Avoiding Organization Fatigue

Avoiding Organization Fatigue

Productive Energy

For any transformational project, reaching its goals should be the genesis of a customer’s future. If a project is transforming an organization, it usually is exciting to the whole organization. It represents a re-birth of enthusiasm; new technology, new business opportunities, new growth paths and improved customer relationships. The excitement usually translates to productive energy, which in turn translates to a higher level of execution. It is important to the project performance to ensure that the participants have a clear and detailed understanding of the re-birth enthusiasm. The difficulty of these projects being completed, is not the start but rather the process, when the mental vision is dimmed by the fog of the project workload. This usually causes the mental energy level to decrease and the execution level moves slowly back to pre-project levels.

In the book “Fully Charged: How Great Leaders Boost Their Organization’s Energy and Ignite High Performance,” the authors, Bernd Vogel and Heike Bruch, identify four types of organization energy: productive, conservative, inertia and corrosive. When you’re establishing a transformational project, your organization will always begin with productive energy based on that re-birth of enthusiasm. The critical task is to avoid extended time in a state of cognitive drift, losing mental energy and the ability to sustain concentration or interest.

Clearing the Memory Bank

Understanding the project goals is vital to the level of excitement and the igniting of productive energy. Having your personnel believe in and commit to a project of re-birth opportunity is inherently difficult. Most visionaries are somewhat abstract in defining their vision, usually because it is so clear to them, they assume others see the same. However, to ignite that productive energy will necessitate clear definition, description and substantiation of the vision, in clear and convincing terms, stimulating a project victory. Second, leaders have to balance the mundane aspects of a project with the forward looking assumptions of a project victory; how are we going to apply the technology toward our goals of, new business opportunities, new growth paths and improved customer relationships? Interspersing these activities, throughout the project, will clear the memory cache of the mundane activities of the project and refresh the enthusiasm, once again igniting the productive energy.

Avoiding Organization Fatigue

Rotating teams to spend time on clearing the memory banks of the mundane activity of a project is not necessarily wasted time. In a RiskCALM₄^® project there are exciting aspects that should be considered and defined, prior to implementation. The various aspects of new business opportunities, new growth paths and improved customer relationships, should all be scoped, with consideration to defining and prioritizing required activities that will occur after implementation. This process will automatically remind the participants of the re-birth enthusiasm and refresh the productive energy. It will also ensure the completion of the project, which includes the full utilization of the solution’s capabilities. RiskCALM