Overview

RedShift Programs: The Power of Change

RedShift Consulting and Coaching, Boston MA - mary wynne-wynter, change facilitator

What

Innovative Professional Services. Innovation is a word that goes in and out of fashion. Here’s how Scott Anthony, Innosight Ventures thinks about it:

When I use the word innovation, I think of three interlocking components:

  • Insight or inspiration suggesting an opportunity to do something different to create value
  • An idea or plan to build an offering based on that insight or inspiration
  • The translation of that plan into a successful business (in simple terms, commercialization)

Obviously, each of these components carries significant complexity, but more often than not, they cover the basics of innovation.

The senior leaders I talk to believe that the bulk of their innovation challenges lie in the first two components. I suspect this is because the third piece looks like execution, and of course, large organizations know all about execution. And yet, my field experience suggests that it’s this third component, not the first two, that actually blocks innovation.

Ideas, solutions and content that helps people respond to change in whole new ways to improve their lives and businesses.

  • Consulting programs to help people shift from a push mindset (forcing and buying influence and awareness) to a social mindset (earning influence and awareness).
  • Coaching programs to help people shift from a dependent and linear state to an independent and present point of power state.
  • Creative programs to help people shift from ego-centric, manipulative communications to authentic self-expression that engages, shares and relates.
  • Self-awareness programs to help individuals and organizations shift from willfulness to accommodation, from control to empowerment, from fearfulness to courage and from stress to peace and joy.

A significant body of work, from 1996 to present, by Hagel, Brown and Davison, includes articles and a forthcoming book that ties the evolution of power shifts to the mechanisms, the “how” these shifts would take place:

While we may have had this insight fourteen years ago, what we didn’t yet have in clear focus was the mechanism by which this shift in power from institutions to individuals would take place. We now know that mechanism is pull.

Pull allows each of us to find and access people and resources when we need them, while attracting to us the people and resources that are relevant and valuable, even if we were not even aware before that they existed. Finally, in a world of mounting pressure and unforeseen opportunities, pull gives us the ability to draw from within ourselves the insight and performance required to more effectively achieve our potential.

The power of pull puts each of us, individually and together, in a position to collaborate in a complete re-imagination of our biggest private-and public-sector institutions, one that may eventually remake society as a whole. As customers, we have more choices, and more information with which to make those choices, than ever before. As talented employees we have greater power too than before, since we create the lion’s share of today’s corporate profitability. As each of us votes with our feet and allies ourselves with new generations of institutions, we’ll abandon the old ones, leaving them to drift into obsolescence and setting in motion a reshaping of broad arenas of economic and civic life.

Pull means a lot of things, then for different institutions. Employers that fail to provide sufficient professional development opportunities for their employees. These companies will lose their most talented workers to more magnetic organizations that provide better chances for learning and growth. Full article at HBR blogs

Why?

Power has shifted in the reset, connected and conceptual world. Now its time to say Yes to growth & development and No to protection & resistance.

  • The unprecedented pace of change affecting our lives, businesses and organizations is accelerating, intensifying, and undeniable.
  • Many corporations will refuse to change beliefs, structures and governance that were created for a world that no longer exists. They will lose, as will their employees.
  • Interruption and broadcast-based advertising and marketing techniques fail in the digital world and are thus a dying model.
  • SEO and social network strategies and tactics that game the system or lack integrity are increasingly risky for personal and business brand reputation.
  • The direction toward social business will grow as power continues to shift absolutely from seller to buyer, from employer to end user and from centralized controllers to users at the edges.
  • Static web sites, even beautifully designed ones, are irrelevant.
  • Social media inevitably exposes contradictory communication, behavior, motivation and belief.
  • Health, longevity and workplace research is irrefutable: stress is harmful to individuals, relationships and organizations.

Default, reactive responses to change become habitual actions and eventually an identification with what is not wanted, resulting in a limited and diminished experience. This is true for individuals, solo and small businesses and large companies where the unhappiness about the limited experience lives in the culture and shows up in the morale. There’s never been a better time to change these negative beliefs because they were formed to respond to a world that no longer exists.

What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
- Plutarch

How

Structured programs that get you from point A to desired point B. Corresponding training in awareness and change leadership disciplines. Directional and process facilitation, feedback and support.

  • Ideas, solutions and content are freely shared on the web site, blogs and social communities so there’s options: doing the change, growth and development work on your own, or, in conjunction with RedShift Programs.
  • Fixed price, fixed time consulting, coaching and creative programs make the best use of client resources by focusing on solutions and deliverables.
  • Contradicting and limiting assumptions and expectations are addressed and facilitated in a real time process so that desired results program deliverables.

RedShift clients learn and embody new change responses by releasing willfulness and practicing willingness and receptiveness in their real-world, personal, business and professional problem solving and decision making experiences and change situations. This applied and experiential approach increases the likelihood of desired, and often unexpected, results by letting them happen rather than attempting to force them to happen.

The challenge is reconciling how we respond to unprecedented change affecting our lives and businesses and how we get the positive results we want. If we stop trying to make it happen, then what do we do?

We stop identifying with what we don’t want and live up to what we do want, whatever the situation or circumstances.

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