Surprise, Surprise! The keys to resilience in your strategic initiatives
The only sure thing in any strategy initiative, or any other project, is, that – sooner or later – you will end up surprised.
Yet, not all surprises have to lead into veritable crises.
How people in your organization manage your surprises makes all the difference: whether you strategy work and your projects become resilient – or brittle.
After several years of research on the subject, we decided to condense our key learnings into a little Workbook.
This workbook helps you to explore why your organization is surprised in the first place, and how you can handle your surprises more effectively. By providing you with a framework for discussion, you can identify the barriers and enablers in your organization when it comes to noticing your surprise, drawing meaningful conclusions, responding appropriately, and finally learning a thing or two.
Surprises come in different shapes and sizes. Being able to not just deal with them, but leverage them, is a critical competitive advantage.
In the Workbook, we cover:
The Foundations: What are suprises? How can we characterize them? What is the lifecycle of a surprise? And: Barriers and enablers of managing surprises constructively
Workshop preparations: Design principles for workshops helping your team leverage surprises. Tips for facilitators (most likely: you)
Surprise-to-competitive advantage workshops: The 4-step journey through the workshop. Exercise 1: Why are we surprised? Exercise 2: Understanding surprises. Exercise 3: Identifying our barriers & enablers to dealing with surprises. Exercise 4: Taking action and moving forward
Workshop material and templates to print out as large as you can!
Do not let a good surprise go to waste!
Working with your team on surprises and becoming more resilient is fun. Download the workbook now and get started!
Reference:
Stingl, V., Oehmen, J., & Wied, M. (2019). Surprise, Surprise! A workbook for finding the keys to resilience in your strategic initiatives. Technical University of Denmark. https://doi.org/10.11581/dtu:00000067