Looking Ahead - How To Start With The End In Your Mind
Different views connected through one phrase: "Start with the end in your mind"
I found this idea of starting with the end in your mind in many books, podcasts, trainings, and so on.
And you can take it as it applies to you.
How former nuclear submarine commander L. David Marquet suggests looking ahead
With your leadership team, develop longer-term organizational goals for three to five years out
Go through the evaluations and look for statements that express achievement. In every case, ask “How would we know?” and ensure that you have measuring systems in place.
Then have employees write their own evaluations one year, two years, or three years hence.
Have conversations with employees to make their desired achievements indisputable and measurable.
How Franklin Covey, author of the book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” writes about starting with the end in your mind
Define clear measures of success and a plan to achieve them.
Begin With the End in Mind is based on imagination—the ability to envision in your mind what you cannot at present see with your eyes. It is based on the principle that all things are created twice. There is a mental (first) creation and a physical (second) creation. The physical creation follows the mental, just as a building follows a blueprint.
One of the best ways to incorporate this habit into your life is to develop a Personal Mission Statement. It focuses on what you want to be and do. It is your plan for success. It reaffirms who you are, puts your goals in focus, and moves your ideas into the real world. Your mission statement makes you the leader of your own life. You create your destiny and secure the future you envision.
Strategyzer - begin with the end in your mind in order to prioritize your teamwork
How can you prioritize your own work or teamwork in a simple and fast way and at the same time achieve the target you have?
Here is a simple way to do this, inspired by the Strategyzer exercise “customer gains”:
🎲 Draw an arrow or a line and make a plus sign up and a minus sign down.
🎲 Let’s suppose you want to support your team to prioritize several weekly tasks very fast. You can put “essential” and “nice to have” up and down the arrow in this case. Depending on your case, you can of course change the words to fit your needs.
🎲 Write all team tasks on sticky notes or any paper you have. Ask your team to think about the end goal (i.e. can be a sprint goal) and prioritize them silently with your team members from up to down.
🎲 Take a few minutes to shortly discuss if there are clarifications to do for some of them.
Sharon Bowman - author of “Training from the Back of the Room” - writes as well about starting with the end in your mind
She gives the trainers the suggestion when designing a training to start with the end in their mind and only after answering these 3 questions to go forward and create the content:
What do learners need to know?
How will they know they have learned it?
What will they be able to do with it?
Bottom line
It is up to YOU what you take away from these points which have in common the main idea to start with the end in your mind and how you will apply this.
Will you write in the comments your thoughts about what you can apply, please?
I am inviting you to register your spot in the new on-demand training and experience a training designed with the end in my mind:
Facilitation - neuroscience behind - a 3h online session where I would explain some neuroscience principles I use in most of my workshops in order to create brain-based workshops that are universally applied independent of culture, industry, etc.
Resources:
L. David Marquet: “Turn the Ship Around!”
Strategyzer : “Value proposition Design”
Sharon Bowman: “Training from the back of the room”
Franklin Covey: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”