Leverage Simon Sinek's Golden Circle for Your Change Practice
— Transforming Organizations, Revitalizing Communities and Developing Human Potential
Starting with WHY - Leveraging Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle for your Change Practice
… Have you ever - been overwhelmed by your change efforts getting lost in the HOW and WHAT of agenda design, facilitated activities, technological hurdles, and logistics challenges? Have you ever gotten lost in the details of HOW you might tackle WHATever challenge you were working on - that you forgot WHY your team was looking at this issue to begin with?
Leverage the grounding of Simon Sinek's 'Golden Circle' and the ‘WHY’ to align and focus your change engagements. The following is from a 30 min. TOOLS4change webinar - our weekly webinar series of high-impact change tools:
In his TEDTalk “How great leaders inspire action” (which was the most-viewed TEDTalks for some time) and in his book “Start with WHY,” Simon Sinek’s suggests that our focus on the HOW and WHAT is problematic.
We tend to start with WHAT. That’s WHAT people ask when they are making small talk, isn’t it? “So … - WHAT do you do?” And a lot of times we give people our title or position in response. If someone challenged you to respond to: “WHAT do you do?” - without sharing your title or position - WHAT might your answer be? When we asked this question in a webinar, some of the answers included:
I help organizations and individuals make the right connections to create harmony and success in a dynamic environment.
Intentional development of community. And,
I help leadership teams leverage their wisdom and experience.
I create shared environments for synergy. That’s my WHAT. But that wasn’t the first thing that came to mind. Too often my response to “WHAT do you do?,” begins with “I am a” and ends with my job title. So it turns out, we may not always know what we do 100% of the time, as Sinek suggests.
The HOW can be a bit more challenging still: HOW do you do WHAT you do? WHAT is a tool or practice that you use? Some of our webinar attendee’s answers were:
I do this through facilitation, training, and consulting that is tailored specifically to the needs of my clients.
I hold a space utilizing tools to collaborate, discover, and BE the difference.
I do this through a win-win negotiation framework and seeking to understand their systems and viability for training needs.
One answers to my HOW is: By leveraging and creating virtual tools to connect people.
There seem to generally be two ‘HOW’- challenges: Specialization and Tradition.
SPECIALIZATION might include some proprietary process or specialist knowledge and so we might have a harder time to explain HOW we do something. In some cases I have become cocky about my HOW, suggesting that my HOW was so unique that others just “wouldn’t get it” if I tried to explain HOW I do things.
On the flipside, the HOW can also be the result of TRADITION or the old “Well, we’ve always done it that way”- which often means that ¾ of the organization may know HOW to do it - but have No Idea WHY they do it that way!
Sinek suggest that what sets successful leaders and successful organizations apart from the rest - is their clarity of WHY they do something. And that they start there.
So WHAT’s your WHY?
At NEXUS4change, we believe that when people have the tools to collaborate and connect - we are better together! Everything we do relates to that belief.
As a minister’s kid in East Germany, I could not afford to ask WHY. In school, I was supposed to listen to WHAT and follow instructions on HOW - WHY was none of my concern - or so I was told. I hated it with a passion. So WHY do we seem to lose the curiosity and focus on WHY that seems so much at the core of our experience of learning as children?
It appears that at least part of it - is our adult focus on the WHAT - which happens to corresponds with the neocortical activity in our brain. As Sinek points out, our neocortex is responsible for rational and analytical thought and language. It allows us to dig through facts and figures and drives WHAT is supposed to be rational decision making or WHAT we often think of as weighing the pros and cons of something.
But decision making doesn’t actually happen in the neocortex. It’s our limbic brain, responsible for feelings, trust, and loyalty - that actually has the last word in decision making - based on the things we believe. It connects to WHY. Simon Sinek quotes Henry Ford, in saying that “If I had asked people WHAT they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” So you have to start with Purpose!
Purpose connects us.
What happens if you have a group of stakeholders that actually agree on their WHY? What if those responsible, those accountable, consulted with, informed about and those facilitating [RACI+F] your effort all agree on
“This is what we believe [in]: __________ .”
“This is what we believe to be true: _________.”
So the leading questions that lead to WHY for your change become:
1. WHAT are the shared desired outcomes, benefits and results? 2. If all of your shared intended outcomes are realized - What’s different, What changes, What shifts?
That is the purpose, the WHY. Note that we often describe our WHY with a lot of Whats.
So what is a concrete way to leverage and apply Sinek’s Golden Circle?
When you are planning a collaborative meeting, you can use the golden circle to get organized: A Collaborative Meeting Structure built on the Golden Circle would start a meeting with
WHY? - “What is the purpose of our meeting?” Make this explicit at the very beginning of the session.
WHAT? - represents the agenda items to be covered in the meeting, and
HOW? - details the Time, Talent, Treasure, Ties [4 Ts] needed for the meeting - from logistics to video conferencing tools to the budget, etc.
We sometimes confuse activities for purpose.
An easy way to check this is to ask: “In order to WHAT?”
”We are doing [this] - in order to WHAT?” For more on getting to purpose check out our webinar on Ron Lippitt’s 3 Questions for Collaborative Design. Speaking of Lippitt’s 3 Questions. They are:
WHAT is the purpose?
Who needs to be involved?
WHAT conversations need to be had? -
In thinking about Lippitt’s and Sinek’s frameworks - there seem to be clear parallels in the focus of several key frameworks you may leverage in your change engagements. They are described in the table. So, whether you call it purpose, Why, or the Vision of your organization - START HERE!
Check out NEXUS4change’s webinar series of 30-min. high-impact change tool talks. Check our events page [www.NEXUS4change.com/events] for more on the power of Design Teams, the Change Formula, Collaborative Roadmaps, Appreciative Benchmarking and more.