Читать книгу Navigate the Swirl - Richard S. Hawkes - Страница 15

The objective of this book is to plant seeds for a shared language, one that enables team members to work together in a deeply human way to evolve and grow companies. For these seeds to take root requires working through the three parts in this book in sequence. If your objective is to apply the Seven Crucial Conversations to plan a major transformational initiative, such as a breakthrough strategy, cultural transformation, or organizational redesign, use this book to create a context for key stakeholders to understand your plan.

This book has been many years in the making, and I'm delighted that it is finally in the hands of readers like you. It has been designed to share what I call the Growth River Operating System—a tightly integrated set of concepts, frameworks, and processes to guide teams and organizations on a transformational journey of growth. I use the term operating system because it is the best term that I've encountered to describe the systemic nature of this methodology—the way it provides a platform for ongoing growth and transformation in multiple dimensions of the organization. However, unlike a new OS on your computer, it's not just a package you can install with a click and a reboot. It is much more dynamic and requires ongoing engagement and participation. What I hope to provide you with in the pages that follow is a framework to understand the journey, and a shared language to describe the work you do, the potentials you see, and the challenges you face. I will highlight the key milestones on the journey to higher performance and offer processes for getting teams and businesses aligned. At the heart of this approach are the Seven Crucial Conversations referenced in the book's subtitle.

That being said, you might expect to turn the page and start with conversation 1. But that's not how this book is structured. Indeed, you might be surprised to find that the Seven Crucial Conversations don't appear until Part III. This is because those conversations are designed to take place within a particular framework. Parts I and II provide critical context for the conversations, inviting everyone—whether you are an enterprise leader, or a team member at any level of the organization—to take in the big picture, to step back and understand the broader journey of enterprise evolution.

I'll start with some fundamental questions that anyone serious about organizational change must grapple with. Part I: Framing the Conversation, asks: What is an organization? What is a business? And what does it mean for organizations and businesses to grow and transform? Considering these questions will provide critical shared language, models, and frameworks for the journey ahead.

Part II: The Evolution of an Enterprise, takes readers inside that journey from the perspective of the organization as a whole—starting with the formation of a business and moving through the four stages of enterprise evolution by which it can grow and transform into a large, complex, agile enterprise. In this journey, we zero in on the particular stage where many of today's companies get stuck, and analyze the confluence of factors that come together to create a transformational tipping point that I suspect will be familiar to many readers. I'll introduce new ways of thinking about roles, capabilities, business models, strategies, and teams that can help to anchor you in a higher stage of organizational evolution.

In Part III: The Seven Crucial Conversations, we will turn our attention to the building blocks of the organization—teams. The Seven Crucial Conversations are a transformational template for creating and sustaining a high-performing team—covering leadership, culture, roles, strategies, implementation, and more.

You may be tempted to jump right to Part III, but I'd encourage you to work through the book in sequence. No matter where you sit in your organization's system of roles, you'll benefit from taking in the big picture and considering the journey as a whole as well as engaging more deeply in your particular team and accelerating its journey to high performance. So let's begin! First, I'll invite you to consider an experience that may be all too familiar. I call it the Swirl …