is often invisible and damaging to our momentum.
When we are in hierarchical organizations, we don’t often (in my experience) think of decision making as people focused. We don’t see relationships there. We see structure.
This, I feel (and could probably validate with a number of cohorts who have this and who don’t), is a BIG miss in many initiatives.
Is it cheap to say “leaders are people too?” I don’t think so. The VASE doesn’t either.
More writing to come on this for sure… and if you have an example or insights to share on this notion, please reach out. 🙋🏻♀
A final word: Time
The VASE is a timeless centerpiece. In fact, as has been pointed out by folks like Alex Ryan, the VASE could hold space for conversations over time about what we need to pay attention to. It could take different shapes too at different times, where we put more or less effort in.
My team does this now. Our organization uses Objectives and Key Results to help reduce work in progress and find alignment. With our partners, we openly discuss these elements.
Recently we gave them a version of VASE to come together in discussion about where everyone’s confidence level was in each facet, so that we could relate better and advance our efforts collectively. The result was overwhelmingly positive.
I imagine a glass blower, spinning and weaving a beautiful sculpture that eventually sits balanced on the table, holding an arrangement of positivity we’ve centered ourselves around.
VASE is a centerpiece for our collective effort, so long as we come to the table.
Are you interested in having conversations about this framework? Interested in putting it to the test and sharing back?
️I’d love to include more writers in this publication as we experiment with the VASE framework.
💐 Heather-Lynn
