Fit for the Future
Building an organization that is daring, adaptable, innovative, and engaging as the times demand requires a large cadre of inspired management innovators—individuals who can envision and prototype bold new alternatives to the management status quo. This is the goal of Fit for the Future, a 1 or 2-day experience that helps participants gain the necessary perspectives, skills and tools to first imagine and then design innovative approaches to creating strategy, allocating resources, harnessing talent, evaluating performance, building teams, and exercising control.
We'll explore four critical steps for turning “ordinary” managers into inspired mavericks:
Challenge Management Dogma
All of us are prisoners of precedent; all of us struggle to envision radical alternatives to the status quo. Most of us have grown up in and around organizations that fit a common template. Along the way we've inherited all sorts of management beliefs that constrain our thinking. Most managers believe, for example, that freedom and discipline are mutually exclusive, that control must be exercised from above, that people will reflexively resist change, and that first-level associates are incapable of self-management.
In Fit for the Future, we help leaders surface, examine and challenge their deeply embedded assumptions about how the work of management gets done in their organization. In doing so, we open up a "field of possibilities" in which new management approaches can take root and grow.
Learn from the Fringe
The future—of art, music, fashion and management—is born on the fringe. That's why you won't uncover the future of management by benchmarking your peers Fortune 500 peers. In Fit for the Future, we introduce participants to a wide range of positive deviants—progressive organizations that are already challenging the basic tenets of Management 1.0.
On the fringe, one finds organizations where employees chose their leaders, where formal hierarchy has been abolished, where employees select what to work on, and where strategy is the result of an open, always-on, and company-wide conversation. By exploring these bleeding edge practices, one learns bureaucracy isn't inevitable, and that you can build an organization of scale that is lithe, nimble and endlessly inventive.
Prototype
A top-level task force is seldom the best way to reinvent a company's management model. Traditional approaches to improving management practices are too slow and incremental. What's needed is a broad portfolio of bold, yet low-risk, management experiments. Companies regularly experiment with new products, web designs, and ad campaigns, so why not experiment with new management techniques?
In Fit for the Future, we will show you how to design low-cost, time-compressed management experiments—and how to scale positive lessons across the organization.
Make it Personal
Building new organizational capabilities is unlikely to succeed unless accompanied by a radical re-think of individual mindsets and behaviors— especially among those with formal authority. Leadership must become less a function of one's position, and more an expression of one's ability to catalyze positive change: unleashing entrepreneurial energy, nurturing colleagues, building community, challenging dogma for the sake of collective accomplishment.
In Fit for the Future, we will provide participants with practical steps to surface and challenge self-limiting, bureaucratic beliefs and multiply the leadership capacity of their teams.
The companies that win in the tumultuous times ahead will be the ones that evolve their management practices faster than their competitors—and Fit for the Future, you will learn how to do just that. The ultimate goal: an organization that is bold, resilient, creative, and brimming with passion.
Ready to accelerate your organization's evolution? To learn more about bringing Fit for the Future to your company, please use the contact form below.