How Many Strategic Value Dots Are You Really Connecting?

Are you comfortably connecting strategic value dots across your organization?

If you are really, really comfortable connecting those dots, you may not be providing the robust yet nimble business outcomes you target. Here’s why.

There are three reasons why being too comfortable in your professional role is not the feeling you should seek. However, confidence in your professional role fuels professional growth and innovation. Let’s explore together.

When you become too comfortable in your professional role, you default to connecting strategic value dots linearly.

First, you assume all projects and problems fit into the comfortable professional tool box you create. Fitting all problems into this box creates a wear, wash, rinse, repeat approach to problem-solving. Things are predictable instead of novel and exciting. As a result, you and your team may ignore signs and symptoms that some problems will not fit into “how we usually solve problems” or “what has worked in the past.” Consequently, you, and your team lose perspective and, as a result, context.

Due to your collective comfort level, your focus becomes too narrow to create robust, nimble, flexible, and enduring strategic value.  

You and your team commit, too early, to tactical approaches which are too limited to become strategic. Once you commit, you are reluctant to consider new variables and changing conditions. Consequently, you prioritize information that reinforces your comfortable solution. As a result, you ignore information and implications lurking around the edges of your comfortable professional problem-solving box. Plus, you also ignore information and de-prioritize implications bouncing around outside of the box. Consider that it is around those uncomfortable edges, both inside and outside of the box, where innovation resides.

When you confidently move one millimeter beyond what is professionally comfortable, you identify and prioritize the strategic value dots you should be continuously connecting. 

Strategic problem-solving is about anticipating solutions for what is new, next, and changing. This approach favors individuals and teams who are courageous and curious enough to move one millimeter beyond comfortable norms. The focus is discovering strategic possibilities, making ideas visible, and then taking action on those possibilities and ideas. Consequently, you become proactive and anticipatory in creating designs, solutions, and outcomes which easily connect into continuously evolving business ecosystems. And, those ecosystems are hardly linear, because many of them may not even exist yet: at least not until tomorrow.

How many strategic value dots are you really connecting to get everyone to where they really need to go: today, tomorrow, and moving forward?

The greatest problem-solvers are those who are comfortable being constantly uncomfortable. As a result, their perspective is creatively focused on eliminating complacency and continuously and innovatively serving colleagues and clients, together. One millimeter at a time.

What do you need to choose to do to connect those strategic value dots, moving forward?

• Searching for a coaching catalyst to get you unstuck professionally?
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• Then engage me to present a One Millimeter Mindset ™ program! Delivered virtually or in-person.
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Change Agent | Collaboration Catalyst | Complex Problem Solver | Professional Innovation | Cross Functional Leadership | Speaker, Consultant, Coach, Author |

Babette Ten Haken’s One Millimeter Mindset™ programs catalyze people who solve problems differently to collaborate more successfully. Become more professionally visible, cross-functionally relevant, and strategically valuable as you create and implement innovative and robust business outcomes together. She is a business-oriented STEM professional, qualitative Voice of the Customer facilitator, PMI-certified Wicked Problem Solver, Duke Corporate Education licensed Strategic Agility practitioner, and Six Sigma Green Belt (Quality). Babette is a member of the ASQ, SHRM, PMI, the National Speakers Association (NSA). Her playbook of cross-functional collaboration, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com. Contact Babette here. Image source: Adobe Stock.