Professional topics

It’s often said that a picture is worth a thousand words.  That may be true.  But a metaphor is worth a thousand pictures.  Using metaphors in business might be a relatively new concept to some people, but it’s been in large businesses, international agencies and governments since 1988, with a track record of success.  One of the biggest benefits of using metaphors is that metaphors promote creativity.

Just take a moment to imagine your typical meeting.  You want to roll out a new project and your team is working to foresee problems and implement solutions to solve them.  In addition, they need to find opportunities to engage other employees, or customers, or clients and help them manage the change in an effective and least problematic way.  There might be notepads in your meeting, there’s probably a white board or a computer screen projection writing down ideas.  You might have 1/2 the team working productively throwing out ideas.  The ideas may be organized neatly, or you may find yourself having to re-explain what the idea was or the intention.  You come away from the meeting feeling somewhat defeated, hoping to have accomplished more in your meeting than what was done.  You schedule another meeting, and then another, hoping to get more clarity on the issue.

Metaphor mapping helps prevent wasted time, and makes process planning more effective by engaging all your team members in a creative project.  Using visual symbols and metaphors is engaging and turns on the creative portion of your team members’ brains and allows them to have more free thinking processes, giving them opportunities to visually see different paths, different problems, and new solutions.

This free thinking and creativity allows your meetings to be more effective and  involves people more deeply and prompts them to take ownership of the strategy and tasks.  Being involved and feeling like you’re a part of the solution is a huge step towards successfully implementing change within your company.

It’s hard to believe that such a simple strategy can be so successful, but it won’t take you long to become a believer in the metaphor mapping strategy.

For more ways our unique metaphor mapping can help your team meet your business needs and succeed, please contact us today!

A start up is a company that intends to grow quickly. There’s no map for growth, and one of the common pitfalls of this typical acceleration towards success is a loss of identity among the leaders in the organization.

Facilitating growth in a company begins with adopting a culture of creativity among the thought leaders in the organization. Once you’ve recruited the right people to propel your company to your next benchmark, you need to implement a set of values that everyone agrees on. It becomes necessary to have a series of conversations about who will fill which role in the company. Confusion in this particular area is common. It’s also deadly.

If you understand that patience is required to achieve your company’s goals, you may find yourself in a situation that many start ups face during their otherwise successful first years. No one knows who is supposed to be doing the next important thing.

Company culture that facilitates creativity is vital to the entity that is the fragile, mysterious, amazing start up. Don’t let it be damaged by your team’s confusion about what their individual roles are within the framework of growth.

It’s hard to read the label when you are inside the bottle.

Metaphors promote creativity, and creativity solves problems. In this case, metaphors also clarify the roles, responsibilities, and privileges of each of your team members.

Someone needs to be the designated leader. That leader will need a partner, and both the leader and her partner are going to need someone to implement the activities that the group has agreed on. The leader will make decisions, consult with her partner, and give authority to the person who is in charge of implementing the activity.

This structure makes sense to people who are ready to move forward, but are confused about their particular role.When the roles are described using metaphors, the way forward becomes crystal clear.

To learn more about our unique, simple, effective method for using metaphors to promote creativity and clarify roles in the typical start-up company, please contact us.

Mind Mapping and Team Alignment

The logical connections you make when developing a mind map help you organize your thoughts and clarify your situation or plan.  When you try to achieve the same clarity and insights with groups, the conventional techniques from Mind Mapping fall short.  Their lines and text work on paper or a computer screen, BUT, they don’t ensure cross-function or cross-culture communication, don’t stimulate intuition, draw people into conversation or develop teamwork.

Your group will become more than the sum of its members if you bring in visuals to promote spontaneity, symbols to bring instant meaning and metaphors to provide a syntax for the big picture discussion and promote creativity.  Taken together, you can achieve real teamwork and commitment to shared goals.

This is what Metaphor Mapping does for you.  Its four metaphors take your group along a path to think out its strategy, develop a plan, assign roles and responsibilities and deal with any problems of attitude or mindset.  The team can always take home digital images of their maps, tweak them and communicate with them throughout their project.

This post was contributed by a Six Sigma specialist in a major, mid-West USA based engineering and construction company>>>>

Last month I facilitated a Village Mapping exercise at the major global engineering/construction company that employs me. The objective was to develop a plan for implementing a knowledge transfer program in our biggest division. The division is facing the loss of a great deal of engineering knowledge because of retirements in the next few years. The mapping exercise helped the team look beyond immediate tactical concerns and understand the nature of relationships among the many organizational functions with a stake in knowledge transfer. One major ‘aha’ was how many functions the knowledge transfer process touches that have not been involved in the program heretofore. The result of the exercise was the creation of a basis for a longer range plan to ensure the success of the program.

This was not strictly speaking a Six Sigma initiative, but the mapping model does incorporate many of the concepts employed by the Six Sigma methodology. It deploys a systematic, team-based approach to defining the current process, identifying problems and opportunities embedded in the process, and visualizing creative solutions to streamline the process. It also highlights the importance of quality communication and control measures that satisfy the requirements of critical internal customer and stakeholder groups.
Finally, the exercise energized the team and kick-started a planning process that had been drifting for some time.

An interesting new ebook titled The Engaged Employee states that “Companies with high engagement experience more than 5% in operating margin and more than 3% in net profit margin as compared to those companies with low employee engagement.”

http://www.kaptasystems.com/resources/Employee_Engagement_ebook.pdf

Metaphor Mapping is a great tool for employee engagement in that it provides a easy mechanism for involving employees in strategy setting, where they can efficiently bring their experience and perspectives to bear on matters critical to company success.

Since you need to specialize to be a leader in any area today, you need a team to accomplish just about anything. So, if you don’t work well with others, you’ll finish in the also-ran category. Same for your functional group if it doesn’t work well with other groups. Sounds like kindergarten moralizing but a real issue for highly focused individuals.

Personal characteristics that help.
If getting along with others was a high value during your childhood, your collaboration skills may be well developed. If your empathy for others is very high, that helps too. If you’re not a compulsive direction-setter but are pleased to support the ideas of others, you’re likely a good collaborator. But, if you are just “normal” in these ways, you have to build skills. The same applies if your functional group doesn’t include a super-star collaborator to lead the way.

Core skills, but continuing challenge..
Effective collaboration is based on mutual understanding of views and needs, appreciation of and response to time constraints and aligning objectives of participants. Communication skills aid can be of help. But, much personal and team development literature emphasizes building on your strengths, rather worrying about your weaknesses. So what to do?

Enter Metaphor Mapping …
Try your best to be a good collaborator but give yourself an assist. Always ensure that your functional group and cross-functional teams understand each other and are clearly aligned on goals. Metaphor Mapping is the champion at this. Gather everyone together and in just a few hours you’ll have a common understanding and clear expectation of what each has to do for the others. The visual symbols do it at a gut level and make it memorable.

The Power of Habit

Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

Charles Duhigg. Random House. 2012 377 pages

Charles Duhigg, a New York Times investigative reporter, has written an easy to read book about a topic most people consider mundane but its core messages are worth serious reflection:

• Habits can be observed everywhere—in personal, social and business environments and we are often unknowingly slaves to them
• They have a profound effect on our lives
• We should learn how to change them when needed to become more effective business people, more aware consumers and more understanding of the broad social forces around us

The author starts by showing small personal habits and how they are formed. He explains how habits give advertisers, such as P&G, an opportunity to influence our buying behaviors at an unconscious level.  He also shows how businesses,  have dramatically improved their bottom lines by changing their habits.   Alcoa, for example dramatically improved its bottom line by focusing on habits related to worker  safety rather than profit.  Readers may react that this is simply analyzing and improving high-leverage areas, but moving away from business term “leverage” to the more personal term “habit” brings with it a useful emphasis on the human perspective and opens up new ways of thinking about improving operations.

Duhigg describes a versatile three part model for habits that can be applied to developing, using and breaking them. It includes a trigger/cue, an “automatic” action or routine and a satisfying result or reward following the action.
The model is easy to remember and helps you see behaviors you never considered habits.  Although Duhigg doesn’t apply the more conventional terms,  organizations would recognize the routine initiated by a cue as a work process. And, that’s the cue for me to describe my view of how Metaphor Mapping helps change organization habits.

Organization processes are initiated by cues, include routines at their core and rewards for successful completion. Metaphor Mapping, a visual systems thinking tool, gives you and a group of collaborators  metaphoric symbols to examine processes through the lens of the three part model. You see relationships among the cues, the steps of the routine and the rewards. The symbols promote open and deep discussion and produce a high impact map of process weaknesses and their relative importance.

Metaphor Mapping helps you quickly and inclusively change organization habits, no matter how in-grained. For example, process participants can come together in as few as two hours to collaboratively identify and evaluate the causes of client dis-satisfaction and create a new flow to correct them. After those changes are put into action and clients’ expectations are exceeded, the new process is validated and becomes  a habit.

The Applications and Offerings sections describe some of the ways Metaphor Mapping is used.  Here is a bit of additional perspective and short hand about when to apply these highly participative visual tools:

• Metaphor Mapping is most useful when the problem is complex and involves several groups.  If there are just a few people involved, if there is no contention or polarization, a workshop is likely not needed.  It may, however, still be useful to build a Village map simply to show the stakeholders and structure of the situation as a communication aid.
• Executives benefit as much from Mapping sessions as do operational staff, but execs often deal with financial and status reporting and evaluation work that is not well suited to map-building.
• If the issue at hand relates to a process, a set of connected activities to achieve an objective, then it most certainly is a candidate for Mapping.  The issue need not be how to fix a problem, it could also be:
  •  “Things are going well, but how might we do better?”, or
  •  “We know competitors may be taking a special action in the future.  How might we operate differently to respond or leapfrog them?”
• Assessing today’s operation, visioning an ideal, planning to achieve it with specific focus on obstacles and possible unanticipated outcomes are the most common uses of Metaphor Mapping.  If you want a solution that engages stakeholders, uses a collaborative approach and results in joint commitment to results, you will be delighted with a Mapping workshop
  •  If you also use the Facecards tool to ensure clear responsibilities, you’ll be pleased with the sense of personal responsibility that continues throughout implementation
  • If you use the Zoo tool to address any mismatched role expectations, you can further energize the group

Building understanding, agreeing common goals across functions

Recently, Metaphor Mapping was the core tool used to build cross-sector teams in Morocco, Jordan, Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Moldova, Lebanon, Albania, Uganda, Kenya and Philippines.

Meeting sponsors were looking for ways to establish new structures, processes and habits for organization operations – to enable them to develop innovative solutions to address significant change, and to build ownership for joint goals. They needed to build effective teams to address critical priorities.

The workshop sessions addressed an array of specific issues including: developing strategies to improve elements of national security, public safety organization improvement and process optimization.  Metaphor Mapping was employed as the workshop vehicle in each case.  It represents a new twist on the proven strategy development technique of assessing the current state of a situation, visioning an ideal state and developing an action plan.  Its uniqueness is the high degree of openness/authenticity and interaction it provokes, the creativity and ownership it generates through use of visual metaphors and sticker symbols.

In each case, the sponsor’s objectives were met in a single day session.  In spite of not having worked closely together before, in each case the groups became highly energized and began developing the emotional bonds that will be the foundation of teamwork during implementation and operation.

Twenty stakeholders agreeing a strategy in a day may seem remarkable, but Metaphor Mapping achieved it hundreds of times in both individual workshops and extensive corporate programs over the past 20 years.

Diverse Teams Address Complex Problems

• Teams worked across disciplines and cultures.

• Some participants had operational positions and others worked at a strategy level.

• Some were decision makers, some middle managers, some senior officers in the military; others were subject matter specialists.
• There were many different work styles and preferences (extravert/ introvert, practical/theoretical, etc.).

• Working languages included English, French, Serbian, Russian and Arabic.  Because Metaphor Mapping is a visual method, the participants could work in local languages and the need for interpreters was minimal.

Challenging Issues, Quickly Resolved

The duration of meetings varied depending on the complexity of the situation and degree of polarization of participants.  In general they took 90 minutes for each of three steps, and total elapsed time of 6-8 hours to:

1. Define the current state and its weaknesses

2. Develop a vision of the ideal operation

3. Set the strategy.

Participants’ Comments:

“It makes you change your own picture of how things work”

“It would have been good to do this before we argued so much about direction last year”

“A picture is worth a thousand words and a map is worth a million!”

“We’ve done many different exercises, but this was the most interactive”

“Mapping is hard work, even if it looks playful”

“This is stretching for your mind”

“The best part of the strategy session was the mapping.  Building the little maps made everybody think and talk.”

Sponsors’ Comments:

 “If you want people to get it and feel different, do Mapping. It worked for all of us!” (Aide to a government Minister)

“This is an effective tool.  We’ll use it in other planning situations.” (Colonel, Internal Security)

“I will apply this immediately in incident preparation exercises” (Head of transportation safety management)

If you believe as I do that metaphors area critical component of the alignment and energy flow of successful organizations, you may be interested in the attached link.

The author writes:

“We can’t not think metaphorically,” according to Charles Faulkner, a noted Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) writer and trainer.  His premise is that most businesses operate from a particular metaphor and that it’s pretty easy to determine by walking through a company’s headquarters.  Some of the more popular metaphors for business are:  family, game, machine, and organism.

http://www.yearick-millea.com/impact/?tag=metaphors-for-business