My Leadership Team and spent a few days last week planning our year ahead. It was a pleasure to work with them all and we got a really clear handle on our priorities for the coming planning year.

We always start these sessions now with a really broad retrospective, as a leader our job is often to dream what could be, our focus is very much ‘out there’.  Yet I find if we do not take a little time to celebrate our past achievement we  can demotivate the team as we always seem unsatisfied.  Looking back and celebrating what we achieved places us in a constructive mindset for planning what id ‘to be’.

We had many things to be thankful for, it was a good year with some major projects completed and significant progress toward our Lean IT goals. Our “obeya” (Japanese for “big room” or “great room”) has taken much shape this year and allowed us to manage and deliver significant Lean progress (Stay tuned  I will post a whole page regarding our Obeya shortly.

As we reflected on David Marquets Greatness video I previously posted we resolved to look ahead and change the way we learn.  In the past only the leaders and I studied a common book in a ‘book club’ format and passed knowledge down to our teams.

Our next Lean experiment will be to divide all the IT team into learning groups and have all staff study a relevant book together. We plan to start with a very generic text “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Steven Covey and see what the impact looks like.

Our definition of success will be most staff engaged with this learning process and seeing some of the 7 habits evident in their behaviour at work.