Strategic Change Management

Making Change Stick

What if you were in a hurry to get somewhere, and everyone you asked for directions spoke a language you didn’t understand?
And there was no translator in sight?

In order to be an innovator, you must separate yourself from the crowd. Strategic innovation requires foregoing “best practices” because, by definition, that means you are using someone else’s model ~ in their industry, with their constraints and competitive set ~ and making them your own.

Generally speaking squeezing yourself into other people’s models doesn’t fit. Best practices are unlikely to leverage what your organization does well, what your leadership strengths are and what your customers expect from you. To be truly innovative, it is critical to start with what you do well, and then do it so extremely well that no one else can imitate it. It is all about becoming the very best at what you do.

The Leadership Architect Group believes that innovation and genius are absolutely and intimately related. You are not merely born with it, but instead create opportunity and success. For example, you can quite literally organize your day – all of your days – so that you can get more of both.

Creativity and genius are a function of the tools, processes and perspectives that you intentionally apply to the questions for which you are seeking answers. By learning to systematically sift through all of the different ways to understand and view your “problem” or opportunity, you can identify the possibility that provides the best fit for you or your organization.

“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the answer, I would spend the first 55 minutes figuring out the proper questions to ask. For if I knew the proper questions, I could solve the problem in less than 5 minutes.” — Albert Einstein

What we call “deep strategic innovation” consists of three steps

⁃    Intellectual discovery - Understanding what the problem truly is, from a variety of different vantage points.
⁃    Creative provocation - Identification of the positioning that affords the clients to become the best in their industry or field.
⁃    Developmental inspiration - Learning the steps needed to ensure that they execute in such a way that they are the best at what they do in their clients’ universe.

Each step takes a slightly different form, depending on the question at hand and the client’s strengths, resources and flexibility.

The Leadership Architect Group creates a space to explore new ideas, at the level where stuff shifts. We take you to a place where understanding is expanded, systems become interdependent, profitability is enhanced and good people become engaged. We will guide you to go deeper into the situation, then allow you to innovate as your re-orient your way back out.

Strategic innovation then begins to happen when it becomes an iterative process of refocus, validation and reorientation. New baselines are generated. practices are standardized, opportunities are created and leveraged.

It’s all very architectural, really.