Can’t Make Babies

I was working with a team this week that has a large portfolio of programming. We started with a series of mapping activities to get them to look at their portfolio from different angles.

Let me assure you: this team is not unusual. Individually, everyone loves the programming they do. Collectively, it is A LOT – maybe too much – for a team of their size. During our first pass, we used the Ecocycle Planning tool from Liberating Structures (described earlier this week).

For this exercise, we looked at the programs and plotted them along the “lifecycle” path (gestation, birth, maturity, and creative destruction). When you are deliberate about mapping each program, it doesn’t take long for a pattern to emerge.

Here’s what we saw: 1) a glut of programs crowded together in the maturity stage, 2) a small handful of promising programs riding the growth curve (heading straight for maturity).

Here’s what we did NOT see: 1) promising new ideas in the gestation stage ready for an investment of time, effort and energy; 2) ideas exiting maturity, leaving their prime to enter creative destruction and eventual renewal.

In Liberating Structures parlance, the team was stuck in a classic Rigidity Trap. We like the success we’re enjoying now so we stop innovating and get stuck. We don’t want to give up our current programs – even when we know they aren’t producing the impact they once enjoyed.

Liberating Structures typically uses a forest metaphor with this activity, but after looking at the map, one of the participant’s said: “We can’t make babies.” Translation: “We’re too busy doing all our existing programming that we have no space to bring new ideas into the pipeline.”

And that’s the Ah-ha moment we needed to spark change.

Inspiration

Inspiration: Ecocycle Planning tool from Liberating Structures