Learning how to handle and do change is an important life skill. Take small steps towards where you want to be. When in transition This workbook will help you move through changes in your life and make plans that help you get to where you want to be. To get your copy of this workbook, click on the button below. Topics: transition planning , Change. Schedule an appointment today to get started. They get us stuck in our present reality instead of liberating all our possibilities. The mind can also be trained to accept, understand, and manage our emotions and thoughts without suppressing them or letting our feelings take over.
The key is helping them understand their emotions, and providing a safe space and tools to address those. We are so obsessed with science, stats, and measuring everything that we lost connection with our common sense.
Change is a sign that we are alive. The world is dynamic, not static. Fighting impermanence or change is going against the basic rules of nature.
Being represents our relationship with the now; becoming, our relationship with our future. The future will happen to us regardless. Their decisions will have positive or negative consequences in your life. But, you can change how you react to it. Everything that happens to us shapes our lives.
And then, we return to a new normal. Even if the forest is covered in fog. Do not let go of your inner tranquility. Do not feel anxious. The seas will recede. The fog will clear up. We must have an open relationship with the future. Make space for things to happen.
When we resist, we block our future. When we adapt, we keep the door open to new experiences. Rain for a farmer is a blessing, but a disturbance for tourists visiting a new city. Senior executives often use DICE assessments as early warning indicators that transformation initiatives are in trouble. In , the company realigned its operations around some key processes, broadened its offerings, relaunched some mature products, allied with some firms and acquired others, and launched several innovations.
As soon as projects reported troubling scores, designated executives paid attention to them. They reviewed the projects more often, reconfigured the teams, and allocated more resources to them. In one area of the change project, Amgen used DICE to track initiatives and reconfigured of them. Both big and small organizations can put the tool to good use. Take the case of a hospital that kicked off six change projects in the late s.
Each initiative involved a lot of investment, had significant clinical implications, or both. However, when the general manager used the DICE framework, he was able to confirm his suspicions.
After a minute discussion with project managers and other key people, he established that three projects were in the Win Zone but two were in the Woe Zone and one was in the Worry Zone.
The strongest projects, the general manager found, consumed more than their fair share of resources. Senior hospital staff sensed that those projects would succeed and spent more time promoting them, attending meetings about them, and making sure they had sufficient resources.
By contrast, no one enjoyed attending meetings on projects that were performing poorly. So the general manager stopped attending meetings for the projects that were on track; he attended only sessions that related to the three underperforming ones. He pulled some managers from the projects that were progressing smoothly and moved them to the riskier efforts. He added more milestones to the struggling enterprises, delayed their completion, and pushed hard for improvement.
Those steps helped ensure that all six projects met their objectives. When companies launch large transformation programs, they kick off many projects to attain their objectives. For instance, senior executives may choose the best employees for projects they have sponsored or lavish attention on pet projects rather than on those that need attention.
By deploying our framework before they start transformation initiatives, companies can identify problem projects in portfolios, focus execution expertise and senior management attention where it is most needed, and defuse political issues. Take, for example, the case of an Australasian manufacturing company that had planned a set of 40 projects as part of a program to improve profitability.
The group went through each project, debating its DICE score and identifying the problem areas. After listing all the scores and issues, the general manager walked to a whiteboard and circled the five most important projects. What do we have to do to achieve that? The general manager walked to a whiteboard and circled the five most important projects.
The group began thinking and acting right away. It moved people around on teams, reconfigured some projects, and identified those that senior managers should pay more attention to—all of which helped raise DICE scores before implementation began. The most important projects were set up for resounding success while most of the remaining ones managed to get into the Win Zone. The group left some projects in the Worry Zone, but it agreed to track them closely to ensure that their scores improved.
Transformations should entail fundamental changes that stretch an organization. When different executives calculate DICE scores for the same project, the results can vary widely. The difference in scores is particularly important in terms of the dialogue it triggers. Prejudices, differences in perspectives, and a reluctance or inability to speak up can block effective debates. By using the DICE framework, companies can create a common language and force the right discussions. Sometimes, companies hold workshops to review floundering projects.
At those two- to four-hour sessions, groups of eight to 15 senior and middle managers, along with the project team and the project sponsors, hold a candid dialogue. The workshops bring diverse opinions to light, which often can be combined into innovative solutions. Consider, for example, the manner in which DICE workshops helped a telecommunications service provider that had planned a major transformation effort.
Consisting of five strategic initiatives and 50 subprojects that needed to be up and running quickly, the program confronted some serious obstacles. There were delays in approving business cases, a dearth of rigor and focus in planning and identifying milestones, and a shortage of resources. There were leadership issues, too. For example, executive-level shortcomings had resulted in poor coordination of projects and a misjudgment of risks.
The Project Management Office arranged a series of workshops to analyze issues and decide future steps. One workshop, for example, was devoted to three new product development projects, two of which had landed in the Woe Zone and one in the Worry Zone.
They eventually agreed on three remedial actions: holding a conflict-resolution meeting between the directors in charge of technology and those responsible for the core business; making sure senior leadership paid immediate attention to the resource issues; and bringing together the project team and the line-of-business head to formalize project objectives.
With the project sponsor committed to those actions, the three projects had improved their DICE scores and thus their chances of success at the time this article went to press. Conversations about DICE scores are particularly useful for large-scale transformations that cut across business units, functions, and locations. In such change efforts, it is critical to find the right balance between centralized oversight, which ensures that everyone in the organization takes the effort seriously and understands the goals, and the autonomy that various initiatives need.
Teams must have the flexibility and incentive to produce customized solutions for their markets, functions, and competitive environments. The balance is difficult to achieve without an explicit consideration of the DICE variables. Take the case of a leading global beverage company that needed to increase operational efficiency and focus on the most promising brands and markets.
The company also sought to make key processes such as consumer demand development and customer fulfillment more innovative. Top management faced enormous challenges in structuring the effort and in spawning projects that focused on the right issues.
Executives knew that this was a multiyear effort, yet without tight schedules and oversight of individual projects, there was a risk that projects would take far too long to be completed and the results would taper off.
To mitigate the risks, senior managers decided to analyze each project at several levels of the organization. Using the DICE framework, they reviewed each effort every month until they felt confident that it was on track. After that, reviews occurred when projects met major milestones. No more than two months elapsed between reviews, even in the later stages of the program.
The time between reviews at the project-team level was even shorter: Team leaders reviewed progress biweekly throughout the transformation. Some of the best people joined the effort full time. The human resources department took an active role in recruiting team members, thereby creating a virtuous cycle in which the best people began to seek involvement in various initiatives.
During the course of the transformation, the company promoted several team members to line- and functional leadership positions because of their performance. Its once-stagnant brands began to grow, it cracked open new markets such as China, and sales and promotion activities were aligned with the fastest-growing channels.
There were many moments during the process when inertia in the organization threatened to derail the change efforts. By providing a common language for change, the DICE framework allows companies to tap into the insight and experience of their employees.
A great deal has been said about middle managers who want to block change. We find that most middle managers are prepared to support change efforts even if doing so involves additional work and uncertainty and puts their jobs at risk.
Too often, they lack the tools, the language, and the forums in which to express legitimate concerns about the design and implementation of change projects. By enabling frank conversations at all levels within organizations, the DICE framework helps people do the right thing by change.
Our hearts still beat faster, but now with a decrease in vascular resistance, meaning blood can flow throughout the circulatory system with greater ease. We either feel more positive or at the very least, less bad in the face of the change we are experiencing. The bottom line: Whether you perceive significant change moments in your life as a threat or as a challenge greatly alters your emotional, physical, and mental experiences.
In general, mindsets reflect how we see things, and they impact both our beliefs and our behaviors. Interestingly, our behaviors impact our mindsets, too, so by practicing specific actions we can help shift our mindsets to be more agile in the face of change.
In this way, mindsets are almost like a muscle that can be trained. And at NLI, we help clients train that muscle around a crucial question:. A growth mindset is one that helps us see skills as capable of improvement. It allows us to see gaps in our knowledge as opportunities to learn something new.
And when we have a growth mindset, we are therefore more prepared to experience the change moment as a challenge, rather than a threat.
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