Focus on Outcomes

Traction Tips

A weekly action idea to improve traction on your important initiatives by Stephen Wise.

  The new and wonderful musical, An American in Paris, is doing the rounds. It weaves multiple love stories with a Jazz and Ballet fusion leading to true love outcomes.  

Milo falls for Jerry, who's in love with Lise, who is engaged to Henri. Lise shares mutual affection with Henri but falls in love with Jerry. Jerry's friend Adam is also falling for Lise. Lise the ballerina, is oblivious she is the focal point of all the story lines. Despite the complications, true love wins out in the end. In the opening scenes of the musical Jerry sets his strategy to find and win Lise. However he gets lost, becomes indecisive, and is distracted by other interests. Has this ever happened to you in business? Getting lost in the details, uncertainty over the correct next step, or being distracted by new opportunities? Unfortunately, I see it every day. So, here is my guaranteed formula for success. 1. Focus on driving the outcomes 2. Accept Uncertainty 3. Agile Mindset

Focus on outcomes

Craft a hi-level plan. List the activities required to achieve the desired outcomes.

Accept Uncertainty

Accept uncertainty. Our ability to achieve goals proscribed in the plan can vary significantly.

Agile Mindset

Re-work your plan frequently.  Consider changes in the environment and your leanings along the way. Switch around your priorities. re-evaluate desired outcomes to reflect new realities.

Weekly Traction Action

Fuse the improvisation of Jazz with the perfection of Ballet to manage your corporate outcomes. Your weekly action: 1. Ensure all your desired outcomes have an accessible, hi-level, end to end plan. 2. Schedule regular times to evaluate whether you are on track and make course corrections to get back on track. I recommend or implement these actions all the time on client initiatives. Hopefully, it will work to improve outcomes for you too.

I love Email

Please send me an email and tell me about if you have success or trouble with this action. I’m always interested to see what can happen out in the wild.  

Stephen Wise

Integration Professionals

https://IntegrationProfessionals.com

Race to Resilience

Traction Tips

A weekly action idea to improve traction on your important initiatives by Stephen Wise.

  Has it ever happened that your adequate plan takes a wrong turn and just keeps getting worse with every move you make? It is critical to under stand the concept of Resilience so that you have built up your resilience muscles in advance. 

Heading to the Airport

We left for Pearson airport right on schedule. It was about 5am, cold and clear. The trip would take about 20 minutes. The international flight was in 3 hours - I was heading for a long planned vacation in Aruba. My daughter was my driver and she would drop me off and return home with the car.

Change of Plan

On the way she mentioned she was worried the car was low on gas.

Waze

We took the nearest exit on the 401 where I knew a gas station would be nearby. While filling up I turned to the navigation app Waze for help to help get back to the airport. I wasn’t familiar with the area but Pearson is pretty big place; an airport should be hard to miss. Waze instantly computed a route and declared 31 minutes to destination. The detour was going to be a lot longer than anticipated, and I was suddenly annoyed with myself, “Bad decision to get unnecessary gas when the most important thing was to get to the airport on time”, I was thinking.

Wrong Turn

We turned left, left again and then another right and so on. Eventually Waze declared Mission Accomplished right on scheduled time. I peered out in the dark and nothing was familiar. There were no strings of lights from other arriving and departing cars, no familiar airport way-finding signage nothing. Waze had delivered us to the service entrance at the back of the airport. At that point, speed limits became speed suggestions, and I raced to re-trace our path, get back on the 401, and re-enter the proper Pearson departure queue. Once back at arrivals, I lept out of the car.

Arrivals

A very friendly Air Canada rep radioed the gate and ensured my bag was accepted after the cutoff. The sprint through security and customs was heart pounding but successful. Eventually, I took off for Aruba and it was everything people say about it.

Recovery

When you enter stressful events how do you react? Do you cope as best you can and then collapse? There is a better way. I learned from Richard Citrin, an expert in Resilience, that the right approach is to expect stressful situations to occur and prepare in advance to navigate through them and recover.

Resilience

When you are planning your next task, remember to build in enough time for reality. Also, prioritize so that you do the most important things first.   Thanks for reading. Subscribe to my newsletter for more traction tips at www.IntegrationProfessionals.com Stephen D Wise

Trust us. We have block chain and we are here to help.

Block chain's great Promise

Middlemen are part of our daily lives. The great promise of block chain technology is eliminating the middleman. The original / most famous application of block chain is cryptocurrency, such as bitcoin. With no middleman, for example, with no bank to have to deal with, we could avoid those annoying fee’s and charges. Sounds great! Really? Who is going to do the work to provide a monthly statement of all your deposits and withdrawals? Who is going to do the work to lend money so you can buy a house or car, or pay for the hundreds of smaller purchases you make? Who am I going to call if I am having trouble logging in and can’t access my money? Who am I going to call if my bank engages in fraudulent activity?

Block chain's technology

Block chain uses crowd sourcing, massive computing resources, and math. The result is a process to allow us to exchange value directly with each other, without using a middle man. You might think we do this already. For example, if I make a deal with the neighbour to cut my grass for $25, you may think there is no middleman. But there is a middleman. I can’t pay unless I deposit my pay cheque and take out money from my middleman/bank. The promise of Block chain is that we can eliminate the middleman and instead of using a middleman/bank to keep track of our money, we will use the crowd to keep track of our money. The block chain response is something like, ‘Isn’t this going to be fantastic? We will deal direct with each other and rely on math and big computers as a proxy for trusting our bank/middleman’. This is not so fantastic. In the current models, we have no way to reverse a fraudulent transaction, no way to track money laundering, and no way to stop terrorist financing. Governments and banks aren’t going to hand over the keys to the economy so easily.

Peak frenzy

We are approaching block chain peak frenzy. I know because I failed my second-year statistics course but still read Satoshi Nakamoto’s paper on distributed databases, probability, and time-stamping. The trouble right now is the conversation is being dominated by charlatans jumping onto the next big thing. If not charlatans it is geniuses interested in the math, or disaffected folks interested in disrupting big corporations. Or, all the above.

Steve Jobs

Something big is happening but block chain is missing it’s Steve Jobs. I think block chain’s Steve jobs will emerge from Toronto, but that is for another article.