Stop Decorating the Fish

A step-by-step way to tell if your strategy (or strategic plan) is on solid ground, or might be setting you up for problems

What a privilege we have in this episode to hear directly from Rami Goldratt, one of the world's leading spokesmen on the Theory of Constraints (TOC), the son of Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt, TOC's founder, and CEO of the highly successful Goldratt Group. Rami provides insight after insight into the power of inertia in our organizations, innovation, how to create breakthroughs, and on and on. You won't want to miss this one.

What does it take to build a great culture...really? Is it just perks? Or is it something much deeper? And can we build a culture directly? Or is it a byproduct of something else? That's what we tackle in this episode.

We have a professional problem. We get frustrated. It's very common to succumb to a basic instinct: to blame our team, our boss...someone! Our next step is often to impose more oversight and more accountability (one of the Seductive Seven). This is a tough one to catch and fix, because it requires some personal courage and introspection. Why? Because quite often, the root of the problem is staring us in the mirror.

In this episode, we explore Dr. Goldratt's unique definition of value creation and how we tend to fall into the trap of creating more-and-more inward-facing goals over time--goals designed to improve the bureaucracy and make our work lives better, but often do not translate into removing any significant limitations for our customers. In short, we do a lot of work, spend a lot of money, and nothing improves for our clients. This episode is about what to do instead.

Training is great, and needed...when the underlying forces that really drive the organization's consistent behavior are positive, healthy, and in alignment. Training on top of a complex set of unhealthy, unexamined dynamics is fish decorating.

Join us in this episode to question some of your deeply help assumptions about strategic planning, and discover a streamlined, highly-effective "reframing" of how to approach it.

Learn how to apply systems thinking to problem solving with a simple, powerful diagram that let's you see the cause-and-effect relationships that ultimately feed back on themselves to create chronic problems. Then, learn how to find the focal point in the cycle you can flip to create virtuous cycles out of the situation. Note there are visuals you can download to follow along in this episode by visiting the "Speeches" page of https://www.KrisCoxResults.com.

Our organizations all tend to drift away from what really matters. In this episode, we talk about what we can hold onto, what we can navigate by that will ensure we keep our focus in the right place.

Why is it that we keep thinking we just need to merge with another organization (external or internal), or go through a lengthy reorganization (reorg) process, and that will fix our problem (even when the vast majority of such efforts fail)? What is the logical fallacy we keep falling for, and what should we be considering instead? That's the topic of today's discussion.

There may come a time when you have a problem at work and you actually do need more money as part of your overall solution. But you never start there. You never just assume that's the answer--that's lazy thinking. You have to earn your way into having that discussion by diligently trying a number of other options first. In this episode, Kris breaks down the "More Money" trap that so many leaders and managers continue to fall into. She also explains why there will never be enough money, as well as several other insights.

We are continually hearing about how we need to be more data-driven in our leadership and management approaches, but we rarely hear how we can take that too far, and/or how we might be putting the cart before the horse in many cases. Learn when and how to use data appropriately, and the key thinking that leaders must have in place before anyone calls the analytics team.

This is the first episode in our new series, exclusively for Fulcrum members, on the material covered in Kristen and Yishai's two books: "Stop Decorating the Fish" and "The World of Decorating the Fish." In this episode, we talk about the backstory for the "fish decorating" idea, give an overview of the "Seductive Seven," and talk through how they let us find enormous hidden capacity in our organizations.

The quickest, easiest way I know of to start learning the fundamentals of systems thinking.

You have a serious problem at work, and you're convinced you need more technology to solve it (one of the Seductive Seven traps that my co-author, Dr. Yishai Ashlag, and I wrote about in our two books). Perhaps tech is going to be part of the solution, and there are many software vendors out there who will tell you their particular product is all you need, but it's never that simple. The great software companies know their software, their tech solution, will sit inside of (and need to be a great citizen of) your unique, complex ecosystem and not on a blank slate or inside an isolated bubble. If you're getting the "bubble" pitch from a vendor, run the other way and lock the door behind you. In this episode, I mention a concept my team and I call Pre-IT which refers to all the work that needs to happen up front, well before anyone calls the CIO or IT Director to schedule a meeting. We're doing more-and-more work in this space and will have lots more to offer on this topic in the coming months.