Nothing comes into existence that is not a possibility first in the mind of someone. This stage of the speaking map is about inventing possibilities to take care of what you want for yourself, the other, the team and/or the company. Sometimes this is the most difficult part of the Authentic Speaking Map™ because people are so predisposed to nothing working; they become a conversation for no possibility. When I coach an authentic conversation between two people, one of the keys to success is to open each person’s mind to the possibility of possibility.
Once you have a rich set of possibilities, which you can think of as an inventory of possibilities, you can move to vet out which possibilities represent real opportunities and are worthy of taking action. When you select a real opportunity you will know it because it resonates with you, it pulls you toward action.
If you cannot find an opportunity that resonates with you, you have to go back and invent more possibilities until you have a rich enough set of possibilities from which you can find an opportunity that pulls for its implementation.
With this post I am moving into the second half of the Authentic Speaking™ Map. The first half deals with the facts/interpretations/feelings and focuses on creating understanding around the concerns and commitments of the speaker. The second half of the map focuses on coming to an agreement between the speaker and the listener. I will show how this occurs when I bring everything together and discuss how to use the speaking map in conjunction with the Authentic Listening™ Map. I will cover the Authentic Listening Map after I finish the next two segments of the Authentic Speaking Map.
In my experience coaching authentic conversations, I find that the participants, many times, do not have clarity on what they want. Declaring what you want is critical to a successful resolution of an issue or conflict. Believe it or not, declaring what you want is difficult for many people. These people tend to live in expectation, but without their willingness to declare what they want, they usually fail to get what they want.
Declaring what you want requires a sense of personal awareness and the courage to disclose that awareness.
I, Kobe, came to the US in 1995 to work and study with Dr. Igor Ansoff, often referred to as the Father of Strategic Management. Although he was a great contributor to management thinking, I do think that he mainly got that reference because he was the first to dedicate a book solely on the subject of corporate strategy. I am dating his initial contribution as this happened in 1965. This book is described as “the most elaborate model of strategic planning in the literature” by Henry Mintzberg, a consistent critic of Dr. Ansoff.
One of the most recognized models of Dr. Ansoff is the Product-Market Growth Matrix, or Ansoff Matrix which he published in 1957. Although it does not sound like much in our MBA driven culture where every problem has its own matrix, at the time this was a revolutionary concept.
The matrix provided, and it still does to this day, a good basis for a strategic discussion. Its main weakness was rooted in the fact that it was one of the first strategic models in the market place. Its initial success drove the widespread adaptation of this model and it quickly became a ‘one-size-fit-all’ solution for any company that wanted to do strategic planning. That combined with the analytical and prescriptive nature of the tools, checklists and processes in his initial work as described in Corporate Strategy, made it too difficult to consistently implement.
Although the matrix has its use, and it is never a lost conversation, it clearly is not a solution to every strategic dilemma, even less so in an ever-increasing complex environment. Lucky for me, as I am quite a bit younger, it did not discourage Dr. Ansoff in his strategic thinking. I strongly believe that to this day one of his greatest contributions to business world is the Contingent Strategic Success Paradigm. It is the major recognition in that strategy is not a balance sheet, a point in time where you write a plan that you put on the shelf. The strategy development process sets up strategy development as an ongoing process. Since that time, there are other great thinkers that I admire that have developed similar strategy development processes. The main advantage of looking at strategy as a development process is that there is always room for continuous improvement, and there is the recognition that strategy has to be flexible if the company is to stay successful.
Dr. Ansoff took that process one step further by firmly linking the environment, with the strategy and the capability, where the premise is: “In order for a company to reach optimum profitability in the future, a company needs to align its strategy and capability with the future turbulence of the environment.” Ansoff’s strategy process has been empirically validated its process in a wide variety of industries and over 1,500 companies.
Other management gurus have picked up several of his ideas and made them more famous such as Michael Porter’s competitive advantage, Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad’s core capability and Tom Peters’ “sticking to your knitting”, to name but just a few.
I will expand more about Ansoff’s strategy development concepts in future blogs.
