Which brings me onto something that I’ve been doing for the last few years that has been immensely helpful to me; The Strategic Latte. There are a group of people with whom I meet up individually from time to time for a Strategic Latte – some monthly, some less frequent – and all we do is chat.

Why ‘Strategic’? Because Strategy is the process whereby you stop and do some hard thinking; Where you look to the future and think about your goals; where you reflect on how things have been going, and make clear decisions about what you’re going to do and (just as importantly) about what you’re not going to do.
Why Latte? Because I’m a bit of a Latte addict and because I think there’s a real benefit of getting away from your normal workplace and into a coffee shop. That said, you don’t have to go to a coffee shop or even drink Latte for the Strategic Latte to work.

So how do you use the Strategic Latte?

Firstly, what kind of support do you need? I love the idea of a Personal Board of Directors; Who is going to challenge you, support you, stretch you, hold you accountable for what you’ve said you’ll do? If you’re going to have Strategic Lattes with a few people, go for variety and don’t pick people who are just like you. When you suggest meeting for a Strategic Latte to help each other, you don’t have to commit to meeting regularly for a year; Just meet once and see how it goes.

When you meet up, make sure you spend an equal amount of time talking about each other. The Strategic Latte is more than a chat, so when you’re talking about the other person ask them:
- how things are really going for them (not the usual ‘fine, thank you’)
- How they’re doing in terms of moving towards their big goals (and what their big goals are).
- What’s holding them back and how they’re overcoming any barriers
- Is there anything you can do to help

That’s it: Just a brief time to sit down and talk honestly and openly, and to reflect on things. .

I would wholeheartedly recommend that you give it a go and I’d love to hear your experiences.

1 – Not all advice is created equal

“82% of all quotes attributed to me on Twitter aren’t things I said”. Albert Einstein

When I’ve got a long holiday, I’m planning to read Einstein’s works to see if he did say everything that he’s quoted as saying as I am very suspicious. I’ve sometimes seen multiple tweets on the same day with the same quote attributed to different people which doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. The reality is that it is easy to publish a blog post and even easier to Tweet. Not all will be accurate and well-researched. Some will be rants, some will be opinion, some will be wrong, some will be sales pitches, and others will be brilliant. I love Twitter and I read a lot of blogs. My point is simply this; don’t necessarily believe everything you read.

2 – Advice needs context

Given a particular piece of advice, it is often easy to find a piece of advice that suggests exactly the opposite! It doesn’t matter whether it is business, entrepreneurship, fitness, dieting, social media, or productivity it easy to find contradictory advice. For example, my fitness has slipped somewhat over the last year and I’ve done a bit of searching round for a workout plan that will suit me and found loads of contradictory plans. I’m sure many of them are good but unless they’re suitable for where I’m at now and where I want to be, they either won’t help me as much as they should or could help me damage myself in the process. Whenever you see or hear advice, look for the context that it is set in so that you can get an idea of whether it might be suitable for your situation.

3 – Your own advice is better

There is an easy trap to fall into of looking to success stories and aiming to copy whatever made somebody else successful. Lauryn Ballesteros wrote a great blog post on this after working with Seth Godin: If Richard Branson can do it, then so can you. Steve Jobs obviously figured it out early on as he talks in this video about discovering that

“…everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”

If you can’t see the video embedded above, here is the original on YouTube.

Successful people like Branson and Jobs didn’t try copying others; they’ve been successful because they have been themselves. Nobody knows you or your challenges like you do. One of the most powerful aspects of coaching is that it helps people work out the answers for themselves; If you know what is holding you back, you won’t find the best answers from others. Instead, try coaching yourself, do some mutual coaching with friends (more on this in a future blog post), or get some professional coaching. That way, you’ll get advice you can trust, tailored to you, and you’ll learn and grow as a result.

Finally, if you want an illustration of what it is like to listen to and respond to advice from everybody, then watch the following video. I wouldn’t bother watching the whole thing as you’ll get the idea after less than a minute but I think it is a great metaphor for what it is like to ask for too much advice!

If you can’t see the video embedded above, here is the original on Vimeo.

But don’t just take my word for it; What do you think and how does this relate to your experiences?

So, it was back to the drawing board and I kept on bouncing possible business names around with my wife. Every name we came up with was naff! We were out walking our dog in the Ladybrook Valley (known as Happy Valley) and still bouncing around naff business names when we spotted a Kingfisher. I love seeing the Kingfishers; they are absolutely beautiful birds and I feel really inspired every time I see them. After it flew off, we agreed that it would be really easy to come up with a business name after seeing the Kingfisher as we were both feeling inspired. And that was when it clicked; Kingfisher Coaching! A quick check for the URL and business name and we had the name!

Kingfishers are beautiful. People that only ever catch a glimpse of them talk about seeing that vivid electric blue colour, but they have a lot of orange that many people never see and there is so much more to them than meets the eye! They’re so well-designed that the shape of their beak has inspired the design of the Shinkansen Bullet Train in Japan. My graphic designer was as excited as me and I’m delighted with my logo – which has Kingfisher orange as the main colour and that beautiful electric blue for the dot of the ‘i’. I love the name and I smile whenever I see the logo!

Kingfishers are beautiful, incredibly designed peak performers, inspiring, and not always how they appear at first glance. So are people. That’s why I do what I do and I love my business name and my logo.

 Image credit: Surfgirlly

So, my focus of blogging & tweeting is on subjects that support people, teams, and organisations to be peak performers:

- Coaching & Mentoring
- Positive Psychology
- Goals (setting them and achieving them)
- Resilience (how to survive and bounce back from the less-than-perfect times)
- Doing the right work (playing to strengths)
- Teamwork
- Innovation & Entrepreneurship
- Using time effectively
- Procrastination
- Helping others & being helped (through support networks)
- Making changes and making them stick
- Feedback as one of the keys to peak performance

However, I am a person as well as a business so I will tweet about other things (especially after 6pm & at weekends):

- Motorsport (I love F1 and motorbikes)
- Social Media (I’m a very social person and I really enjoy using social media)
- Really good stuff on TV (like Spooks, and definitely not like X Factor)
- Gadgets and technology
- My puppy (who takes a lot of my time, so sometimes gets tweeted about)
- Coffee (an obsession)
- I’m likely to tweet every time I see a Kingfisher as I find them inspiring (and inspired my business name)
- Awesome charities like Retrak (after I spent a month in Uganda last year and was privileged to go into the slums and talk to street kids)

I don’t think I’m a completely open book on Twitter, and there are some things that I tend to save for Facebook:

- My wife and step-kids
- My faith (I’m a Christian and a lay minister (Reader) in the Church of England)
- Football: As a passionate Liverpool supporter who lives in Manchester, there are times when I keep quiet!

So, that’s me.

I started off by highlighting that I am passionate about effective engagement and why it is so important to get this right, to work in close collaboration with team members to be sure that all customers needs are addressed and, by way of introducing this I used a collage depicting some of the insights and experiences I have had working with global teams, covering sessions from team effectiveness through to problem solving and celebrating success!

Engaging with stakeholders is all about building relationships with people who you affect through your work, or who could make an impact on your success and it is therefore crucial that we get this right.

Identifying stakeholders at various levels determines the appropriate level of engagement and this should be built into your processes throughout the lifecycle of the project. I co-facilitated a stakeholder mapping exercise with a large cross-functional team that was preparing for a key investment decision for a project. After brain-storming, we used a 4 quadrant grid to help identify individuals extremely interested in the future of the project and who would have the power to enable progression or remove blockers i.e. the high interest / high influencers.

By doing this exercise it brought the team to an aligned view for setting expectations on four categories for how to engage;

1. Manage closely
2. Keep satisfied
3. Monitor
4. Keep informed 

This allowed us to develop clear plans and identify accountable owners, which made significant contribution to the projects delivery and decision making. It enabled an effective governance interaction to take place having identified key 1:1 interactions. The end result was a win / win situation; the project team understood the customer’s needs, these needs were addressed and the formal governance output was a success leading to a real feeling of partnership.

There are many methods of engagement, ranging from focus groups or task teams that consist of a small group of representatives to discuss relevant issues or gaining different perspectives for the project, to questionnaires and electronic tools, which provide structured methods covering larger communities to communicate progress or status. Holding face-to-face 1:1’s with individuals enables a more in-depth discussion to take place whilst interactive events or workshops are great for bringing people together for bouncing ideas off one another but the key is about creating the right environment, making sure these sessions are interactive in a way that everyone feels able to provide their input. I’ve used all four methods, as I am sure most Project Managers have, but tailored to suit the needs and expectations for all stakeholders. Being part of a global virtual team, co-located across UK, Sweden and the US, has proven a challenge to hold such privileged face-to-face workshops but, these have proven to be priceless when they happen!

It is also conducting yearly reviews, looking at each group of stakeholders and asking yourself and them how they have a voice within the organisation or project and whether the current mechanisms are working:

What’s working well…

Even better if…

To summarise, stakeholder engagement isn’t something to do from time-to-time. It is something that should be built into your processes recognising that some individuals will need to be more actively involved than others BUT… it is important to note that you won’t be able to engage with everyone all of the time!

If you can’t see the embedded video above, please click here to see it.

Ries defines a startup as ‘a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty’ and argues that it could generally be done a lot more effectively. As he unpacks this, it is clear that the thinking can be applied to organisations of all sizes as well as startups.

There is one aspect of The Lean Startup that I want to focus on in particular; the pivot. This is apparently old thinking in startup circles, but was new to me. The concept of the pivot arises from the fact that startups are harder than typical New Product Development as you don’t know exactly who the customer is, or what they want (just like The unclear path). So, as a startup develops, the pivot is a change of direction (firmly grounded in everything that has been learned) that moves you towards success.

Ries develops the following points:

• It can take a number of pivots before finding success.
• Reducing the time between pivots allows for more pivots and increases the odds of success before money runs out.
• Focusing on the learning required in order to pivot can drastically reduce the time between pivots (by developing the minimum viable product); each iteration is simply testing a hypothesis.

We know that lots of projects fail and I see a lot of change programmes and reorganisations that seem to be constant, without delivering the expected impact. Perhaps Lean Startup thinking is what we need in these situations; to run a series of really intense initiatives which will produce just enough learning to pivot and drive towards the successful outcome.

As soon as the book is available, I will definitely be reading it and posting a fuller review but (on the basis of the presentation) it looks great.

What is your experience of startups and pivoting?

If you can’t see the embedded video above, please click here to see it.

What comes across loud and clear is the cost of being a startup entrepreneur, and Tara Hunt makes it clear that you’re not an entrepreneur unless you’re ‘all-in’ and have staked everything. She talks with passion about how she is struggling, but is exhilarated and happy and how entrepreneurs have an unbreakable spirit.

Tara Hunt argues that entrepreneurs need these three qualities to survive:

• Delusion
• Desire to change the status quo
• Audacity

Another aspect of entrepreneurship that comes across is ‘the unclear path’ – that entrepreneurs ask questions and let the answers take them to the end result – and this relates strongly to the concept of ‘The Pivot’ which I mention in my review of  ‘The Lean Startup‘.

If you can (and should) go all-in, then there is an extra level of motivation that comes from the obsessive focus on survival and the success of your business. But, even if you’re not all-in, my challenge is this: Is there an area of your life, even just one project, where you’re prepared to be a delusional, audacious dreamer? Why not go for it? Unlike those that are all-in, you have nothing to lose.

Here’s to the delusional, audacious dreamers who have the courage to go all-in; we really need them!

In my experience (of both my own behaviour and that of clients), there are lots of common pitfalls to achieving our goals; Sometimes we’re not clear on what exactly our goal is. Sometimes, we can get stuck in the loop of trying the same thing again and again even though it doesn’t work (remember the definition of insanity, attributed to Einstein).

In order to coach ourselves through an issue, we need to make time to stop and reflect, and here are three simple ideas on how to do that;

1 – Keep a Journal

If you’re frustrated with something, the art of writing a daily journal entry on what you’re trying and how you’re feeling about it can be quite therapeutic in itself. You could write the journal in a book, although my favourite is to catch a few notes on my iPad using Evernote. What matters most is to get in the habit of writing in the journal each day and just making a brief note about what you’re doing, how it’s working, and how you feel about it. The other crucial habit is to sit down weekly to review what you’ve written and reflect on what you could do differently.

2 – What would it have taken to make it a 10?

In his book ‘The Success Principles‘, Jack Canfield talks about a very simple technique that he uses; For something important, he starts by reflecting on, how many marks out of 10 would he rate that area at the moment. The next question is ‘What would have needed to happen to make it a 10?’ This gives a really nice, positive way to reflect on what you could do differently.

3 – Use the GROW model of coaching

There’s a lot more depth to the GROW model than I’m going to go into in this post, but it requires you to think through the following steps:

Be clear on the Goal that you’re seeking to achieve

reflect on the Reality of what you’ve already done and how that’s worked

consider the Options for moving forward

decide what you Will do.

It might be that you combine all 3 approaches but, regardless of how you approach it, the habit of stopping and reflecting on how things are going is a powerful one.

What are your experiences?

The debate about the ROI of Social Media seems to be clouded by all sorts of red herrings; I must disclose that I’m not a Social Media expert/guru/ninja (but it is something that I’m passionate about and use for my business) but I believe that the Social Media ROI debate needs to get back to some simple fundamentals and here is my starter for 10;

There are two reasons why the ROI of Social Media really matters:

1 – The potential ROI is part of the decision-making process for thinking about doing something different. It is part of the process of deciding what to do, what to change, and (possibly) which person/company to engage to help you.

2. Once you’ve made the decision,  ROI needs to be tracked to make sure that you’re getting the results you wanted and to help take corrective action if things aren’t working out as expected.

A possible approach to ROI discussions:

ROI isn’t an easy nut to crack for Social Media and I think it revolves around accepting that any ROI decision needs to factor in the cost, the risk, and the potential value and not just focus on the value alone:

- The cost: Social Media isn’t free and any Social Media initiative will cost, even if it is purely an investment of time. Whatever the ‘cost’, it is likely that you could use that time/effort/money to pursue alternatives and it should be factored into the decision.

- The risk: When trying something new, it is unlikely that you can guarantee 100% success and a realistic view of the risk should be part of the decision. This means that innovative, risky ideas with a large potential return still get a chance.

- The value: This needs to be clear at the outset and it needs to be expressed in terms of how the planned activities will deliver the business result that is expected. I’m a fan of the work on Benefits Management  that has come out of Cranfield and there is a great paper on “Managing the Realization of Business Benefits from IT Investments” by Peppard, Ward, and Daniel which, although aimed at IT, has a brilliant concept of the benefits-dependency network which I believe could be a great help in the Social Media ROI debate. Here’s a sample benefits-dependency network from the paper:

I can see how this could be used for Social Media and it forces the drawing of the connection from things like ‘set up Twitter account’ on the left to ‘Improve customer service’ on the right and forces the debate about how the former will enable the latter.

Having a benefits-dependency network agreed up-front also helps to make the measurement of ROI easier; Generally, things on the left are easy to measure (e.g. set up Twitter account and build followers), but it then gets progressively more difficult as you work towards the right-hand side and start to try to measure engagement, and even harder when you reach the right-hand side and try to measure improved customer service when loads of other initiatives are trying to claim the same thing! That said, a balanced mix of measures should be enough to have an open discussion about how things are working out and to make any necessary changes.

I’m not claiming that this answers every question on this difficult topic, but I do believe that making decisions based on cost, risk, and value where value is expressed as a benefits-dependency network could lead to better decisions, less disappointments, and a balanced set of measures that help!

Any thoughts?