This will probably be the last in the recent series of posts on True North following the inaugural True North Workshop I ran with Jim Benson last week. In this one, I want to give a high-level outline of the exercise we ran through using Miro. The image to the right shows the template to give a feel for what it looked like.
The Prompt
We opened with a generative prompting question to start creating what I called True North Fragments. Small granular pieces which might come together to form an overarching True North. Inspired by the Agendashift True North, the prompt was:
Imagine your organisation performing at its ideal best:
- supporting your people producing value
- delivering on your business strategy
- meeting your customer needs
What’s that like?
This prompt intends to encourage consideration of all three potential scopes of a True North: the individual, the business and the customer.
The AIM
The Fragments were then assessed against the various perspectives introduced in the previous post. Given the ambiguity and overlap of some of those perspectives, we ended up arranging them into three Triads, wth each Triad representing a different theme. Conveniently, and serendipitously, these three themes gave us the acronym AIM. If you’re navigating towards a shared direction, you need a good AIM!
- Addressable – the ability to take action or have an influence
- Inspirational – the external or extrinsic influence of the environment
- Motivational – the internal or intrinsic influence of the individual
Using a running metaphor, let’s say my True North is to run a marathon. Being addressable means that I can get off my seat and do some serious training. Then being inspirational means that it is worth my while to train for. Finally, being motivational means that it is something that I want to put the effort into training for. Of course, there is some overlap and ambiguity with these themes as we shall see below.
The Triads
These three Triads had the following questions and dimensions on their vertices:
Addressable – Is each True North Fragment: Compelling, Concrete, Cryptic?
Inspirational – Is each True North Fragment: Cultural, Compelling, Challenging?
Motivational – For the True North Fragment, there is: Culture, Cronos / Kairos, Clout?
Firstly, you will notice that some of the dimensions are repeated across Triads. e.g. Compelling appears in Addressable and Inspirational. That’s because, as noted above, the three themes themselves have overlap and ambiguity. Secondly, you may also notice that there is a new dimension – Clout. That’s because in naming the first theme as Addressable (which is in part a hat-tip to The Crux), I realised that I wanted to include something related to the capacity and competency to start making actual progress. There’s no point in having an inspirational and motivational True North if you aren’t able to even take a first step.
The Outcomes
Participants first came up with around 10 True North Fragments each.
Then we took each of the three AIM themes one and a time and they placed their fragments onto a Triad relative to its vertices. Note that if you haven’t already realised, the Traids are influenced by Dave Snowden’s use of Triads. Having said that, this isn’t doing anything as sophisticated as the use of Triads in Sensemaker. For each theme, we debriefed and discussed the experience, e.g.
- considerations and evaluations of where to place fragments
- patterns and differences in the overall output
- insights and learnings from seeing the results
Finally, based on their conclusions and reflections, participants reconsolidated the most meaningful fragments back into a single True North statement. This proved to be non-trivial (perhaps unsurprisingly). However, I think it’s fair to say that the results were some of the strongest True North statements we have seen during any of the X-Matrix workshops we have run together.
Future Development
This is something we want to run again. Let me know if you’d like to be part of that! Apart from some minor tweaking of the language and prompts, there are a couple of areas to experiment with and evolve.
Firstly, we had individuals who were working on their own, based on their unique contexts. It would be really interesting to have a group of people in a shared context work together. That would highlight interesting commonalities and differences, and generate some powerful conversations to create alignment.
Secondly, I would add an extra step between the Triad debriefs and discussions, and the creation of the True North, to reduce the size of the leap between the two. Explicitly selecting and focusing on the most meaningful Fragments might help hone in on the most important aspects to make part of the True North.
If you’d like to be part of a future workshop, let me know. Even better, if you want us to run this with your organisation or teams, we’d love to help!