Herding Cats
Have you ever tried to coax a cat to volunteer, totally of their own accord, to walk into a travel carrier without getting meowed at and your face slashed? It's not easy. Now imagine coaxing a dozen cats to walk into a dozen travel carriers, simultaneously? Now that's a challenge...
‘Herding cats’ is often used as an analogy in transformation and change. It centres around the challenge of organising people with often differing views and perspectives around a common goal as they embark on the transformation journey. They have done nothing wrong, people are busy and have their own areas of focus, and this is another thing for them to focus on and take up more of their valuable time so you need to ensure they stay aligned. Easier said than done.
It needs strong stakeholder management to ensure each key stakeholder’s needs are understood and listened to. This ensures a ‘work with’ approach is adopted instead of a ‘do to’ which nobody likes. In short, people need engaging.
Today I want to talk about a hack to use to help ensure people stay aligned, which I’m calling ‘red dot thinking’.
Cats love to play. Surprising a cat by shining a red dot laser pointer on the floor, will often cause them to run about and chase it.
There is no rule (as far as I know) to say transformation and change shouldn’t occasionally be fun and engaging and they must always be serious, sombre affairs. Often the transformation can be so significant taht having a valve to let off some pressure can be extremely healthy.
So make the programme fun and every so often take the temperature of the team and where necessary, adopt some red dot thinking. Mix things up and bring out a red dot. I’m not literally meaning shine a red dot at people for them to chase around a meeting room, but get creative - for example, you could make a meeting face to face and take it outside as a walking meeting, or ask people to provide updates via a brief video instead of a slide to showcase their part of the business, or change up the running order of the weekly meeting and bring in a guest speaker from outside the business to talk about a transformational topic.
Some of the best red dot moments I've seen over the years included having a team meeting at the Imperial War Museum, a programme team being surprisingly taken to the cinema to watch a new Star Wars film at a booked out cinema just for us at 8AM with popcorn for breakfast, having an office bake off with bragging rights of star baker for the winner, being serenaded through the streets of San Francisco by a world class musician during a team event, having a global best selling business author come and talk to the team about change management and a team being given a cooking lesson in a top restaurant kitchen by a top quality chef. All excellent red dot thinking moments.
It doesn’t matter what your red dot is, just do something a little bit different. This is all about engaging hearts and minds so people stay aligned and focused on the transformation journey ahead.
After writing this I was feline a bit paw-kish, so I baked a giant red laser dot and a clowder of calico cat biscuits. Meow. 🔴 🐈
