TO MOVE FROM CONTINUATION TO COMPLETION:

1. Chunk work for frequent completes early, few completes late.


2. Celebrate with, not for.


3. Focus on behavior, not characteristics.


4. Focus on journey, not destination.

This common mistake in organizations comes from treating all communications, orders, and information in the same way. Ideally, orders should follow the chain of command, but information should be able to flow freely throughout the organization.

The differences between redwork and bluework can be summarized in the table below.

REDWORK BLUEWORK

Avoid variability Embrace variability

Prove Improve

Do Decide

Repetitious Dissimilar

Blue collar White collar

Physical Cognitive

Individual Team

Homogeneity Heterogeneity

Production Reflection

Performance Planning

Process Prediction

Compliant Creative

Conformity

Encouraging people to speak up, or even "empowering" them with statements like "don't hesitate to change course" in an environment of top-down decision-making, simply does not work.

Leaders say these things to assuage their conscience. When things go wrong, they can blame others for not speaking up despite the leader's encouragement to do so. But

This is a problem because people are typically attached to their previous work and now we need them to admit it could be done better. We need to help them shift out of their prove mindsets to an improve mindset. We need to leave the prove mindset behind and almost think of ourselves as detached observers of what we have previously done. We call

CONNECT

Connect is the enabling play that makes all the other plays work better. The Industrial Age play is conform. Connect is about caring: caring what people think; caring how people feel; caring about their personal goals.

Connect is not a superficial "friendship" but caring for someone else and wanting the best for them. Connect is love.

The key

Many of the strategies that thawed Frozen are components of the IMPROVE play. Improvement-which comes from egoless scrutiny of past actions, and deep reflective thinking about what could be betteris the core purpose of bluework, which is meant to improve redwork. Bluework in isolation is useless. It's relevant only to the extent that it makes

For leaders, managing the frequency of the completion play by controlling the length of redwork periods and frequency of the bluework periods allows us to take a proactive approach to controlling the clock. If we have made a thin slice for a commitment and planned the completion of redwork, we have protected ourselves to a large degree against the

This may seem tremendously obvious, but the more you talk, the less you are listening. If you want to hear more from your team, you need to talk less. The sequence is you talk less first, then they talk more-not, "When they talk more, I will talk less." It's as simple as that. The TLC is the hard data behind so-called soft skills.