Explore the 1E Collaborative Space on April 2

After a six-month pilot, the collaborative workspace in the Richmond Times-Dispatch building is about to go public. Join Times-Dispatch Publisher Tom Silvestri at an open house to see and discuss the new 1E space this Tuesday, April 2, from 5:00 to 6:30 p.m. at 300 East Franklin Street.

Called 1E, the 4,500 square-foot open space will have up to eight tenants working in dedicated office spaces and sharing common work areas. Tenants also have access to meeting space in the building, as well as off-street parking.

One of the drivers for the collaborative space is to create new opportunities for the team at the Times-Dispatch and its parent company, World Media Enterprises, to interface with local entrepreneurs. The real goal is to create a vibrant, energetic community of small business collaborators in the heart of downtown Richmond.

As the first tenant in 1E, Floricane has not only seen real benefit from the location and setting of the space, but has enjoyed being part of an emerging culture at a time of growth and change in Richmond and within the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

If you’ve got a small business, a yen for collaborating with others and a bit of zest, you might find the 1E space an ideal home. We hope to see you at the open house next week.

Tuesday, April 3

5- 6:30 p.m.

300 E. Franklin St

Richmond, Va. 23219

Can’t join us on April 3 or want more information about 1E? Contact Rick Thornton at 804.649.6441 or rthornton@timesdispatch.com.

Thanks, ChildFund International

Time flies when you’re running as hard as you possibly can just to keep up! Since October, I’ve been working with the team at ChildFund International – filling a gap left by the departure of their Director of Strategy.

I recently joked with members of the organization’s global leadership team that I didn’t quite understand how I ended up at the front of the room – for a very process-focused and deliberate organization to invite me to ride shotgun seemed dangerous!

But, shotgun I rode, and what a great ride. I wrap this engagement with ChildFund with a much deeper appreciation for the deep commitment it takes to align more than 1,000 employees (plus countless stakeholders, sponsors, donors and partners) around a vision to improve the lives of children in distress – and the health of their communities.

In the last few weeks of work – leading up to a weeklong strategic planning session with a global team – I finally realized what an exceptional group of people worked out of the relatively innocuous building near Gaskins Road and West Broad Street. From staff to directors to senior leaders, people leaned in to contribute to making the meeting a success (and to make my work easier, and more effective).

Two weeks before the global meeting, a vice president emailed to tell me she thought my agenda was a disaster. (My words, not hers.) Then she gave me an hour of time by phone, and countless email exchanges, and the support of several of her colleagues, to strengthen the agenda by leaps-and-bounds.

Four days before the meeting, a group of senior executives had an opportunity to blow the agenda to pieces (and send me screaming into the night). Instead, they listened as we walked through it, pushed back on a few key pieces, and offered up their trust in the process.

As always, what really made the experience were the people.

In addition to the committed staff who helped organize (and quietly compensate for my sometimes-patchwork approach to planning), the 34 global leadership participants were real rockstars.

Representatives from Brazil to Sierra Leone, from the Philippines to Ecuador, from Washington to Singapore, everyone showed up to work. Even when the wings of the planning plane felt like they might shake off, participants leaned into the work – and breathed a quiet sigh of relief when we wrapped the meeting up in one piece, and with good outcomes.

Take Them to the River

We played around with a river metaphor – with mixed results – during our week with the global leadership team from ChildFund.

During an exploration of their strategic plan, we had teams wrestle with the desired outcomes (the ocean) built within their plan – and to identify both the key strategies  that fed the outcomes (the river) and other organizational initiatives that supported the strategies (the tributaries).

During the debrief, one of the participants noted that 60% of the health of a river came from its tributaries. I didn’t Google check that particular fact, but it did get me thinking about the real importance of work that tends to happen around the edges in our organizations.

Another participant shared that he spent most of his time at work buried in the tributaries, and that this was one of the first times he’d had the time to clearly see the relationship between his day-to-day work and the organization’s strategic vision.

There are plenty of directions I could run with these observations, but one chord in particular is struck for me.

If a significant slice of our non-strategic work contributes to the health of our strategies, and the employees who do that work don’t see a clear linkage between their work and the strategic vision, why aren’t we having more strategic discussions with all of our employees?

Don’t leave your best assets floundering upstream. Take them to the river, and let them swim with you.

Congratulations, VCU Parkinson’s and Movement Disorders Center!

We recently completed an extensive strategic planning process for Virginia Commonwealth University’s Parkinson’s and Movement Disorders Center. As the Center moves out of “start-up mode” and VCU strategically reconsiders the role Centers play at the university, the new strategic plan is designed to quickly push the Parkinson’s Center to a new level of organization.

One key emphasis? On the Center as a gateway for individuals and families looking for education, support and clinical care – and committed to helping advance the important science and research that will one day crack the code on Parkinson’s and other related conditions.

Everyone’s in Transition

When I roll through the mental rolodex that is our client list, it strikes me that everyone is in transition.

One of our first strategic planning clients was the Valentine Richmond History Center, and one of the key things we did during that process was explore some big trends – economic, technological, demographic and social.

Our research was basic, but it was revealing. Nothing is static right now. Everything is in flux.

In the past six months, we’ve done work with newspapers, health care organizations, symphonies, global development organizations, libraries, architects and more.

Every single organization is trying to read the tea leaves to better understand the ways in which reinvention should be happening in their professional space. There are lots of ideas, and plenty of best practice approaches, but there are very few clear, concrete answers.

In some ways, that is utterly terrifying – because it challenges each of our clients to discover their own best answers to big, systemic changes. In other ways, it is marvelously liberating – because it allows each of our clients to discover their own best answers.

In the end, our best clients explore the big plays, and develop plans that carefully move them into an ambitious – and new – future.

Congratulations, National Alliance on Mental Illness Virginia!

Last weekend, the board of the National Alliance on Mental Illness Virginia approved a new strategic plan for the statewide awareness, education and advocacy organization. We spent some time with the board after they approved the plan talking about implementation, and will be doing some implementation work with the staff in April – just to get the wheels turning.

Building the Future with Architects

We started a strategic planning process this past weekend with the staff and board of The Virginia Society American Institute of Architects, and membersof the Virginia Center for Architecture. During our afternoon and morning together, we put the group through their visionary and aspirational paces before getting down to brass tacks – what does a strategic plan for VSAIA need to include?

Over the next three months, we’ll put that question to the board, the staff and to key stakeholders in more focused ways as we help the 99-year-old organization strengthen its alignment around its vision and mission – and the needs of the architecture industry, and the public.

Just Keep Going

On our second day with the global leadership team from ChildFund International, I watched as my facilitation design collapsed under its own weight.

This isn’t a new experience. Sarah and I often joke that we’re not doing our job if the agenda doesn’t get thrown in the trash by lunchtime.

For some reason, when the plan falls apart during an extended facilitation gigs – several days or more in a room with the same organization – it feels bigger.

I’ve found four important steps that help me bridge the chasm:

• Name it. Better yet, let the participants name it. “How’s that experience work for you?” is an easy question to ask a room. The answers are not always the ones I want to hear, but they’re important to ask. The ChildFund team was pretty clear last week. When I asked, they answered. “Meh,” the said.

• Share the ownership. We often tell clients that they own the room, and their own experience. It is in these broken moments that we all learn what exactly that means. I try to claim responsibility for the process and facilitation failures, but I also find value in asking the group how they might have engaged differently.

• Keep moving. It’s easy to hit the brakes when a wheel falls off. Bad idea. Stubbornly charging ahead without adapting is an equally bad idea, but at the end of the day there is limited time to move the client group – wasted time typically not only wastes time, but it loses points with the client.

• Be agile. The night the wheels came off, or started vibrating intensely, at ChildFund I was up past midnight redesigning the next day. The revised agenda looked dramatically different than the original agenda, and was built around the new needs of the group – which became more clear during a time of tension and frustration.

Believe me, I beat myself up all evening about the way the second day played out. It’s what I do. I felt anxious, frustrated and disappointed – primarily with myself. But I also know that I had a job to do for my client, and that I actually understood their needs fairly well – I just needed to let go of my own needs so the design could serve them well.