Organizational expert Walt Brown coaches us on how to use the flower power facilitation exercise to create and inventory of positions for our organizational chart. all of this is in Walt's book Death of the org Chart .
Video Transcript
How To Create your inventory of Organizational Chart Positions via the Flower Power Exercise
Walt coaches us through the how to.
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All right. Still digging into accountable. Third question. Very important question, the hinge question. Super important, whether we're growing or whether we're in uncertainty mode. And what we're digging in here is a very simple facilitation that you can get somebody to run and you can run yourself, that we call the flower power exercise. And it's really how you build an inventory of all the positions that are attached to a simple job. So it's a doing job and all the positions. And these are the steps. So you gather around, and typically, you might be working on one position. Let's say you have five sales reps, and all five sales reps and their manager might be in a room. We gather around. We decide who we're going to focus on. It really helps when you put an individual in the center, and I'll show you the way this works in a second.
We're going to ask the question, which is really kind of a secret sauce underneath all of this. We're going to extract the pattern. And from the pattern, we're going to draw some really sweet little petals. You see the way we're going to keep it going around. And then we're going to number the petals, and then we're going to name the petals. Petals have a nice little flower. So it goes like this. We gather around somebody. We're trying to figure out what this job is made of, what the positions are made of. And you have a group of people surrounding this individual or this job that really know what's going on. And we decide who's going to go into the center. So let's just say we have this person who's actually in the book, and her name was Skippy. That's her nickname, but it's an actual person named Skippy.
And yes, Skippy has tons of energy. So we put Skippy in the center, and then we ask the question. And the question is this, and it ties into the dome top table, et cetera. And we're saying, let's everybody think about what Skippy is doing and thinking about every day, including you Skippy. And what can't drop through the cracks? What does she need to be thinking and doing every day, every second, every minute, every hour, every day, every week, every month, every quarter a year? Lots of detail. So we're really looking for granularity with regards to the ideas when people are thinking about what Skippy's doing. What can hit the ground every second, every minute, every hour, every day, every week, every month, every quarter, every year? Lots of stuff. And you give them a few quiet minutes just to make a list.
And if there's five people in the room, you ask each one of them to give you 10 items. That'll be enough. And once we get the list done, you're watching them. They get the list done, so that's probably enough. When we go around, we do this thing we call the extract. And the whole idea here is to let each person play around the room. So there's lots of input into these positions we're forming up. And you just go to the first person you say, "What's the first thing you wrote on the list?" They tell you. I'm sure it works the way it works. Then the next person when you're right on the list. And if somebody says, oh, I've already written so and so, just scratch that off and give me the next item on your list. And it's going to look like this. You're going to go around the room and ask person A, "What's the first thing you wrote on the list?"
Down into here's where we are. So we gathered around. We decided who was going in the center. We asked the question every second, every minute. We extracted all the ideas, kept that going. And then we grouped them up and formed the petals. We numbered the petals. And you just go over here. You're like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. And you just ask the group, "Okay, let's put a descriptive names against each one of these positions." We name the positions. They don't have to be perfect, but they need to be close enough. And then we go away, and we give homework. And the homework is to write the purpose statement. So each one of these needs to have a purpose statement. And then we have a full inventory of all the positions that Skippy's part of. Fair enough?
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