I woke up this morning perplexed about how to fully embrace a human centred, design thinking mindset and skill set and provide the approaches and tools to enable the team to deliver on the core business outcomes

When I look at all the corporate analysis from engagement surveys, investment analysis, strategic analysis and operational reporting it all feels somewhat disconnected

All the insight to drive successful performance speaks to knowing your customer, addressing the opportunities overcoming the challenges and providing solutions to your customers problems. We are all in many leadership sessions where this insight is shared and yes we get it.

In the next sessions that often follow we often lose this thread.

Why don’t conversations and analysis within organisations alway start with reinforcing what we are doing as a business and ensure that the viewpoint being discussed has the goals and objectives of the business explicitly declared at the start of the session.

With the goals and objectives of the business being reinforced in every session/discussion it helps sets the context, it helps us feedback within the context of achieving our goals and it helps provide a thread to the real things that will drive the business forward

So yes we need to be human centred and yes we need to get into the mindsets of our employees and our customers – and I am cheering at the thought of making a difference with these approaches but we must all approach this by explicitly focusing these approaches on helping to achieve our business goals

Now I am sure all of us human centric, design thinking advocates will all say that absolutely it’s how to get the results but how many of us are:-

1. working with ambigious objectives and goals

2 Are filling the void with assumptions

3. cracking on at pace with our analysis and thoughts

4. Not taking the time to be really clear on what the objective for the business is and what problem we are trying to solve.

I’ve spent the last couple of hours recapping on the “GE workout” approach and being reminded of the need to

1. Work with the business sponsor to really define the objective of the actions we want to drive?

2. Ensure there is some form of data pack that can be used to provide insight for the team to work with

3. Ensure the team all know their roles, understand the objectives, are familiar with the data pack and recognise that they will need to remain engaged and involved to execute on the ideas that follow

4 and only after this give the time to the team to brainstorm ideas and make solid recommendations based on scenarios to the leadership team with the expectation that actions will deliver at pace and progress towards the objective can be quantified

It takes discipline and focus, it takes buy in and it takes “leadership by goals and objective” to drive real business success

Let’s get our business discussions and insight aligned to deliver on the things that matter

Let’s stand back and let’s get us really clear on what are our objectives the SMARTER the better and then let’s smash the results by being human centric.