2nd Anniversary Superlatives: Building A Shared Vision

We had a team meeting last month at Floricane World Headquarters – it involved Post-It® Notes. Of course.

I’ve had lots of questions since Floricane began its shift from an individual consultancy to a small consulting firm. One of the bigger ones has been centered around the creation of a plural voice – as in, a Floricane voice that is bigger than my own individual voice.

Well, 36 Post-It Notes later and the writing is on the wall. Literally.

When the six of us sat down in October, I asked everyone to grab a blank sheet of paper and put six Post-Its on it. On the first Post-It, each of us wrote down one word or phrase that captured our best sense of a Floricane we wanted to create. Then we passed the sheet to our left, and wrote down a second word or phrase on the sheet that was handed to us. And a third, and so on.

When all six Post-Its on all six pages we completed, each of us had a sheet of paper with six words or phrases – only one of which was our own idea. We prioritized them, and 12 words emerged as a foundation for the team’s first stab at creating a shared sense of the Floricane culture and voice.

I think they clearly identify the sort of company I want to co-create – and I’m excited to be part of a team that would land such strong concepts.

Here they are. Let us know how we’re doing.

• Purposeful
• Creative with a purpose
• A place where we make each other better
• Space for radical changes/moments
• Valued as individuals
• Open communication
• Intriguing energy
• Edgy
• Cutting edge
• Authentic
• Straight talk
• Hard-working and light-hearted

Greater Fulton: Letting The Children Speak

What’s the best part of bringing residents of a community together to talk about the future?

They get right to the point. They’re plain-spoken and blunt. They care – deeply.

As part of our three-month, community visioning effort in the Greater Fulton area of Richmond’s East End, we’ve spent hours brainstorming, asking questions and listening deeply to residents – well over 100 at two community sessions in October, plu s dozens of on-the-street interviews and sessions with teenagers and young children.

Sidewalks. Playgrounds. Better bus service. A place to buy fresh vegetables. An elementary school – heck, any neighborhood school.

These are just some of the things residents say they’d like to have in their neighborhood. Nothing fancy – just the sorts of things many of us take for granted in our own communities.

Okay, some things fancy. For starts, Caliyah wants “a mansion and a million dollars.” She also wants places to play with her best friend.

The work of community visioning is as frustrating as it is affirming. It helps when we have the opportunity to sit on the floor with young people and soak up their perspective on what makes a neighborhood. Almost every single time, it's as simple as feeling safe, and having something fun to do.

As Peter Fraser and I have immersed ourselves in the world of Fulton’s 5,000 residents, we’ve been amazed at the ways in which accidents of design and, worse, decades of neglect, have conspired to leave this slice of Richmond to fend for itself.

Fulton has no library or school or police station or medical facility or grocery store within walking distance. (Well, there’s a Food Lion a few miles down Williamsburg Road across the county line in Henrico – residents walk there frequently because it’s the only place they can buy groceries.)

As we work with residents to complete a community vision for Greater Fulton – and to help design a year-long strategy to make the vision a reality – we’re more excited by the small opportunities than we are by the grand ideas.

With one month left before we pass the plan off to the capable folks at Fulton’s Neighborhood Resource Center and Virginia LISC, we’re genuinely stoked by the emerging vision and possibilities for Greater Fulton.

We wouldn’t be this close to the finish without the residents.

Lights! Action! Leadership!

We’ve got exciting things planned for our clients, partners and friends throughout Central Virginia as we move toward 2011.

Want an example? Look no further than The Music Paradigm, an amazing presentation of The Richmond Symphony that Floricane is sponsoring. On March 22, several hundred musicians, businesspeople and community leaders will gather at CenterStage to learn lessons in organizational culture and leadership from conductor Roger Nierenberg.

What makes The Music Paradigm special is that participants are seated within the orchestra for the entire experience – as Nierenberg conducts, he periodically pauses for an in-the-moment, experiential teaching lesson.

The symphony’s assistant director for business development, Kathryn Pullam, and I both experienced The Music Paradigm this summer. Kathryn traveled to Capital One’s Falls Church office, while I lived the experience with the incoming executive class at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. We both left amazed.

Kathryn and I talk about our experiences, and The Music Paradigm, in this video produced by the talented Jerry Williams.

A Global Future for One of Richmond’s Best Homegrown Treasures

Children, Incorporated was one of our first, big clients coming into 2010. We just put the final touches on their long-term strategic plan.

Our work with Children, Incorporated held important lessons. The importance of the journey, for starters – and of dreaming big.

Our journey was almost 10 months, and the organization experienced tremendous change while we explored new ways for Children, Incorporated to manage its programs, serve 14,000 children around the globe and maintain an emphasis on sponsorship.

As always, success lies in the hands of the employees and board members who felt the most invested in the process. A handful of key contributors helped to craft, reshape and influence the final planning document – pushing the 47-year-old nonprofit to create an ambitious, aspirational strategy.

But we couldn’t have gotten to that point without the engagement of every employee in the organization – even those who were skeptical of the process (or of me, the consultant). Multiple times during the process, the entire staff (and sometimes the board) came together to wrestle with big questions about the organization’s future direction, and how to strengthen their internal operations.

The ideas and insights – and even the skepticism and pragmatic push-back – that emerged in these sessions helped put shape to an ambitious, new vision statement: Children, Incorporated envisions a world where every child has the resources and opportunity to build a better life.

Building better lives for children. For every child. It doesn’t get much bigger than that.

Thanks to Marian, Kelsi, Ryan, Liz, Whitney, Luis, Renee, Dick, Dana, Elethia and others, Children, Incorporated is ready to turn ambition into action. The new strategic plan maps out fundamental steps toward an exciting, global future for one of Richmond’s best homegrown treasures.

An Excellent Book of Business

It’s beginning to seem like every new client is a hidden gem. And while the Library of Virginia is extremely visible – on many levels – I’m already discovering that there is plenty to learn about one of Virginia’s oldest government agencies.

One of the most important things we’ll be learning – or co-discovering with the staff and board of the Library – is where it wants to go in the 21st Century. While the Code of Virginia provides clear detail on what the responsibilities and mandates of the Library include, how the Library moves into the future is very much dependent on its talented, experienced staff.

Over the next several months, the Floricane team will be facilitating a series of staff-focused visioning sessions. We’ll explore the changing environment libraries everywhere are experiencing, and help the staff map out an innovative, customer-facing vision to lead the Library of Virginia toward its 200th birthday in 2023.

Learn more about the Library at its website (or drop by its awesome building in downtown Richmond, and grab lunch at Positive Vibe Cafe Express).

(image: virginia.org)

Delivering New Insights for Individuals and Team

How do you help people really hone their personal and professional strengths and understand their opportunities for growth?

Gather a disparate group of professionals – from the Virginia Credit Union, the Library of Virginia, Children, Incorporated, and the Greater Richmond Chamber, among others - to exercise self-awareness, personal development and relationship building. Mix well.

Career coach Debra Saneda and I were excited to see 32 participants gain a better understanding of their personality style and the role it plays in their relationships at our one-day workshop, Insights for Personal and Workplace Effectiveness.

Debra and I walked the group through discussions on perceptions, personality, team effectiveness – and how increasing our awareness can help us be more effective and engaged in our work.

Everyone was engaged, curious and eager to understand their individual Insights profiles. We asked tough questions of each other. We had a good time. We forged new relationships. We invigorated and exhausted each other the way a good workout might.

One measure of the workshop’s success is that we’re already making plans for three additional offerings in 2011, and have been invited to conduct similar sessions for several of the organizations who attended.

If your organization is looking for a unique, powerful way to engage individuals and strengthen teams, let us know. Debra and I will be happy to introduce the Insights Discovery model to you.

Building a Portfolio We Are Proud Of

Our whole team is very excited about our current portfolio of business, which covers three big areas – strategy, engagement and community visioning. Helping amazing organizations and groups think differently about their future, their culture and their work is energizing stuff.

On the strategic planning front, we’re continuing our work with The James House, Historic Richmond Foundation and U-TURN Sports Performance Academy.

On the organizational engagement side of the house, we’re getting started on new projects with The Library of Virginia and One South Realty Group.

Our community visioning work – in partnership with Peter Fraser – is currently concentrated around supporting the neighborhoods of Greater Fulton as they develop their long-term community vision.

We’ve recently completed projects with Children, Incorporated, the Virginia Poverty Law Center and Virginia Commonwealth University. We have more clients in the pipeline, and are always available to discuss ways in which we can help your organization strengthen and grow.

Mapping My Day

During the second Creativity at Work session, I didn't have a second epiphany. Really, it's probably a lot to ask for every time the three-month program brings people together for a day of creative thinking, hands-on art experiences and relationship building.

I did, however, rediscover a few things about myself, and about the creative process.

For starters, I have high expectations – I was in the room looking for the damned epiphany, right from the get-go. My suspicion is that all of my searching and anticipation makes it more difficult for that big, bright moment of discovery to actually make an appearance – or maybe it just clouds my ability to see the small lessons.

A small lesson like standing paralyzed with nine other people around a table of junk – twists of copper sheeting, broken plastic toys, string. To clarify, I was paralyzed. Everyone else was happily constructing a "writing tool" from the items at hand, as I stood idly by remembering how challenging I've always found it to create something out of nothing. Or out of what's at hand. McGyver, I'm not.

(Except in the kitchen. I manage quite well in that space. And words. Epiphany: I'm not a particularly tactile creative.)

Once our writing tools were done – yes, I managed to cobble something together in the end – we spent some time with artist Amie Oliver drawing lines and maps.

Another lesson emerged when Amie asked us to use our writing tools to replicate our journey that morning to the Visual Arts Center. Why was I the only one who – from the get-go – thought she was asking us to map our metaphorical journey? While everyone else busied themselves with streets and bridges, I went to town with a meandering line that faded in and out over the span of several hours as I wore myself out chasing Thea, hungered for my coffee, dodged raindrops in parking lots and wrestled with complex issues of identity in a technology laden universe.

Oh, you wanted an actual map from my house to the Visual Arts Center? Oops.

In the end, the day was much more interactive and relationship centered than the first session, and I was probably more pleased by that than anything. Gaining a better understanding of the dozen people participating in the Visual Art Center's pilot program, and dabbling in a little self-exploration of my own, is well worth the investment.

I've also got an intriguing little map.