I hope you’ve had a great start to the year, and hopefully after a decent break. Personally, I was lucky enough to do Experience Design advising to the Aus Open and kept an eye on some projects that I’d help set up, including the Ashes fan experience and a few others over the summer.
The reason I mention that (apart from the obvious humbrag of being involved :), is that there’s been a couple of things that I’ve been reminded of - which might be of use for you to have in the front of your mind right now.
More Decisions, Always Changes
One is that the decisions we make are important.
That is because they often can have a far-ranging influence, and more often than not, our decisions are assessed by many other people, given the public nature of our work.
The second thing is - that given the uncertainty we have had - and will have for some time (and in fact will always have uncertainty) - is that having a strong guide to make and adjust our decisions, is just as important.
Both of these points won’t come as any great surprise or awakening for you, but again the reason I raise them here is that for one, I don’t think we have a lot of great, actionable guidance on how to make great decisions, and secondly, we need to make more decisions, quicker, with less certainty, than ever before. And we often either don’t have a plan, or 'The Plan' doesn’t apply to our work, or, we struggle to change the plans when we need to.
So, I’ve been working on sharing are the tools to make better decisions, and, how to document them. And in the coming months, starting with a few points below, I am sharing my Game Plan for strategic decisions in sport and events.
Why?
Because when you think about it, making decisions are the most important thing we do.
The decisions you make decide how successful you are, and determine how successful other people will see you.
Do you want to make better decisions? Does your team need to? Do your leaders need to see that you are??
A common day to day situation I’ve been encountering is the wish from leaders that their teams will make strong decisions, aligned to overarching strategies and organisational intentions and values. And vice versa, these teams want to make the right decisions, but, they just aren’t sure how.
It's about the process, and the outcome
We’d be arrogant to think that we can control the results of all of our decisions, there are too many other factors and forces to be in absolute control of the outcomes, but, what we can do is control the process. As the mantra goes, 'it's about the process, not the outcome' - and any high performer will tell you, they succeed by focusing on the process. What follows is up to the gods, and most often, those that focus on the process, get the results they want.
“I think for us it's doing the work, sticking to our processes and sticking to our routines that we know work. If you go about it the right way, make the right decisions for the right reasons, you know you're putting yourself in good stead.” - Ash Barty
“When push came to shove, those big moments, I was clear, I knew what I wanted to do, I just had to execute.”
Your Game Plan
So in step 1, in making good decisions, or empowering others to do so, is to start with a good process.
A big challenge for leaders, and all our teams, is making good decisions. Our time is short, with no time to guide each other, so we need a guide on how to make good decisions - so that we make them.
With the likes of the AusOpen and the Ashes there are well stated, clear, simple ‘plans on a page’ that allow us all to make strong, well informed, decisions.
Next week, we start with the why, the purpose of your event, and why it's important, but also how that’s just not enough - in that a purpose is great, but a shared purpose will be better.
If you need some help with that right now, please just let me know…
We walk through this Game Plan process in detail in my Sport Event Strategy workshops – you can find out more about them here.