TABLE OF CONTENTS The goal of this activity is to think about action versus analysis.
PowerPoint Item PowerPoint slide 8 25
Clock 5 minutes
Show the slide and give people time to read it. Ask them to decide the first five actions they would take and write these down. Give them several minutes for this.
There are no right answers. Whatever people come up with is fine (it is not even necessary to ask them to share their thoughts). The idea is that the participants engaged a process for setting priorities, just as they need to engage a process for setting priorities in the midst of change.
This exercise grew from some research on decision making that was conducted with emergency response teams. The research question was, How do these emergency response crew leaders make fast, life-and-death decisions in the midst of the chaos surrounding them? The trick lies in the question they ask themselves. Many of us approach chaos with the question of What do I do? Asking this puts us in the middle of the chaos we get caught up in it and are overwhelmed by it. A better question to ask is What s going on? This puts us outside the chaos in observation mode. We re now in the helicopter at 100 feet looking for the pattern, getting a sense of the chaos and the priority of actions becomes clearer. Organizational change is chaos, just like the chaos that...
