Remarkable
We have best practices, tools and experts for virtually any field. Where are those ensuring that not only the partial solutions work, but also the whole package at project, department, enterprise or system level?
More specifically, where are those best practices, tools and experts that …
- Solve the mounting conflicts between traditional1 and agile best practices2?
- Solve the changeable (root) causes hiding behind complaints, reoccurring problems, failed projects and ongoing cost-savings pressures?
- Bridge the highly complex internal communication space between organisations and between best practices?
- Identify phenomena3 in complex environments and solve them with techniques suited to these phenomena?
1 Traditional Best Practices: Project Management, Governance, Service Management/ITIL, etc.
2 Agile or new Best Practices: Scrum, Semco, self-organization, etc.
3 Phenomena: Capacity bottlenecks/traffic jams, tipping points, butterfly effects, etc.
Open Root Cause Analysis Delivered Answers and Simple Solutions
Open root cause analysis delivered insights, root causes and solutions impossible to find with popular analysis techniques.
Open implies no splitting into supposedly manageable parts and without the usual restrictions. Focus on both, highest-possible damage and highest-possible value creation reduced an endless number of possible causes to just a few fundamental root causes. This provided new insights. In turn, it delivered answers to the questions above and the pathway to the simple questions.
Question 1 became solvable by a single word. An open method, responding to question 2, turned out to have delivered extraordinary results. The highly complex communication space of question 3 was bridged for 30,000 employees with a surprisingly simple solution. Examples responding to question 4 are available through the sliding pictures at the top of this page.
Through these experiences and advanced networks, it became obvious that simple solutions and new possibilities for our tough challenges are waiting to be explored.
Simple Solutions Are Waiting To Be Explored:
What You Can Do
1. Ask Guiding Questions
Whenever the opportunity arises, simply ask Guiding Questions. That are just a few questions that cannot be left unanswered any longer, as their consequences cripple what we do.
You will find the highest-impact and most broadly-applicable questions under Remarkable above. Additional, challenge and field-specific guidance questions are available under point 4 below. ‘Highest impact’ refers to damage created and value waiting to be released.
2. Make Your Contributions Powerful
To make your contributions powerful, provide examples of simple solutions. However, don’t waste time with bottom-up and top-down examples that have been tried many times yet encountered insurmountable obstacles. This shortcoming is recognized very quickly these days. To avoid the shortcoming and gain support, you can provide examples that minimize the obstacles and clear the way for bottom-up and top-down initiatives.
Nonetheless, there will be opposition. To prevent opposition from the beginning, it is advisable to use the technique of possibilities. Possibilities are perspectives that are attractive to all parties.
To this end, feel free to use examples from our list of simple solutions and new possibilities.
3. Insist on Solid Answers!
You can ask certain questions to determine whether solid answers are being provided in response to the Guiding Questions and to your contributions. For this, it is important to avoid getting into to the control-mode of the past.
The important thing is that the answers lead to trust. That involves promoting the drive to go beyond the tipping point, where projects become executable, and preventing the impulse to fall back into old habits.
4. Ask Additional Guiding Questions for Specific Fields and Challenges
Additional Guiding Questions help you to make more significant contributions in addressing specific fields and challenges. Here is an overview of our blog posts that contain Guiding Questions. Of course, the posts include backgrounds and lessons learned.
Guiding Questions for Specific Fields and Challenges
General
For almost two decades, we have been trying to adjust our organisations to the challenges of today’s world (Including the Guiding Questions at the top of this page).
For Organisations
How can executives, managers and professionals make the right decisions when, with today’s Business Intelligence approach, vital information for making decisions becomes invisible?
For larger companies to survive in today’s world, they need to become agile. To become an agile company, its internal communication and decision making need to function with the speed of a high-speed train.
Where is the trend, priority, solution, best practice or method needed to make this happen? Inclusive an agile solution and experiences with 30.000 employees.
Heads-Up
Service Management/ITIL
Service Management/ITIL is available since the mid-90s. Today, it belongs to the best practices IT advisory company Gartner has characterized as ‘optimized for a world gone by’ in 2008. Preliminary Guiding Questions:
- Where are the lessons learned of the past 20 years? That is especially the root causes hiding behind the lessons.
- Where are the do’s and don’ts?
- Where are the adjustments for the agile requirements of today’s world? Examples: natural process flows, guiding mechanisms and effective techniques for the phenomena above.
- Where is the solution to the structural conflict of the working practices of agile best practices and those of ITIL?
For Health Services
And for the prevention of unacceptable behaviour, bullying, vandalism, school shootings and crime
Children can learn what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. When they reach puberty, it is too late. Just one Guiding Question for the prevention of unacceptable behaviour, bullying, vandalism, crime and school shootings.
Heads-Up
Health Services
How can we continue with today’s ‘solution’ approaches to make health services affordable in the years to come, when the solution thinking remains the same as the one that created the current situation? One wonders, how would Einstein have approached this challenge? Well, he told us: By applying a different thinking than the thinking that created the problem situation. With this guidance, let’s create some Guiding Questions:
- The brain, the body and health services are highly complex systems: Where is the education of doctors, researchers, consultants, managers and politicians in phenomena of complex systems and solutions engineers apply?
- Where is the research having applied this knowledge?
- Easily, unconventional therapies are flagged as ‘unproven’. This includes therapies of which the working principle can be explained through phenomena knowledge. Due to the ‘unproven’ flag and missing answers to the previous question, however, getting research started turned out to be next to impossible: Where are the initiatives providing this status to scientists, doctors, politicians and ultimately to the patients for their treatment decisions?
In this respect, please see the sliding pictures at the top. What made the results possible was applying such knowledge.
5. To Speed Things Up
There is no doubt. Effective mechanisms, tools, natural process flows and simple solutions are waiting to be applied. The challenge is that of finding them, integrating them in such a way that the difference is made and preventing fallback into old habits.
Do you want to speed up your initiative or project? Do you want an independent perspective to find the optimal way forward? Do you want to prevent fallback into old habits? If that is the case, feel free to contact us.
