‘the chick does not break the egg out of hatred for the shell — it does so out of a desire to walk under a wider heaven’
Here’s a little exercise I developed nearly twenty years ago, useful for any kind of change where you have some vision or outcome which resonates.
- Share the vision with the group
- Ask ‘if we are here in one year, doing the post-mortem, because we failed to make this happen, what barriers or obstacles will we identify as the reasons we failed?’
Everyone writes one barrier or obstacle per post-it note, identifying why the project is going to fail.
Then, you categorise the barriers, together:
- brick walls are immovable things in the world that we can’t change; we have to work around
- partition walls are solid — we have to have top-level support or team effort to overcome them
- paper walls *look* like walls — but if you test them, an individual can go right through
- mindset issues require us to rethink and innovate
The exercise helps you identify where real work is required, identify risks, and is a cathartic whingefest which lets people process their expectations of failure — and then get on with succeeding.
Download the full exercise here: https://bit.ly/breakingtheshell — and please credit the work, and tell me how you get on! Credits: — quote at start is from an early draft of The Rainbow by DH Lawrence, when under the influence of Bertrand Russell, according to Ray Monk for the biography of Russell — the exercise was derived from a ‘four walls’ customer service exercise at www.squarewheels.com — image www.pxfuel.com
What’s your favourite tip for successful change?
