Strategy Facilitation
BIOSS SA strategy facilitation is effective. ‘Appreciation’ has become the underlying principle in the ways BIOSS works with individuals and with organisations. It underpins all our products as well as our overall consulting approach.
What Appreciation Truly Means
We use the word ‘Appreciation’ because it conveys both value in philosophical and economic terms and growth as in the appreciation of capital – social and financial. An Appreciation seeks to see the value in and to set a value on.
So many of the skills we acquire as a result of our working lives have to do with exactly the opposite. We are called on to make situations and people better – the outcome of a performance appraisal is a development plan looking at the things we need to do better, and not appreciation of what we already have that is good. What we still need to improve on is documented in detail, but very often, our wonderful uniqueness and gifts are not harnessed and utilised for the improvement of the whole.
A focus on appreciation therefore requires a slight shift in paradigm. The shift is this: to get the best out of people, you need to appreciate and utilise the uniqueness of what they bring. This is not just a glib and/or idealistic statement, it has been proven over and over again by science and experience.
It should therefore come as no surprise that we at BIOSS SA use an Appreciative Model to have Strategic Conversations.
How to have a strategic conversation
We believe the best people to sketch scenarios and shape the strategic direction for any organisation are those who are expected to implement the strategy. When engaged to facilitate a strategic session we encourage the conversation to be as participative as possible and we ask questions in order to stimulate the participants to re-examine their basic beliefs about the organisation.
We want people to bring their minds, their experiences and, most of all, their imagination to the meeting. Through our knowledge of Neuro Psychology and “Brain-based conversations” we structure sessions to embrace the imagination, the very faculty that allows people to think outside of the box.
Our approach is based on Collaboration and Quality Conversations as we seek to obtain a diversity of views and then gain alignment.
Through quality dialogue and widely shared co-created images of what we want the future to look like for the organisation, a shared picture of the future is created. Through this envisioning process, new realms of behavioural possibilities are opened up and chain reactions of self-organising change are created.
The economist Kenneth Boulding summarised this view effectively: “The human condition can almost be summed up in the observation that, whereas all experiences are of the past, all decisions are about the future. The image of the future, therefore, is the key to all choice-orientated behaviour. The character and quality of the images of the future which prevail in a society are therefore the most important clue to its overall dynamics.”
Another important lesson for thinking about the future was summed up by Alan Kay, who created the computer interface which became the model for the first Apple Macintosh and then the basis for Windows: “The best way to predict the future, is to create it.”
Contact BIOSS today for more information on strategy facilitation and the various services that we offer.