What does swimming have to do with strategy deployment?…. read on…..

I was speaking this morning with Pete, a friend of mine who does personal fitness training. He told me about a swimming training programme he runs for adults, that is proving very successful. His approach is to focus on one aspect of swimming technique at a time. He trains this in a 1:1 session, then leaves the person  to get confident with this technique (usually for about two weeks), before adding the next technique. This process repeats itself about 6 times until the individual has all aspects of their technique working well for them, usually a step change in their performance as a swimmer.

This conversation made me think about how we learn and how change occurs for people. One of my reflections was on the recent Newsletter we published, in which we shared a lot of new News about changes in Meeting Magic. It may have come across to the reader as if these changes occurred quickly. In reality, many of the seeds for these changes were sown months, even years ago. It has taken time for small, incremental changes to click into place, until we can look back and see a significant change.

I think this is a useful insight for those of us that work in the deployment of strategy. If we communicate too many different things that need to change, all in one go, then it is likely that recipients of the messages get overwhelmed and do nothing. By making small, clear changes, we can, step-by-step, make big transitions.