Saturday, September 04, 2010

Breakthrough Servant Blueprint

This blog entry and the ones that follow are excerpts from
Appendix B of my new book, 2,000 Percent Living.

“Who then is a faithful and wise servant,
whom his master made ruler over his household,
to give them food in due season?
Blessed is that servant whom his master,
when he comes, will find so doing.
Assuredly, I say to you that he will make him
ruler over all his goods.
But if that evil servant says in his heart,
‘My master is delaying his coming,’
and begins to beat his fellow servants,
and to eat and drink with the drunkards,
the master of that servant will come on a day
when he is not looking for him
and at an hour that he is not aware of,
and will cut him in two and
appoint him his portion with the hypocrites.
There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
— Matthew 24:45-51 (NKJV)

Christians benefit by engaging in work on righteous
breakthroughs for Him by becoming more focused on the
Lord, one of God’s great gifts for helping us avoid this
world’s temptations to sin. We see added encouragement
to develop righteous breakthroughs from the parable in
Matthew 24:45-51 where Jesus describes a faithful
servant as someone who serves righteously whether or
not the master is present. This parable presents a
personal challenge because most people have little formal
authority over directing that a righteous breakthrough
be sought and applied in their working lives. When we are
not in charge of an organization or a task, how can we
serve as faithful servant believers in developing the
righteous breakthroughs that serve His purposes?

In this blueprint, you will learn about how you can stand
on the solid rock of your dependence on the Lord to be a
faithful, righteous servant for Him and His people as
described in the parable by helping make righteous
breakthroughs. In doing so, apply the Golden Rule as
defined by our Lord:

“Therefore, whatever you want men to do to you, do also
to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”
(Matthew 7:12, NKJV)

In performing your various life roles, look at what needs
to be done from the perspective of all those who will be
affected and act according to the rule. Let’s look at some
helpful steps for following Him in this way.

Copyright 2010 Donald W. Mitchell All Rights Reserved.

Labels: , ,

Step One: Understand the Importance of Learning about Breakthrough Leaders and Stakeholders Who Will Be Affected by Breakthroughs

Many shall be purified, made white, and refined,
but the wicked shall do wickedly;
and none of the wicked shall understand,
but the wise shall understand.
— Daniel 12:10 (NKJV)

The breakthrough servant can only succeed by
successfully influencing both breakthrough leaders and
stakeholders. Before trying to have any influence, the
breakthrough servant must understand that the need to
carefully gather and appreciate the right information
about the backgrounds, experiences, philosophies,
circumstances, preferences, and observations of all
concerned is especially critical. Otherwise, breakthrough
servants, even with the best of intentions, may err by
encouraging the wrong changes or by failing to act
while breakthrough leaders are about to provide the
wrong benefits to stakeholders. Let’s look at how such
mistakes can happen.

It’s easy for anyone to provide benefits for others that
aren’t at all welcome due to misunderstanding what’s
desired and appropriate. Applying the Golden Rule
correctly requires us to put ourselves into the minds and
circumstances of those we are seeking to help, rather
than providing what we would find desirable if we were
the recipients. Learning how to employ the Golden Rule
properly is one of the ways that the Lord helps us grow
in wisdom, which is a great blessing that we receive from
Him.

Let’s look at some examples of how the backgrounds,
experiences, philosophies, circumstances, preferences,
and observations of others vary in ways that need to be
taken into account. Imagine that you have uncommon
tastes: Let’s say that you love to see people who have
dyed their hair bright orange and green; you adore
eating chocolate-covered grasshoppers; you delight in
seeing people wearing horizontally striped and polka
dotted outfits; and you take great pleasure in smelling the
odor of skunks. Next, imagine that you assume that
everyone else has the same tastes and faithfully seek to
make what you like more available to them. As a result,
others might not thank you for your efforts … unless
they happen to share your preferences. If you first
establish an interest group of people with those same
uncommon interests, all will be well. Otherwise, you may
repel more people than you attract.

Now imagine that you have very common tastes: You
love to see people smile; you enjoy eating chocolate; you
delight in seeing people wear outfits that complement their
skin, hair, and eye colors in subtly coordinated ways; and
you take great pleasure in smelling the fragrance of
gardenias. If you assume that others have the same taste
that you do in those aspects of life, you’ll often, but not
always, be right. When you act on that assumption, many
people will thank you for your efforts, but some will not,
such as those who are allergic to chocolate and gardenias
and people who are color-blind. Individual circumstances
also vary a lot, greatly affecting the felt needs of those in
quite similar situations. Let me share with you two true
stories that I recently heard Franklin Graham (the
American evangelist son of Billy Graham) tell that
perfectly make this point about how individual
circumstances can powerfully affect perceived needs.

In the first instance, a little girl was shivering in a refugee
camp in Bosnia during the last war there. The
temperature was below zero Fahrenheit, and she was
dressed in thin clothes huddled with her family in a
small tent. Unexpectedly, she received a shoe box filled
with Christmas gifts sent by donors from outside of
Bosnia. As she opened the package, she was delighted to
find a woolen cap that fit just right over her head and
ears. Digging deeper into the package, she found warm
gloves that she quickly slipped over her shaking hands.
It had been months since she had bathed or been able to
wash her clothes. The clean smell of the gifts uplifted her
soul. Ten years later, she recounted her joy from those
gifts as the little girl, now grown, handed over a shoe box
she had filled with gifts to Franklin Graham to be sent to
another needy youngster as part of Operation Christmas
Child.

At about the same time as the girl received her shoe box
filled with gifts, an aid worker with a similar shoe box in
another Bosnian refugee camp approached a small orphan
boy whose parents had been murdered by the Serbs. The
small boy refused the gifts. Through tears, he told that he
only wanted to receive new parents. The aid worker
patiently encouraged the child to at least look into the
package. Eventually, he did but he was still disconsolate.
The aid worker noticed that the package carried the
names and address of the donors. The aid worker asked
the boy if he would like to send a letter to thank them.
With the aid worker’s help, he eventually did and told in
the letter about his desire for parents. His letter was
received with great joy by the donors, a childless couple
who were looking to adopt. Six months later, the couple
arrived at the refugee camp to adopt the boy and to take
him home with them.

Further, priorities can also differ among people with
similar tastes and circumstances. Let me give you an
example. Imagine that two youngsters who love soccer
come from similar homes and circumstances and play
on the same soccer team. The two children are each
given two free tickets to attend a local match of top-
flight soccer teams. Who will the youngsters invite to
join them? One youngster may want to invite the
youngster’s soccer coach as a way of showing
appreciation for the coach’s help with learning and
playing soccer. The other youngster may instead want
to invite an uncle who is great fun to be around. In such
a situation, a donor would err in presenting the tickets
to a parent and asking the parent to take the
youngster. Should the donor make that mistake,
neither youngster would be able to attend the match
with the person of his or her choice.

Experience, as well, plays a role in creating
preferences. A new leader with limited experience may
be eager to bring in a totally new team of people to
work on making a breakthrough. Such a person will
often discount the knowledge and experience of those
who have been working in the activity. In the process
of developing a breakthrough, that leader will probably
make a lot of mistakes that could have been avoided by
keeping more people involved who are knowledgeable
about the activity and its stakeholders. As a result, the
new team might make performance worse rather than
better. Certainly, the breakthrough will be delayed and
may be less effective than it could otherwise have been.

A well-experienced leader who has specialized in one
activity may be skeptical that breakthroughs are
possible, particularly if this leader has never seen one
in the activity. This leader may also be skeptical that
anyone who doesn’t know the situation well could
possibly make any helpful suggestions or improvements.
The leader may not even try to make a breakthrough. If
the leader does try, the efforts may not work well
because thinking about possibilities is too limited.
Backgrounds matter in determining what a leader will
do. Many ideas about how to make changes are learned
at a young age. Let me share some observations I’ve
made. For instance, someone with technical training
gained in French schools may be inclined by that
background to look for breakthroughs built on superb
engineering analyses of what’s possible. That same
person may tend to be dismissive of ideas or potential
contributions by those who don’t have technical training
and aren’t well-grounded in logic.

Someone who majored in lease financing in an American
business school will probably first look for breakthroughs
by considering innovations in ways to finance leases for
the organization and its stakeholders. If the best
breakthrough opportunities lay instead in adding more
benefits for customers, such potential will probably lay
fallow under this leader.

I won’t drag out the point about subjectivity of leaders
and stakeholders any further. Just remember that
there’s no substitute for finding out what people really
want before you try to help them to lead or to gain a
benefit.

Copyright 2010 Donald W. Mitchell All Rights Reserved.

Labels: , ,

Step Two: Learn the Backgrounds, Experiences, Philosophies, Circumstances, Preferences, and Observations of Those Who Will Lead Breakthroughs

A wise man will hear and increase learning,
And a man of understanding will attain wise counsel,
To understand a proverb and an enigma,
The words of the wise and their riddles.
Proverbs 1:5-6 (NKJV)

Many people may feel discouraged about becoming
breakthrough servants because of the gap between what
they know now and what they need to learn about
breakthrough leaders and stakeholders. Such
discouragement may be increased if one of the
weaknesses of their organization is fragmenting
information on a need-to-know basis. In some
organizations, the preference for secrecy might make you
think that lives are at stake. More typically, information
scarcities are made worse by:

• desires to increase influence versus rivals in the
organization.
• not understanding the huge benefits of knowing more.
• lack of curiosity about what else is going on.
• ignorance about how to learn more.

The less formal authority an individual has, the less likely
are those with more authority to encourage or to support
the individual’s efforts to learn more. What should a
breakthrough servant do?

Many approaches can help, some of which are outlined in
this section. Choose the approaches that best fit your
situation. In any case, begin by praying for guidance.
There is probably an attractive route for quickly gaining
the information that the Holy Spirit can show you. It will
almost always be the right next step after praying to
learn more about the leaders who will have to develop
and implement the breakthroughs. As I point out in the
Breakthrough Leadership Blueprint, leaders usually don’t
know enough about each other to work well together. I
suggest that you assume that leaders are ignorant about
each other until you receive overwhelming contrary
evidence.

As a step toward finding out more about leaders, start
by identifying some important task that the overall
organizational leader wants to do that would clearly
benefit from having all leaders learn more about each
other. Your supervisor probably knows what
important tasks are being planned or are about to be
implemented. You can safely assume that if the task isn’t
important enough to draw your supervisor’s attention, the
task probably isn’t important enough to persuade anyone
to want to learn more about the organization’s leaders.

Here are some of the circumstances to look for in
identifying an important task that can justify learning
more about the leaders:

• Concern that some leaders will resist doing the task
• Doubt that the leaders have the needed skill to do the
task
• Disagreement among the leaders about how to do the
task
• A need for more openness in order to implement the
task
• A history of unsuccessful efforts to do the task

Once you have identified a task presenting several of
these circumstances that the organizational leader
champions, find out more about how your supervisor sees
the task in terms of her or his responsibilities and career.
In most organizations, ambitious people see helping high-
priority tasks favored by the organizational leader as
opportunities to shine and to advance their careers.
Those who care about the organization’s success will also
be determined to do what they can to help. If your
supervisor indicates that he or she wants to help push
the task forward, ask your supervisor if she or he would
like you to prepare some thoughts about what might be
done to be more successful in performing the task.

Pray about what to say, and take at least a week (but no
more than two weeks) to get back to your supervisor with
your ideas. Then, share your thoughts informally in a one-
on-one meeting. Part of your purpose is to encourage your
supervisor to propose that leaders who will be involved in
performing the task learn more about each other. Chances
are that your supervisor hasn’t thought of this possibility
before. It may be that the supervisor doesn’t have any
idea how well the leaders know one another.

If your supervisor strongly disagrees that the leaders need
to get to know more about each other, you should drop the
subject for the moment. If your supervisor isn’t sure,
suggest that he or she informally check with her or his
supervisor to see what the supervisor thinks. Offer to
prepare a memo or paper that raises the issue so that
your supervisor can address the subject more easily with
her or his supervisor. If your supervisor agrees that
more information is needed, ask what you can do to
provide support in raising the issue with his or her
supervisor. Ideally, it would be good to present to your
supervisor’s supervisor with your supervisor present to
support you. In any of these communications, feel free
to share the Breakthrough Leadership Blueprint. Add to
that information anything that you can think of that
supports the need for gaining more information. If those
approaches don’t work, encourage your supervisor to
experiment with helping those who work for him or her
to know one another better. Describe the potential
benefits. Suggest that your supervisor involve someone
from the human resources department, a part of the
organization that will typically encourage and assist such
an initiative. After the experimentation, suggest to your
supervisor that he or she report the results to her or his
supervisor. Perhaps the supervisor’s supervisor will want
to try the same. The human resources department may
also decide to recommend that others duplicate the
initiative. Eventually, the organizational leader will learn
about one of these experiments and will probably
recognize the potential benefit from applying the approach
with her or his direct reports.

If none of those approaches are viable, ask for permission
to run an experiment in learning more about one another
just involving those who are your counterparts in other
parts of the organization. Because implementing the
experiment crosses organizational boundaries, such a
request will eventually reach high into the organization
and will often be granted. Again, a success will quickly
spread interest in doing more. If their subordinates are
becoming better acquainted across the organization,
leaders will eventually realize that they should do the
same thing. Someone will propose the idea to the
organizational leader, and that suggestion will probably
trigger such a desirable information-gathering activity.

In any encouragement to have leaders become better
acquainted, be sure to point out the benefits of having
those who report to the leaders also become better
acquainted with their leaders. If that encouragement is
acted on, you should be able create a forum where you
will gain information about the other organizational
leaders by asking those who are in your part of the
organization.

If none of these other activities work, get to know whoever
writes the company newspaper or newsletter that is sent
out to all employees. Honestly tell the writer what you
like about the publication and share your interest in
knowing more about other people in the organization.
Suggest how great it would be for you and others if
profiles were written about the organization’s leaders.
The writer will know that most leaders enjoy being
interviewed and written about, and he or she will probably
follow through. If the writer indicates that there’s no
time to do all that, offer to help by conducting the
interviews and drafting all of the articles.

A lot of information about leaders can also be gathered
from sources that aren’t within your organization. Check
the Internet for any speeches, articles, and videos that
include your organization’s leaders. If you learn of other
organizations the leaders have worked for, it may be that
you can use mutual friends or acquaintances to learn
about what the leaders did and acted like in those
previous roles. If you find out what schools the leaders
attended, you may also be able to read profiles in alumni
publications. In doing any of this research, be sure that
your activity is very low profile and undetected, or your
research can be viewed defensively by the person who is
being studied.

You can also learn more about the leaders from internal
sources. Start by reading any press releases your
organization has made about the person. There’s usually
one that describes a leader’s background at the time of
hiring or promotion.

In addition, you may know people who work with the
leaders. Buy those people breakfast or a cup of coffee
after work. While chatting, ask about what it is like to work
with the various leaders and why the leaders operate in the
ways that they do. Inevitably, some personal background
and perspectives will come out.

At some point, you will have done all you can to learn more
about the organization’s leaders. Congratulations on what
you’ve accomplished! Now, turn your attention to learning
about stakeholders. Once again, start by praying for
guidance from the Holy Spirit. Because of the wide scope
of this task, exhaust internal resources before you
consider external ones. Starting internally will speed
learning while reducing the amount of work involved.

Much of what you want to learn about stakeholders will
need to be interpreted in terms of what customers and
end users (or beneficiaries) perceive, think, do, and feel.
In addition, many organizations have market research
activities that collect and analyze information about
customers and end users (or beneficiaries). Such
information is usually not kept too secret because many
people involved in marketing, sales, and developing new
offerings need to know that information. Further, many
salespeople are perfectly happy to describe in detail the
customers and end users (or beneficiaries) that they
come into contact with. If any of your normal
assignments involve anything to do with marketing,
sales, and developing new offerings, you should be able
to simply ask to see what you need. If you don’t have
such an assignment, volunteer to work on one.

While a lot of survey-based customer and end user
(or beneficiary) information is pretty abstract and dry,
you may also find that videos were created of some
visits and round table discussions that include these
people. Try to see these videos. You will learn more
rapidly if you hear their thoughts and ideas expressed
in their own words and with their own gestures. Many
organizations also invite key partners, distributors, and
suppliers to visit, and you may also find video and
audio recordings of many of the speeches and
discussions that occurred during these visits. As you
watch and listen to what they have to say, consider how
accurately they perceive the customers and end users
(or beneficiaries). Try to understand why their vantage
points might be incomplete or inaccurate. Whatever else
you cannot explain about any misperceptions is probably
related to individual backgrounds and opinions. You can
supplement this information by speaking with those in
your organization who normally work with partners and
suppliers. If you have any assignments that would
benefit by your visiting partners or suppliers, be sure to
do so. While visiting, you will quickly get a sense of the
perspectives and personalities of those people and
organizations.

Employees are obviously more accessible to you than
any other stakeholder group. Most will be happy to speak
with you. If you have a friend who works in your human
resources department, you may also be able to learn
about or read surveys of employee perspectives and
attitudes that can help you. The organization’s employee
newsletter will often contain information about
individuals throughout the organization. From those
profiles, you may learn the names of people who would
be well worth interviewing because of their unique
perspectives. For instance, if someone recently led a
reorganization of the organization’s reporting structure,
that person can tell you a great deal about the
knowledge, attitudes, and actions that the leaders hope
to affect through the reorganization. If such surveys
haven’t been conducted, you may be able to persuade
someone in the human resources department to do so.

Employees’ families are a group about which a little is
known by each part of the organization, but often the
total picture is blurry except in the smallest
organizations. Human resources people can again provide
helpful information if any surveys have been done or if
you can encourage them to conduct such surveys. If no
surveys are available or can be commissioned, attend
employee activities to which families are invited. While
there, converse with family members to find out more
about their circumstances and how the company affects
their lives.

If your organization is a large one, it probably has a
department that works in governmental and local
relations. People in that department often have a
detailed understanding of how your organization affects
the communities in which it operates. Interactions with
the communities your organization serves and in which
it operates are usually pretty visible. You can search
online for references in local publications that describe
your organization. In such articles, critics and advocates
will probably be quoted. Lawsuits are also disclosed
publicly, which can reveal some problem areas. In
addition, you would do well to speak with local
government officials, business leaders, and heads of
local nonprofit organizations (with your organization’s
permission) to find out how they see the effects of your
organization that you haven’t been able to gain from
any other sources. It’s always valuable to find out as
much information as you can from any organized,
continuing critics of your organization: They have
often done more research than your organization has
into its effects on communities and society in general.

Copyright 2010 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved.

Labels: , ,

Step Three: Identify the Hidden Consensus among Stakeholders

Then the whole assembly agreed to keep the feast another
seven days, and they kept it another seven days with
gladness.
— 2 Chronicles 30:23 (NKJV)

Breakthroughs are much more likely when you begin by
identifying some benefit that everyone strongly favors. As
a breakthrough servant, you need to rely more on the
hidden consensus among all stakeholders than does a
breakthrough leader so that powerful tides of favorable
opinion can substitute for your lack of formal power.
From your work in Step Two of the Breakthrough
Servant Blueprint, you will have gained a lot of
understanding about your organization’s leaders and
stakeholders. In some cases, nothing more will need to
be done because the hidden consensus isn’t hard to
determine. For instance, an organization that serves a
humanitarian purpose such as educating those who
cannot read will probably have a hidden consensus
related to either helping more people learn to read or
making the process easier for them. If a few such
hypotheses can be easily developed, you may be able to
test and to confirm your conclusion by simply talking to
a lot of people about what they think the organization
should be doing more of or differently than it does now.
With a strong enough consensus, you will only need to
find it.

You won’t also have to document it to convince others.
More typically, the hidden consensus is harder to
determine. In fact, some stakeholders may be so ignorant
of the circumstances and opportunities that they haven’t
even thought about many of the possibilities. As a result,
these stakeholders may report what they want for the
organization something that they prefer less strongly than
something that they haven’t considered. If you are pretty
sure that some of the more appealing possibilities are
hidden from many stakeholders, you will have to conduct
your search for the hidden consensus in such a way that
you also inform people about the possibilities, without
promising that they can cause those possibilities to
occur.

For a large organization, you could spend years looking for
the hidden consensus among stakeholders on your own. Or
you could find out and document the answers you need in
a short period of time by drawing on the organization’s
resources. Although you need to be prepared to do the
former and work on your own to gather at least some of
the answers, it will usually be possible and more desirable
to be involved in an official organizational activity that
brightly illuminates the hidden consensus.

How might you persuade the organization to look for the
hidden consensus among its stakeholders? Start by
examining what you’ve learned about the organization’s
leaders. Do they have a hidden consensus that you can
identify? If they do, that underlying agreement can be a
lever to test whether the leaders’ hidden consensus is
shared by the organization’s stakeholders.

Here’s how such testing might be encouraged and
authorized. Let’s imagine that the hidden consensus
among the organizational leaders is that a new
technology is needed that would enhance the experience
of employing the organization’s offerings. Let’s also
imagine that many stakeholders don’t know enough
about the potential of that new technology to assess
whether that change is a good idea. One thing we
can be sure of is that no new technology is going to be
developed inexpensively. In such cases, it’s usually not
hard to gain support for the idea of testing the appeal of
using the new technology before going to the time, effort,
and expense of developing it. In that way, risk is
reduced and costs typically are, too. Because the hidden
consensus is shared among all the leaders, you will
probably find that all you need to do is propose that
stakeholder testing of the idea be done to identify
issues that need to be addressed in order to get great
results at less cost than what is expected. Volunteer to
work on the project as a way to ensure that you will
obtain the information you most want to learn.

As this example demonstrates, acting on any hidden
consensus of the leadership group will mean deploying
resources. Because the leaders will be highly interested
in getting good results from something they all favor,
they will be more open than usual to checking out the
best way to go about making the changes. Build on that
interest to show how checking for the hidden stakeholder
consensus can be a great way to improve the likelihood of
success. If in the process you discover that stakeholders
don’t agree with the leaders’ hidden consensus, leaders
will probably be most interested in understanding that
point after carefully checking to be sure that the
answer is an accurate one.

Copyright 2010 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved

Labels: , ,

Step Four: Use the Hidden Consensus to Build Interest in Developing Breakthrough Knowledge and Skills

Mercy, peace, and love be multiplied to you.
— Jude 1:2 (NKJV)

If you approve of some action, you are also likely to favor
obtaining more results and faster benefits from the action,
and using fewer resources to accomplish the action. The
more expensive, difficult, risky, or time-consuming the
action is, the more interest many leaders and stakeholders
will have in gaining breakthrough knowledge, skills,
methods, and accomplishments.

Despite this interest, most people are naturally skeptical
when you start talking about making exponential
improvements. Breakthrough servants anticipate
skepticism about such large gains and prepare
convincing proofs for the organization’s leaders before
proposing breakthrough methods. Once breakthrough
servants have convinced the leaders, they can rely on the
leaders to decide how to share and to lead in persuading
stakeholders. Here are some possible sources of such
proofs:

• Breakthrough examples of what other organizations
have done
• Breakthrough accomplishments by your organization
• Your organization’s successes with 2,000 percent
solutions
• Your organization’s stalls and stallbusters
• Descriptions of how to engage in breakthrough
processes
• Ideal best practice lessons that are applicable to your
organization’s intended actions

Normally, it’s hard to interest leaders in talking about
potential innovations in all but the smallest and most
innovation-oriented organizations. However, any time
that highly regarded, risky, or expensive actions are
being considered or begun, information related to
enhancing those actions quickly spurts from the bottom
to the top of an organization much like Old Faithful
geyser in Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park shoots
hot water and steam impressively many feet into the air.
After you obtain convincing proof, you usually just need
to alert your supervisor to that information and let
nature take its course. At most, simply ask your
supervisor later if he or she has passed along the
information yet to her or his supervisor and followed
up.

Let me describe some ways to obtain the six sources of
proof that I listed. Let’s start with breakthrough
examples of what other organizations have done. Some
organizations will usually have been more effective than
others in engaging in similar or the same tasks as your
organization is planning to do. Making leaders aware that
fast progress isn’t automatic usually triggers an interest
in finding better methods. If the activities were not done
recently, you can probably find people who used to work
for that organization to tell you about what their
experiences were including what worked well and what
didn’t. In some cases, the experiences may be
documented in recordings or transcripts of speeches,
annual reports, articles, and books. The more sources
you find that document successes, problems, and missed
opportunities, the more persuasive your breakthrough
examples will be.

If the breakthroughs occurred more recently, you will
probably have to rely on your stakeholders who are
familiar with the other organization as well for
information. Suppliers are often the best source,
especially those who provide equipment or software,
because they are often called on to assist in implementing
a new activity. There will probably be relatively little
information that stakeholders can ethically provide that
isn’t confidential, but on general subjects (such as how
long the task took) they can probably share information
without violating any trust or confidences. If in doubt
about the appropriateness of answering your inquiry,
just ask the knowledgeable person to check with the
other organization for approval before telling you
anything.

Breakthroughs accomplished in your own organization
often have near-legendary status internally. As a result
of many people wanting to claim credit for such successes,
you will find that a lot of inaccurate perceptions will have
grown up around what led to the success and how it was
accomplished. Dig down and find the real data, and you
will be able to sift through any misinformation. In my
experience, a good number of the breakthroughs that
any organization has been celebrating for a long time will
turn out not to have been breakthroughs at all but,
rather, misperceptions of what occurred. In fact, you
might even find that some of the “breakthroughs” were
actually failures, but someone powerful recast them to
protect reputations.

The challenge in checking out the real data is finding out
who has what information. Here’s an example: Although
the breakthrough may concern customers, it may be that
the effects can only be seen today by looking at historical
financial information kept in a small part of the
organization. In some cases, there isn’t any complete
historical financial information. In those instances, it’s
often necessary to estimate the experience by assembling
bits and pieces of financial histories from different records
and making reasonable assumptions. If you are fortunate,
your organization has achieved some breakthroughs using
the 2,000 percent solution process that are not yet widely
known and appreciated. That’s not unusual. Whenever I
contact large companies about 2,000 percent solutions in
seeking to find new examples, people at the top tell me
that they don’t know of any such solutions. I hear this
reaction even from organizations where I have worked
with someone to create a successful 2,000 percent
solution. If you do have such an example, by all means
use it to demonstrate the potential of what your
organization can accomplish. If you don’t have such an
example to share, telling people that they can make
exponential improvements with the same time, effort,
and resources can sound like either wishful thinking or
invoking black magic. Introducing people to the
processes involved in locating and implementing
breakthroughs provides helpful knowledge about how a
different approach might lead to new and more effective
methods for accomplishing critical tasks.

Rather than first jumping into describing the eight-step
process, I suggest that you instead explore personal and
organizational stalls and stallbusters with those you need
to inform. A revealing part of such a discussion can be
showing how many high-priority internal tasks have
faltered through many different initiatives and projects.
Rather than drawing out some information to make these
points during meetings with the leadership team, it works
better to do the research in advance and to confirm what
you learn with those who should know and with any data
sources that are reliable.

When you start explaining the eight-step process, I
particularly encourage you to spend enough time so that
your leadership team understands a great many ways that
individuals and organizations accomplish near-perfect
results every day. Feel free to draw on the Ideal Practice
Blueprint to help you.

If your group is willing to spend significant time learning
about the process, there’s no better way to begin such
learning than by having them work together to create a
2,000 percent solution. If you do the appropriate future
and ideal best practice research work and thinking in
advance for the task, you’ll find that any group can
develop a perfectly good 2,000 percent solution in a
month or so after meeting for just a few hours each
week. If you don’t feel confident about doing this, first
develop a 2,000 percent solution in a similar area so
that you will be able to draw on that information and
experience as you work with the leadership group.

Copyright 2010 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved.

Labels: , ,

Step Five: Document and Suggest 2,000 Percent Solution Projects and Goals

For You are my rock and my fortress;
Therefore, for Your name’s sake,
Lead me and guide me.
— Psalm 31:3 (NKJV)

Even the most enthusiastic, best informed, and most
well-intentioned leaders may struggle in selecting the best
projects for creating and implementing 2,000 percent
solutions. They are most likely to latch onto one of the first
improvements that are proposed or occur to them. In
many cases, leaders will not be able to come up with a
good quantitative measurement of what they want to
improve. Organizations are neither going to benefit
equally from all 2,000 percent solutions they could create
nor are organizations equally well prepared to work on a
wide variety of such solutions. Leaders will be greatly
helped by the faithful breakthrough servant who does
advance homework to identify the most valuable, easiest
to accomplish projects and the appropriate goals for those
projects. As wonderful as having such information is,
there’s a lot of work involved. Let’s look at some helpful
suggestions to supplement what is described in Part Two
of The 2,000 Percent Solution Workbook.

Start by imagining every potential improvement you can
that could be supportive of the organization’s hidden
consensus among its stakeholders. In spelling out those
potential improvements, the breakthrough servant
should be sure to look at the benefits in terms of all
stakeholders as well as their short- and long-term
implications.

During this first step, it’s perfectly appropriate to make
some wild guesses about what the improvements might
be and their magnitudes. Test your ideas with people who
are knowledgeable about potential benefits from improved
performance and can consider them in terms of the
likelihood of such benefits being gained and how large the
benefits might be. If you receive greatly differing opinions,
ask the people who disagree to explain to one another how
they arrived at their conclusions. In such a case, it will often
be possible to develop an improved answer that combines
the best insights of all the knowledgeable people who have
given an opinion.

From what you learn, boil down the list of potential
improvements to the ten or so that seem to offer the best
combination of the benefits being likely to occur and to be
enjoyed in substantial quantities. Next, consider what the
key accomplishments are to make the breakthroughs on
the list possible. Although some other accomplishments
beyond those on your list can prove to be more important
for advancing the hidden consensus, in the beginning of
identifying the best breakthrough solutions to pursue, it’s
helpful just to see where knowledgeable people anticipate
that accomplishments will lead to important benefits being
created and how large those will be. After you have a list of
key accomplishments that are required to gain the desired
benefits, compare that list to what your organization has
been most effective in accomplishing. See where there are
close matches and large mismatches. For the mismatches,
do some research to see if other organizations or
individuals are in a good position to provide the missing
skill, knowledge, or experience needed to achieve those
accomplishments. Check on the potential availability of the
helping organizations and individuals and, for the available
ones, investigate the costliness and difficulty of working
with them. Now focus on the key accomplishments that
would be easiest to do, either based on your organization’s
resources or by relying on outside help that you can afford
and expect to succeed in working with. Take those
accomplishments and consider what other benefits could
be produced from them that expand well beyond your
original concept of improvements that would advance
performance in serving the hidden consensus.

Next, winnow your list of the easiest-to-do key
accomplishments down to just those that create the
largest total benefits, both for and beyond the hidden
consensus. You don’t have to be precise in your
measurements. Be satisfied with finding the differences
that can be measured reasonably accurately by orders
of magnitude. From that perspective, just a few key
accomplishments will probably be much more valuable
than the others.

After doing that, think about how the remaining key
accomplishments could be expanded, redefined,
extended, or reduced in scope to provide still more
benefits or benefits for more stakeholders. Let me give
you an example of what might be possible. For the
purposes of the illustration, I will assume that a high-
potential key accomplishment is developing a certain
type of new product that will attract a new class of
customers and deliver valuable benefits to existing and
new customers. For the purposes of this paragraph, the
breakthrough servant would then reconsider the new
product to determine what other valuable benefits could
be delivered by redefining what type of new product is
developed.

Here’s a specific example of the illustration. Kentucky
Fried Chicken (KFC) wanted to develop a non-fried chicken
product beginning in the 1960s to attract customers who
wanted nothing to do with fried chicken but liked chicken.
Having seen how popular rotisserie-cooked chickens were
in KFC restaurants in Australia and in supermarkets
around the world, decades of research went into
developing that sort of product. The efforts didn’t lead to
the desired results.

In recent years, the company took a new direction by
redefining what type of new product to develop: The
result was Kentucky Grilled Chicken, a product that
combines spices with a grilled flavor and appearance that
rotisserie chickens don’t have. The new recipe and
cooking style quickly became popular with KFC
customers, provided health benefits compared to fried
chicken, and expanded the chain’s sales and profitability.

Had KFC defined its new product requirements more
carefully in the 1960s, this product could have been
available and selling well many decades earlier. The
opportunity was missed due to the definition of the
desired benefits being thought of too narrowly,
seeking to help the company make more sales, rather
than extending to providing benefits that customers
wanted, which included not only healthier food but also
a new and appealing flavor.

Copyright 2010 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved

Labels: , , ,

Step Six: Develop Detailed Operating Plans for Performing the Selected 2,000 Percent Solution Projects

So they said to Him, “Where do You want us to prepare?”
— Luke 22:9 (NKJV)

Because the selected projects will carry the fondest desires
of so many people, enthusiasm for completing the tasks can
easily outrun the ability to organize and to do the work.
Preparation can help, and that’s another place where the
breakthrough servant can contribute. I favor such
preparation being structured as a separate 2,000 percent
solution project to be completed before the final decisions
are made about which 2,000 percent solution projects and
goals are to be pursued. The purpose of this project should
be to accomplish the to-be-selected 2,000 percent solution
projects twenty times faster than would otherwise occur.

That kind of speed-up may sound like a stretch to you, but
I’ve seen more organizations than I care to remember
vainly attempt to make the same breakthroughs for many
decades, as in the KFC example. If normal speed for your
organization is forty years, than twenty times faster is still
two years. Now, that doesn’t seem so fast, does it? In fact,
with proper preparation you should be able to do better
than two years in some of the 2,000 percent solution
projects.

If the normal speed for your organization is forty days, you
could focus instead on having the various 2,000 percent
solution projects accomplish a bigger multiple of benefits
during the same elapsed time. For instance, you could
consider how breakthrough projects might be designed to
create more complementary improvements to multiply
benefits for stakeholders. When your goal is to increase
speed of making the breakthroughs, establishing
complementary, multiplied benefits is also a worthy focus
to address.

Having worked with many well-intentioned, talented, but
inexperienced, 2,000 percent solution problem solvers,
I’ve noticed that progress in creating breakthrough
solutions is almost always stalled by the following
difficulties:

• Freeing up enough time to work effectively on the
projects
• Identifying what the personal and organizational stalls
are
• Designing and putting into place stallbusters to enable
these breakthrough-creating activities
• Locating the future best practices
• Defining the ideal best practices
• Selecting the right people and resources to successfully
implement the solutions

Let me briefly share some ways that these stalls can be
avoided through prior preparation. Let’s start with freeing
up enough time. Most people who are assigned to the project
are already fully loaded (at least in their own minds). They
cannot imagine where anything else can be fit in.

Despite this self-perception, most people can quickly free
up twenty-five hours a week for an important activity while
still meeting all their existing work responsibilities. They
can make this shift by eliminating time-wasting activities,
delegating as much as possible to others, teaching others to
do tasks so they can be delegated as well, combining
activities so that more than one thing can be done at the
same time (such as listening to a recorded book related to
work responsibilities while commuting or traveling), and
reorganizing the day so that important tasks are done
when the person is most productive.

The breakthrough servant can help everyone prepare for
the process by circulating information about how to get
more done while spending less time working while the
2,000 percent solution projects are being identified and
assigned. If everyone has already streamlined their
schedules before starting 2,000 percent solution projects,
those projects will receive a lot more timely and effective
attention. Lesson Four provides helpful directions that
can be adapted for this purpose to free up working hours.

People have a lot more trouble seeing their own stalls
than organizational ones. If they have been in an
organization for a long time, however, even organizational
stalls start to become invisible to them. By involving
colleagues, stakeholders, and family members to share
observations about areas of stalled progress, it will be
easier to trigger recognition of what the sources of such
delays are. As Lesson Seven describes, you can also gain a
lot of valuable insights by answering the questions posed
in The 2,000 Percent Solution and The 2,000 Percent
Solution Workbook
.

Some people have trouble developing stallbusters,
especially those who have been keenly aware of long-
standing stalls. The people who are confused about how to
overcome the delays may need assistance from experts in
creating stallbusters for breakthrough projects. A wise
breakthrough servant will assume that he or she may not
know anyone internally or externally who is good in these
stallbusting activities. Acting on that assumption, the
breakthrough servant should look for examples of
individuals who and organizations that have overcome long-
standing and difficult stalls. Having found those examples,
interview people who were involved to see which ones are
most expert at identifying helpful stallbusters and how to
implement them. Find out which ones might be available
to assist those in your organization who will be working on
creating breakthroughs.

Many organizations are unaccustomed to thinking about
best practices and are ignorant of what they are. That’s a
difficult starting point for identifying what the future best
practices will be. The breakthrough servant should draw
on Lesson Six to launch studies that will either identify
relevant future best practices or provide useful
groundwork for others to complete that identification
.
Identifying the ideal best practices that your organization
should be seeking is often the most valuable information
that a breakthrough servant can help with in assisting the
organization to make 2,000 percent solutions. A good
place to begin is by using the Ideal Practice Blueprint and
expanding on those insights by following the other
recommendations in Lesson Six.

Selecting the right people and resources to implement the
solutions is a place where senior organizational leaders
often make serious mistakes. In all but the smallest
organizations, senior leaders rarely know who the most
talented people are in implementing various aspects of
new initiatives. In addition, senior leaders often lack the
educational backgrounds and experience needed to
understand what implementation resources can speed
and improve installing the solutions.

Until there’s some clarity about what the solutions are
going to be, it won’t be totally apparent what capabilities
and resources are needed. In those circumstances (which
are the norm), it’s helpful to develop an inventory of
talents, skills, experience, and resources and to describe
how best to use those capabilities.

With these three blueprints, you can expect to make
great accomplishments if you focus your attention and
apply what you have just read. I pray that you will. The
results will bring many blessings to you and others in
becoming more fruitful for the Lord.

Copyright 2010 Donald W. Mitchell All Rights Reserved.