Climate Crisis. Reduce, Rebel, Now.

Crisis

One year ago this week Greta Thunberg sat, alone, outside the Swedish parliament, to begin her Climate Crisis strike. One year later, literally millions joined her across the world.

Crisis was the one word to change everything. From Climate Change, to Climate Crisis.

Best.

This was the one-word Context developed by a North American client of mine several years ago. They were, at that time, number six in their mature market, yet they chose the word Best.

One word. Always one word. 

Distil your Context to one word and then you can use the Cascading Leadership model (align, engage, enrol) and the entire organisation will get behind that, an immeasurably powerful force.

Best

Best as a word was a starting point to engage, yet to align everyone in that business around that one word, then to get them to enrol to take action from that, what was needed was to create themes.

Themes 

Every Vision, every Strategy, every Tactic, they can all, with focus, be distilled to one word.

However, to both create definition for alignment then a call to action to engage people to then take action, to enrol, what is needed is to create themes that both emanate from and give definition to the one word Context.

What did Best mean in terms of Themes?

For the client with the one-word Context of Best this one word was their starting point to engage, but clearly it needed more. First, the word Best was given extension to say: “Best – in our chosen markets”.

From that, we then took the top 400+ leaders in the business, gathered them for two days, then worked around three themes:

• Innovation
• Talent
• Markets

At the end of those two days, all those hundreds of leaders in the business felt ownership of the Context as well as the Themes

In fact, the entire business was then quickly restructured around those three themes, creating a force for radical, brave and transformative change in an industry thought to be slow, conservative, mature.

Within less than two years that “number six” business became ranked number one in their industry as a place to work.

Focussing on Best with one of the themes being Talent created powerful results quickly.

What are the themes that give meaning for action in this Climate Crisis

So, Greta Thunberg only speaks when she feels she has something to say, something identified as “selective mutism”. There is much to learn from someone who speaks only a little, yet when they speak they make direct points very simply.

What themes, then, has she selected to give depth to the one word, Crisis?

From reading several of her speeches, they seem simple:

• Reduce
• Rebel
• Now

Has this had an impact ? Well, from one person sitting outside the Swedish Parliament on her school strike a year ago, on September 19th, 2019 literally millions of people across the world went on strike to protest the climate crisis.

What is your one word and what are your themes?

There is immense power and energy to having these clearly defined as your drivers.

So, with these two examples shared, this is my question for you today. You can ponder this personally or as a leader for your organisation.

Sometimes it can feel hard to do this for yourself, it takes practice to distil to what has true meaning for you, for your organisation.

This is work often done with a coach or other objective listener. Now, I love to work with people and organisations on this, I truly adore this work. If you’d like to explore this, book a thirty-minute call with me, let’s get to a context and themes for you. Yes, in thirty minutes.