Revised Six Boxes Web Site and ISPI Conference Highlights

We've just returned from a week at The International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) where we were busy, and where The Six Boxes Approach continued to attract a lot of enthusiastic interest.

Before giving you a run-down on the highlights of that conference, we want to direct you to our revised web site, SixBoxes.com.  This is an interim site, meant to update information about The Six Boxes Approach and our new suite of Six Boxes Programs, prior to a major re-launch of the site scheduled in a few months.  We hope you'll take a few minutes to check it out.

Kicking off ISPI with a pre-conference workshop, we facilitated a Basic Six Boxes Program for a group of seasoned performance improvement professionals, including two planning to become Certified Six Boxes Coaches.  The workshop was lively and engaging and, as usual, we probably learned at least as much as the workshop participants.  It's always great to see how The Six Boxes Approach stimulates new thinking and helps people "connect the dots" about performance and how to improve it.

We also presented four educational sessions at the conference, one an "Encore" session, voted as one of the best from last year, describing how The Six Boxes Approach synthesizes an enormous amount of what is known from both research and practice related to managing and improving performance.  

We were pleased to partner in presentations with three of our colleagues.  

Brian Turner from Microsoft presented with Carl about how we have been working with Microsoft's Engineering Excellence group to transform it from a learning and development department to a performance consulting organization, using The Six Boxes Approach as a foundation.  

Art Stadlin of Ceridian Benefit Services described a beautiful implementation of Six Boxes Skip-level Meetings in his IT organization, using our model as a framework for the meetings, to summarize findings, and to plan for improvement. 

Carl also presented a session with our old friend and mentor, Dr. Don Tosti, whose work on clarifying and strengthening organizational culture has been a major influence on us.  Carl and Don facilitated a discussion with an overflowing audience contrasting a proactive "design engineering" approach to performance improvement with the more reactive problem-solving approach that seems to characterize so much work in organizations these days.  Our view, seemingly shared by most in the audience, is that taking a design optimization approach offers much greater power and potential for improvement than focusing exclusively on specific problems, root cause analysis, and specific solutions. We think the latter approach misses many opportunities for truly breakthrough results.

Carl conducted a series of roundtable sessions showing how we use The Performance Chain to identify measures for evaluating the impact of performance improvement efforts.  This combined one element of The Six Boxes Approach with some of our previous work on performance measurement.

After the conference Carl and Timm Esque (ISPI Director) met with a group of delegates from Korea, convened by our associate, Kinam Sung, for an open-ended discussion about the entire conference.  Our Korean colleagues, who have shown a keen interest in The Six Boxes Approach since we first introduced it at LG Academy 2005, once again demonstrated their eagerness to learn and enthusiasm for new ideas. 

One of the most significant parts of the conference for us was an inspiring keynote presentation on leadership and values delivered by Frances Hesselbein, a remarkable woman who is Chair of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. For anyone interested in leadership for the 21st century, we highly recommend her books. And at a personal level, when she signed our copy of her most recent book, the humanity and authenticity that she radiated person-to-person were truly awesome.

Last, but perhaps not least important, we were honored and grateful that Carl received ISPI's highest recognition, the Honorary Lifetime Membership Award, for his contributions to ISPI and to the field of performance improvement.

We're looking forward to the next few months, during which we expect to certify several new Six Boxes Coaches, begin implementing Six Boxes programs for Executive Leaders, and prepare our new web site with additional resources and web 2.0 features to support our growing community of practice.

As always, we welcome your comments, questions, and new ideas.

All the Best,

The Six Boxes Team

Comments

[Teri Warner]

Thanks for the opportunity to meet you at ISPI, Carl. Brian Turner's presentation was wonderful, but not included as part of the post-ISPI conference materials. Is there anywsay to get the actual presentation?

Thanks, Teri