| Insider Secrets Of Successful War Rooms |
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You may never have led or participated in a War Room before. So…what can you do to guarantee success? No matter what role you play in the War Room, you can grow your skills and increase your effectiveness. Here’s how: If You Are A Leader Help the project team by setting the stage for collaborative work groups. Make sure people are protected from being dragged into other projects. Define a place that is a physical safe zone for collaborative, iterative and innovative thinking and dialogue. Make sure people have the tools, process and leadership support for developing and sharing a powerful story. Be a contributor and lead by example. Be willing to share your input, provide necessary guidance and allow people to contribute in an open, facilitative manner. If You Are A ManagerSeek to make sure team members have the time, budget and space to devote their attention if they are hosts of the Command Center. Help provide access to leaders so input is available. Committed hosts helps guarantee team members don’t waste time and effort. Watch out for detours that can be easily avoided.Insure the process is disciplined. Help participants get familiar with a defined process for understanding the situation and for approaching problems in a structured and repeatable manner. This includes identifying the problem, generating innovative approaches to the problem, visual and physical display of the solutions, open dialogue to collectively develop action-focused strategies. Continue to help the teamwork on several levels at once: problem solving, process focus and story telling. Plus use shared documentation and reporting of best practices to leverage the group learning. If You Are A Team MemberStay open to new ideas. One of the biggest problems is team members hosting the Command Center can get identified with a particular solution or the favorite strategy of the moment.In getting stuck on their preferred solution, they can stifle creativity and close off to new ideas. This can undermine the collaborative process involving subject matter experts, product super-users or customers. Part of your role is staying open and flexible to receive new input. Work together to establish a common and repeated process to share the story. this means you'll refine how to orient visitors to the story. Experiment with telling the story using visual display in different manners. Track effectiveness to share learnings with the rest of the team. Several processes will likely occur simultaneously, so team members must work together to gather input, provide structure, tell the story, record visitor comments, integrate insights and keep the team involved as the strategic story unfolds. If You Are An Expert ContributorStart by listening. Let the War Room hosts provide an overview so you not only can see the big picture, but you also understand where they are in the process.The host group may be starting and need research data to understand the current situation, or they may be neck-deep in solutions and need your input to see the big picture. They may be further along and need your expert advice to advocate or verify an approach. Find out what kind of input the team needs at this point. Be willing to continue incubating and letting ideas bubble up even after you leave the room. Many people find that solutions arrive after they have left the Command Center. Be sure to let the team know if you have additional insights. While War Rooms are used for everything from product launches to presentation pitches to top secret strategic planning, some things are consistent. Use these top four proven methods to guarantee a highest impact using your War Room. Top 4 Proven Methods for Success:1. Don’t Reinvent the Wheel Use the proven and tested methods, templates and processes to help your strategic planning be fast, efficient and creative. Resist the temptation to reinvent the wheel and instead focus on inventing great solutions within the process. 2. Less is More…in Words, Pictures, and Documents It’s hard to communicate strategy in a memorable way when there are 200 PowerPoint slides and 16 different documents. Starting with the end in mind will keep your process and output lean and effective. In all cases, strive for simplicity and memorability for your end-target communications. 3. Use Proven Blueprints in the War Room Toolkit The War Room Toolkit is made up of proven processes and easy-to-use blueprints. Groups and teams can get started immediately without having to attend costly training sessions or spend weeks wandering around inventing an effective process. Get started engaging and get busy winning when you use the proven tools and processes to set up your own Command Center. 4. Get Expert Help…You Could Be Too Close It’s easy to lose sight of the strategic purpose and intent when you are very close to the content and data. Many groups prefer to have expert facilitators guide them in the process and manage the context for results. If this is something that you're considering, please feel free to discuss your project with one of our facilitators. We have skilled, expert facilitators whose only job is to help you execute faster and stay focused on making progress in your Command Center. Whether you decide to set up a War Room on your own, or use an external faciltator, one thing is certain. You'll get more done, have an easier time staying on-track for great results and your competition won't know what hit them! |
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