Please submit an excuse that you have encountered over the years and your argument against it. I am hoping for more than ten, but let’s see where it goes.

Has this ever happened to you? An organization begins its journey towards performance improvement, and adopts internal standards for “belting” its associates. Typical targets that I have seen include 1% Black Belts, and 5% Green Belts. Within one year, this organization has achieved or exceeded its targets for “belting”, yet results that positively impact the top and/or bottom line are scarce. I believe that this is an example of abandoning deliberate action, and a disregard for the adaptation of the Japanese martial arts ranking system.

A “real” Black Belt or a Master Black Belt cannot be grown overnight. It takes experience (good and bad) and maturity to develop the depth and breadth of knowledge, skills, and abilities required to affect significant, lasting change across any organization regardless of size or complexity. If individuals in your organization are “shooting the tube”, progressing seamlessly from Green Belt to Black Belt training, consider it a red flag. The purpose of the belt rating is to encourage mentorship and application, not shotgun studies and testing. Allow belts to grow, providing additional training only when current capabilities have been mastered (as proven through continuous application) and as the need within your business becomes apparent. Training and shotgun certifications produce excess and low-quality inventory – pure waste.

And last but certainly not least, consider support from outside of your organization as a necessity. Within three years, a consultant who is worth their salt should be able to develop and deliver training that is tailored to your culture, mentor internal expertise, facilitate improvement efforts to establish an effective standard, and most importantly, provide an unbiased third-party perspective on the state-of-the-union. A good consultant will not hesitate to tell the emperor that he or she is naked.

So…if you can’t answer the “so-what” behind the certifications or belts in your organization – red flag. True transformation is achieved through deliberate evolution.

I had a client come to me today and ask this question: “If the boss already has an operational dashboard, do we have a balanced scorecard of sorts?” My answer was: “No, but you could work in that direction.”

If your boss is tracking operational measures, you can decipher what is truly important to him/her.

1. Look for logical groupings between different measures (an affinity diagram is especially helpful here). The larger, summary groups could turn out to be strategic focus areas that require improvement in order to achieve leadership’s vision.

2. Work towards formalizing the vision, and then exploring potential objectives across the four perspectives of the scorecard (financial, customers, internal processes, and learning and growth) to ensure a true “balance”.

3. Review the measures currently tracked, and discern leading versus lagging. If they are all lagging, establish the most appropriate leading measures to enable decision making “in process”.

This series of activities can continue until you have a formalized, documented, and enabling strategy. If you decide on a Balanced Scorecard (my personal favorite), great! If you decide on another format, that’s good too. The key is to reach into the quagmire of intent and to shape an approach and a direction that can be clearly communicated and executed. Improvement should follow.

Yes, I’ve recently watched “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”. That Island of Misfit Toys really got to me. Toys that have been assembled in unconventional ways, yearning to be applied in unique fashions. I started thinking about the “Misfit Tools” in our profession – those tools that sit behind the Pareto Diagram and the Process Map on every event “shelf”. They seldom see the light of day, but when they do, they ROCK!

So…cast your votes. My personal favorites are the Interrelationship Digraph and the Nominal Group Technique.

How about you?

It just might not be communicated effectively. In the absence of a formal mission or vision statement, look to group emails and speeches from key leadership. Pay particular attention to points that are redundant or emphasized in other ways (remember – repetition of a word or a theme in spoken or written language indicates increased importance). I am not saying this to endorse assumed, informal strategic direction setting/adherence, but I do want to make this clear. If you are working for or with an organization that seems to be running blind, DO NOT start a strategic planning session with a blank slate. With due diligence and careful consideration of internal and external communications, lessons learned, best practices, stakeholder and customer climate review, and analysis of the market and competition, you will discover an existing (albeit potentially ineffective or counter-productive) strategy. Do your best to understand WHY the organization operates this way, HOW they should be functioning, and WHAT needs to be done in order to achieve victory. Document your findings and move forward. This will set up the organization (and the next strategic planning team) for success.

Your thoughts?