Our Example
A while back when we asked our team "what do you think success means for us?", the range of answers we got back was a pretty scary.
Our own formula
To create our own Success Formula, we engaged with all our staff, clients, suppliers and strategic partners, over a 2 month period. We used the Success Formula tools to assist us to concisely describe what our success would look like and what we would need to do (and not do) to make it a reality.
We brainstormed over 500 different ideas, of the practices, principles and behaviours that must (and must not) be in place for us to be successful. Using weighted voting these were narrowed down to the most important. These two parts of the process took each person less than 15 mins total.
Out of this came 8 Business Drivers, and 4 Business Limiters; each having a snappy heading and 4- 6 agreed defining statements.
An example 'Business Driver' is;
A clear and inspiring vision that we live and breathe
Great strategy, turning vision into reality
Focused on our strategy and goals
Vision is shared with stakeholders
An example 'Business Limiter is;
Lousy communication within People Magic team
Not communicating well with clients
Ambiguous marketing material
Not using communication technology effectively
Visualising Success
A picture paints a thousand words... therefore the next step was visually representing our Business Drivers and Limiters and arranging them into a Formula. This formula layout simply means - do more of the things that drive success and less of the things that limit success. Finally our unique formula was created…
Using the Information
We now needed to score against our formula to see how close we were to our desired state of success!
The same people who helped us create the formula then scored against each driver and limiter. They had to say if we were delivering on the behaviours that described each driver and limiter.
All the information was collected and reported using our online tools and again took no-one longer than 15 mins each to participate. We gathered the results and discovered we had scored only 27%!
The real work began there... We had a serious strategy meeting, after which we communicated our new strategy to our stakeholders. This strategy is being integrated into our business everywhere to drive improvements. We now score against our formula every three months to track and review progress.