Category Archives: Communication

Helping A Great Team Think & Act Differently

Total Clothing wanted to involve people from right across the team to streamline their processes, to prepare in advance for another year of major growth. They asked Critical Action to help with building vision, identifying changes and putting a plan into action.

“We worked with many of our team, led by Keith, to identify bottlenecks in our processes and by voting on the most urgent issues, gave everyone a sense of inclusion and buy-in.

It has brought the team so much closer in terms of working towards common goals and also in the way they communicate with each other on an ongoing basis.

We are really thinking differently as a team about the way we operate and this is translating into actions and profitability.

Keith’s no nonsense, practical way of facilitating, managing and ensuring that tasks were completed by all has really helped us overcome some challenging issues and we are moving forward with some exciting times ahead.”

Jan Richardson
Managing Director, Total Clothing Ltd

https://www.totalclothing.co.uk

Value: Why, How, What and Beyond

We’ve been working through Value Propositions this week; a very useful exercise that looks trivial until you try it and really challenge one another as to “so what does that actually mean…?”.

These work best in a group situation, but can be done on your own if you are willing to challenge your thinking and iterate.

You’ll need a whiteboard or a load of Post-Its…

There are several common approaches to value propositions, here are some of our favourites:

Start With Why

Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why?” on youtube.

The principle is that products that really matter to people start with “why” they exist, and “why” we as a business do what we do. The video is well worth watching, and explains more about starting with “why”, moving through “how” and finishing with “what” – the product and features.

Jobs To Be Done

The Innovators Toolkit. Again, the full article is worth reading. What Human need are you delivering against? Think of your (short) proposition in three parts:

Action verb – Object – Context

For example:

Create – a company strategy – in small chunks in your spare time

Value Positioning Statement

In his seminal book Crossing The Chasm Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers, Geoffrey Moore describes the Value Positioning Statement, the main parts of which are:

  • For <customers>
  • With <need/problem/dissatisfaction>
  • Our Product is <product, category>
  • Provides <benefits>.
  • Unlike <competitor categories>
  • We do <differentiators>.

 

Hope you find these useful in communicating the value of what it is you are doing.

A Day at the RACIs

One of the big challenges of delivering a project efficiently and effectively, is to get the right people involved at the right time, doing the right things, without turning it into death by committee.

RACI matrices help to manage this. They’ve come up a lot in conversations we’ve had recently, so I thought a few words on them might be of interest.

RACI is an acronym for Responsible, Accountable, Communicate, Inform.

List major parts of your project in one column, headed “Areas” or similar – and add four further columns for the four RACI headings.

Consider which names to write in each “cell” – the columns for each row:

  • Responsible: who will actually do the work which delivers the objective of this area? Can be one or more names
  • Accountable: which one person puts their name to this area of the project, signs it off, and ultimately is answerable for it?
  • Consult: with whom will you have 2-way dialogue to get the best delivery of this area – executive stakeholders, subject matter experts, and so on – who helps define things or cover gaps in knowledge for example? Can be one or more names.
  • Inform: Who needs to be kept abreast of project progress, issues, outcomes and dependencies (like the need for staff training, process change, systems updates, and so on)? Most likely many names, but could be just one.

Once you have defined and agreed the RACI list, make sure people are aware of it, and understand how they fit into it, particularly around Responsible/Accountable (“one name on the ball”).

We sometimes find people in the “Inform” list feel they should be in the “consult” list. If this conversation comes up, we tend to ask what unique knowledge the person brings to need the 2-way conversation, and also seek to get a firm commitment of time they will devote to the Consult work – no commitment = no consulting, in short. That’s not to say that “Informers” can’t contribute to things like initial requirements gathering if that makes sense.

You can also create a RACI matrix with the areas in the left-most column, then people’s names as column headers, with the RACI letters in the “cells” as required – try both formats and see what works best for you. The latter is the more common layout.