Introduction and Preparation
Practical Implementation/Introduction and Preparation
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INTRODUCTION
Before you start with the practical implementation of Enterneering® you should be attuned and prepared for it. Don't panic, this does not mean a full-scale preparation. Since you will be spending valuable time, resources, and energy on effective Enterneering®, we strongly recommend the following steps in advance so that you can achieve the highest possible level of effectiveness and optimal success.
1. WHY: Awareness, Need, Necessity
In the case of a business sparring mandate, our initial step involves requesting the client to provide a concise description of both their business’s current situation and their personal situation. We emphasise that this marks the crucial starting point where honesty and openness are essential for the subsequent progression and ultimate success.
Therefore, before delving into the practical implementation, please record your honest answers to the above question and proceed as follows.
Briefly state the main goals and challenges your organisation needs to overcome within the next 5 years. Then address the condition and capabilities of your organisation as a functioning system. Refer to the work of the people and talents working in it. Identify the 5 most important deficits or needs that seem particularly relevant to you. Make sure that you relate this description to the business organisation and the workforce and avoid excessive detail.
Finally, round off this step with an honest self-reflection. Record the biggest personal challenges and hurdles you face in relation to the points described above. In other words, this involves reflecting on the challenges of the company in the context of your role and managerial responsibilities.
The aim of the above activities is not to arrive at a comprehensive situation analysis, as this will be part of the implementation later. At this point, the objective is to raise your personal awareness regarding the need and necessity for implementation. In other words, they should work out an inner conviction. This can also end with the result that there is no relevant need for action.
2 WHAT: Basic understanding, elementary knowledge, overview
The first step was to ask WHY you or your company are specifically engaged in Enterneering®. The second step is to determine WHAT IT IS ultimately ABOUT. It’s possible that other focal points besides those emphasised in Enterneering® may be necessary in order to address your concrete challenges. It is advisable to ascertain this beforehand rather than during the practical implementation of Enterneering®.
During sparring, the next step is to inquire whether clients have already explored the basics of Enterneering® and their familiarity with the 22 elements. This point can hardly be avoided if one wants to achieve an effective implementation. Practical experience has shown that entrepreneurs and executives with a solid, ready-to-use knowledge, and a basic understanding are often already on their way to individual implementation.
Get the overview you need by reading and/or listening through the introduction and content related to the 22 elements in Enterneering® within our app. Other alternative sources for this are the versions 'Enterneering® - Resilience through Empowerment' published as paperback or e-book.
3 WITH WHAT: Conscious decision, intangible investment
After steps one and two have been completed, the foundation for a decision for or against a dedicated implementation has been laid. The next step involves understanding the implications of the decision. We emphasise to our partners repeatedly that successful Enterneering® is not about correctness in the application of individual approaches, methods, or concepts. It is not so important whether one uses top modern digital tools or falls back on traditional methods and tools. Much more important are the following four pillars on which your implementation should always be built and which we consider intangible investments.
- Perseverance: The implementation of Enterneering® always follows a strategic orientation with a correspondingly longer time horizon. Be prepared that apart from some low-hanging fruit, most of the journey lies in the months (and sometimes years) ahead. Accept this fact and embrace it as this will enable you to adequately consider necessary predecessor-successor relationships and adequately consider the human factor in all activities.
- Resilience: Be prepared that the path to the destination will be volatile and there is rarely only one route to get there. Similar to navigating on the high seas, expect different weather conditions and fluctuating obstacles. As an entrepreneur or leader, you know this well and are probably skilled at navigation.
- Authenticity: If you have recognised and internalised the value and necessity of the measures you are aiming for, it should not be particularly difficult for you to represent this attitude actively and visibly to the external world. Great art lies not only in showcasing this attitude at the beginning of the activities but in adopting it continuously and for an unlimited period of time. As the ultimate leader, your attitude and role modeling are of paramount importance!
- Capacity: As with any complex project of high strategic importance, resources and expenditure are necessary and sufficient to implement Enterneering®. This is not about substantial financial amounts; it is first and foremost about time. This is precisely where the greatest challenge lies in many practical cases. Ensure that your capacity and that of your colleagues is consistently dedicated to this endeavour. Attempting to undertake Enterneering® after work, on weekends, or in between will most likely not lead to success. The issues are too complex and the impact relationships within your organisation are too demanding for such an approach.
4 HOW: Organic or inorganic implementation
After sufficient clarity has been established regarding why, what, and with what, the final question is HOW. How should the implementation take place, organically or inorganically? By this, we mean the question of whether you want to carry out the implementation under your own steam and with your own resources or with the help of external resources. This consideration must be made individually by the individuals responsible. In each company, the current situation, structure, relevant circumstances, and challenges are unique and cannot be assessed in a generalised way.
What speaks for an organic implementation is the fact that the tasks and measures in Enterneering® align with the typical roles and responsibilities of entrepreneurs and executives. It therefore makes a lot of sense to deal with them directly and through one's own efforts, actively striving to enable oneself adequately for these activities. A risk that should not be underestimated results from the so-called blind spot, which varies from person to person and organisation to organisation to different degrees and has been explored in our app dedicatedly in a separate Field Trip article.
The arguments for inorganic implementation increase in intensity as the various goals and needs for action become more concrete. In other words, the content of the assignment of consultants should be clearly articulated and linked to clear expectations. The risk of external consulting projects for implementation becoming independent increases with the degree of imprecision and uncertainty within the management. Those who commission their consultants mainly with problem descriptions and rough sketches of their challenges should be aware of the potential momentum and external influence of such projects.
Those who decide to go the organic route but need or want to involve external support can resort to traditional management consulting, accompanying coaching, or individual sparring. This can preserve the advantages of organic implementation while mitigating the risk of blind spots. For this, one should understand the differences between consulting, coaching, and sparring. Not every discipline is equally well suited to address specific issues. Especially in organic implementation, the advantages of coaching, or even better, sparring, are obvious. This is because the essence of effective coaching or sparring is to support clients in their self-reflection and empowerment, whereas coaching is more of a passive form of guidance and sparring has the character of hands-on training. We call the individuals who fulfil the requirements for professional sparring partners in Enterneering® the Enterneers®. You can find out more about sparring in our workspace of the same name in the sub menu in the header of our app.
PRACTICAL IMPLEMENTATION
Take a moment to review your progress: Have you written down your answers and deductions to the 4 questions why, what, with what, and how? Are your formulations comprehensible and understandable for third parties? If you cannot answer this - test it with individuals, you trust. If you have dealt honestly and intensively enough with our topic up to this point, you should know what Enterneering® is about, what the 22 elements are, what their significance is, and you should be clear about your own role in effective implementation and what responsibility lies solely with you. Please do not underestimate the work you have invested up to this point! For everything that follows and for your future successes and progress, the time spent up to this point in discussion, reflection, and self-study is essential and very valuable.
Now it is up to you alone or together with your colleagues to decide on the way of implementation. Individuals and organisations that have their own and sufficiently practised application practice for initiating change or development of cultural or structural focal points can, in principle, also implement and operate Enterneering® using their existing or customary methods and practices. They can also buy an external service for this purpose, which is ideally used in a targeted and controlled way. For all those who want to empower and develop themselves at this point, our guide can be consulted. It is important at this point to emphasise that you must always take care of a careful and considered adaptation or adjustment to your specific circumstances yourself. We do not rigidly endorse any specific methodology. We appreciate the diversity of options and, through our decades of experience, have come to know many different methods, tools, approaches, and ways in a wide variety of development projects. Some are similar, some are very individual, and some repeatedly focus on the same basic principle. The important thing is to find something that suits you, your company, and the current situation.
Implementation from a process perspective
Enterneering® does not describe a one-off process, but rather the continuous work of company management on the further development and transformation of the company in its core areas of culture, people, and organisation. Nevertheless, four development phases can be methodically derived:
- Aligning awareness: When a company or its management consciously engages with the term Enterneering® and its targeted application for the first time.
- Initial application: Following the first step, when a dedicated practical implementation takes place for the first time.
- Initial expansion: When the topics prioritised in the initial application are supplemented by further topics or other topics in Enterneering®.
- Continuous improvement: When a transition to continuous application, improvement, and further development occur.
In these four phases, varying conditions prevail to some extent and different topics take centre stage. In addition, a specific form of empowerment of personnel and the organisation unfolds during these different phases, which impacts the subsequent periods. Effective Enterneering® should therefore never be seen as a self-contained or time-limited project, but as a process that is firmly anchored in the entire life cycle of an organisation.
More about the Enterneering® process. ➽
Implementation using the Enterneering® APP
We divide the implementation into three areas or sections:
- Analysis and assessment
- Personal implementation
- Organisational implementation
While working through these three sections, we refer to some concrete tools. These are elaborated further in our app’s sub-menu 'Implementation & Training' under the two sections RADAR and WORKOUT. The point of these tools is not to adopt them 1:1 directly for your operational work, but to illustrate, stimulate, and show modes of action. We cannot emphasize often enough that the most important strategic elements of a company should be contained within a central planning, calculation, roadmap, or budgeting. If you allow parallel worlds or shadow elements at this point, you directly risk losses in impact and an increase in irrelevance as well as inconsistency in execution. The same applies to your time management or that of your management team. All your personally significant actions should be mapped in a personal time and task management system. Likewise, the most important issues of the management team or the company should be recorded and managed in a system. This point is so important because the scarcity of resources, competition for attention, and constant time pressure usually lead to the cannibalisation of important issues among each other. The question of prioritisation becomes a constant companion for dynamic management in the VUCA world.
Start here directly with the first section Analysis and Evaluation and navigate directly to the second section upon the end of the first one. ➽