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Make failure a quick stop toward success.
Initiatives are how you reach your goals and vision. They always demand more change than anticipated — to your company, your people, and yourself. Failure isn’t avoidable; it’s a stop on your journey to success. Not making failure your destination takes more than having the right people, tools, and frameworks. You need the right mindset. Failure, not success, is the natural state for your strategies, programs, and projects. |
copying initiatives
Most initiatives are inherited — from prior efforts, from consultants, from industry peers, from seminars. These inherited designs don’t reflect the nuances of your company or how your people work. Failure occurs because making them work demands impossible compromises, like:
- Pushing a boulder up a hill
- Stealing from Peter to feed Paul
Don’t inherit failure. Design initiatives that reflect your reality. Fight for them. Will them to succeed.
crafting initiatives
Designed initiatives reflect the priorities, work styles, and behaviors of their designers — not those expected to execute them. People fail at what they don’t believe in. People fail at what they don’t practice. This mismatch can drive excessive burn and burnout — of both budgets and people.
Remember: 80% of the budget often delivers only 20% of the results.
Don’t design misalignment to steal momentum and morale. Re-engineer initiatives to match what your people excel at, what they genuinely believe in, and how they truly work.
controlling initiatives
Initiatives need people and funding to run. Both must change to maintain momentum. Too little or too much leads to failure. Get it just right. Find the Goldilocks:
- Too little / too much FUNDING
- Too little / too much PEOPLE
- Too little / too much CHANGE
- Too little / too much IMPACT
There’s no single right answer — only the right answer for right now.
