Summary of the Seven Crucial Conversations

Crucial Conversations

are structured dialogues or multilogues that generate breakthrough insights, encourage continuous improvement, and lead to higher and higher levels of productivity and performance in a team.

The Seven Crucial Conversations

(the 7CCs®) is a system of thought for building teams and growing and scaling companies toward competitive advantage through an optimal sequence of crucial conversations. This sequence aligns with the natural path of the Three Domains of Change. As such, the 7 Crucial Conversations are a roadmap for transforming teams and companies and for planning and implementing major change initatives.

Change Domain 1: Leadership and Culture

Crucial Conversation 1, Activating Purpose

Crucial Conversation 2, Driving Focus

Crucial Conversation 3, Shifting Mindset

Change Domain 2: Capabilities and Roles

Crucial Conversation 4, Specifying Capabilities and Roles

Crucial Conversation 5, Streamlining Interdependencies

Change Domain 3: Strategies and Implementation

Crucial Conversation 6, Aligning Strategies

Crucial Conversation 7, Implementing Initiatives

About the Glossary

The following terms were identified and refined by facilitating the Seven Crucial Conversations in partnership with hundreds of teams across a wide range of industries and cultures. Every term has proven its value toward building high-performing teams and companies. Together these terms work as an integrated system of thought for growing and scaling companies.

The Glossary

Accountabilities

are obligations to create outcomes or deliverables. There are nuanced differences between accountabilities and responsibilities. The objective is to have accountable and responsible team members. Accountabilities link to the Specifying Capabilities and Roles crucial conversation.

Accountability for Leadership Impact

refers to team members being accountable for the impact that their leadership style creates. An “unintentional panicky” team leader creates an “unintentional and reactive” team, whereas an “intentional customer-focused leader” creates a team that is “intentional about creating value.” Leadership impact links to intentional culture. It also relates to the Shifting Mindset crucial conversation. See Toxic Rock Stars.

Active Listening

refers to team members listening in a way that creates clarity, confidence, and trust. Active listening requires fully concentrating on what is being said and the speaker's emotional cues to understand the speaker's message. This behavior is different from listening to respond, which comes from a transactional perspective, commonly an unconscious, default position. Active listening is essential for effective leadership and teamwork. It links to Accountability for Leadership Impact.

Agency

refers to the power of individuals to choose their responses and actions. The goal is to align the agency of individuals with the purposes of teams and the purposes of teams with the organization's purpose. Supporting the agency of individuals and teams is core to the ideas of unleashing distributed leadership and leading Social Systems, Not Machines.

Agile Innovation

refers to team members iteratively prototyping, testing, and validating products, services, and solutions in a customer-centric way. The core challenge is how to manage the uncertainty of Event Horizons by testing, validating, and Versioning in short iterations called sprints. You can't be sure that a technology, feature, design, or solution will have any real value until you have feedback and confirmation from actual customers, which means you must create dynamic interpersonal relationships with at least some representative customers. You start by analyzing needs using Stakeholder Customer Analysis. Then you try to fail fast and cheaply, making choices to pivot or continue, getting feedback, minimizing waste, and accelerating learning. Just as importantly, you avoid grand unveilings. Books and other materials about Agile innovation and its close cousin, design thinking, are generally available. The Growth River Operating System supports these methods and the dynamic interpersonal relationships on which they depend. This links to the Implementing Initiatives crucial conversation.

Aligning Between Roles

refers to team members clarifying, negotiating, and structuring responsibilities and accountabilities. This way of working is essential to aligning systems of capabilities and roles. This links to the Specifying Capabilities and Roles crucial conversation.

Aligning Between Teams

refers to team members seeking to create alignment between the roles each team plays in delivering results across the enterprise. This way of working is part of Straightening the Spaghetti, which refers to the processes for analyzing capabilities, distributing roles, and delegating strategies in teams and companies. This links to the Streamlining Interdependencies crucial conversation.

Aligning Competitive Advantage

refers to team members planning and managing strategic tradeoffs or creative tensions between strategies and roles in the direction of competitive advantage. The Four Metrics for Competitive Advantage provides a formula to do this. This links to Decision Analysis. It also links to the Aligning Strategies crucial conversation.

Alignment

refers to the ideal arrangement of the parts in a system. In groups and teams, alignment depends on the Choice to Align. The objective of Primary Constraint Analysis is to create impactful alignment. The Seven Crucial Conversations are a roadmap of choice points for teams to align.

Alignment Is Required, Agreement Is Optional

refers to a critical underlying mindset for distributed leadership, where team members choose to align with team or leadership decisions, even if they might not personally agree or would have done something differently on their own. Distributed leadership requires alignment, not agreement. This links to Choice to Align.

Analysis

refers to the process of separating something into its constituent elements to understand it. The Growth River OS includes various kinds of analysis: Gap Analysis, Primary Constraint Analysis, and Decision Analysis. This links to the Driving Focus crucial conversation.

Analyzing Business Capabilities

refers to team members defining the essential factors for creating value in their roles and for the business, such as people, processes, tools, technologies or resources. Capabilities answer the question “What do we need to have in place to execute our strategy?” Capabilities represent sources of value at the intersection of customer and business, so how they are named profoundly impacts factors including culture, roles, influence, strategies, hiring, metrics, and rewards. Start with Stakeholder and Customer Analysis and then work backward to identify the most crucial business capabilities to value creation. Define business capabilities at the right level by being aware of the differences between business capabilities and value streams. Seek to assign every essential business capability as a responsibility to a single role or team. Apply the four types of business capabilities from around the Business Triangle to structure your analysis. Analyzing business capabilities is the first step in Straightening the Spaghetti. And it links to the Specifying Capabilities and Roles crucial conversation.

Analyzing the Performance System

refers to team members providing constructive feedback to the team and organizational leaders on performance system constraints or blockers (unclear roles, ineffective incentives, etc.). Team members will discuss: What policies, processes, incentives, or rewards block us from being high performing? This links to the Specifying Capabilities and Roles crucial conversation.

Architecting Systems of Roles

refers to team members structuring roles that enable distributed leadership and ensure ownership of critical decisions and activities. This way of working is the second step in Straightening the Spaghetti, the process of aligning capabilities, roles, and strategies. It is a Versioning process, and a healthy conversation, with no grand unveilings. It links to the Specifying Capabilities and Roles crucial conversation.

Art of Alignment

refers to leaders and teams becoming skilled at breaking complex issues into the key choice points required for people to engage, choose, and align toward higher performance as a collective (see Figure G.1). This relates to Setting the Stage for the 7 Crucial Conversations.

Awareness of Focus

refers to team members intentionally aligning perspectives toward priority outcomes. Issue Action Lists is a practice related to this way of working. This links to the Driving Focus crucial conversation.

Basis for Competitive Advantage

refers to team members planning the configuration of business capabilities most likely to enable business(es) to create competitive advantage. It is part of the Aligning Strategies crucial conversation. Key questions include: In which capabilities will we invest to be the standard-setter? Where will we seek parity? Where will we outsource? The four kinds of business capabilities around the Business Triangle and the Four Metrics for Competitive Advantage are helpful.

Breakthrough Experiences

refers to team members creating events that fundamentally change how things work, requiring the team to learn and adapt to new circumstances. Leaders must become skilled at breaking complex issues down to the vital choice points and breakthrough experiences, which is the purpose of the Seven Crucial Conversations. The premise is ‘an experience always trumps an argument,’ or ‘seeing is believing.’ A related concept is Breakthroughs in Systems, which relates to Primary Constraint Analysis. Willingness to create breakthroughs links to Transformational Journey Mindset. It also links to facilitation.

Breakthroughs in Systems

refers to an event in a system that resolves a primary constraint, creating the conditions for a higher-sustainable level of performance. It links to Primary Constraint Analysis.

Business

refers to a system of capabilities and roles designed and managed to develop, sell, deliver, and support products and services to target customers toward competitive advantage. The Business Triangle is a way to visualize this definition. See Business Triangle.

Business Capabilities

are strategic factors critical to creating value for a customer or in a business. Capabilities answer the question “What do we need to have in place to execute our strategy?” A capability can be almost any key factor or point of leverage, including people, processes, tools, technologies, and resources. In high-performing teams, members will actively discuss, “What are the essential capabilities to winning as a team or business? What are the capability gaps? Where are the primary constraints? Which roles are specifically responsible? And what are the next steps and priorities?” This links to Analyzing Business Capabilities. See Business Triangle.

Business Capabilities versus Value Streams:

It can be easy to confuse business capabilities and value streams. Both are essential concepts for aligning teams and organizations to optimize customer value. However, they serve different purposes and operate at different altitudes. Business capabilities are more strategic, while value streams are more operational. Team members will usually not share the details of values streams with other team members unless these details impact points of interdependency or primary constraints. However, team members must share the details of business capabilities to make strategic tensions transparent and ensure strategic alignment. This links to the Aligning Strategies crucial conversation. See Business Triangle.

Business Leader or Business Team

refers to the role responsible for leading and managing a business segment or Business Triangle toward competitive advantage in the enterprise. This links to the Specifying Capabilities and Roles and Streamlining Interdependencies crucial conversations. See System of teams.

Business Segment Strategies

refers to team members formulating business strategies for one or more business segements. The Business Strategy Canvas is a way to summarize these strategies. This links to the Aligning Strategies crucial conversation. See Business Triangle.

Business

Segmentation refers to identifying and separating Business Triangles to ensure customer focus and to elevate the business leader perspective. See Business Triangle. Differences in customers, products, services, sales processes, channels, delivery platform, geographies, and other factors create the need for segmenting business triangles and for separate and focused business teams and strategies for each business segment. Team members will discuss: What are the key differences that distinguish business triangles in terms of Develop, Sell, Deliver, and Support capabilities or value-streams? A stage 3 distributed leadership company will have an enterprise with multiple business segment leaders and teams. It will require a matrix of teams. See System of Teams. This links to the Capabilities and Roles crucial conversation. See Enterprise Evolutionary Stages.

Business Triangle

refers to a diagram for visualizing a business as a system that includes four business capability types: (1) Develop, (2) Sell, (3) Deliver, and (4) Support, as shown in Figure G.2. Team members apply this diagram to visualize business capabilities, analyze primary constraints, design systems of roles, leverage creative tensions, and accelerate value and throughput around the business triangle towards competitive advantage. It also links to the system of teams. See Business.

Capabilities and Roles

refers to the second of the Three Domains of Change. See Three Domains of Change.

Cascades of Key Conditions

refers to a powerful method for analyzing primary constraints in complex systems by testing against ideal operating conditions. This method works because changes in interdependent conditions are more likely to have impact than changes in independent ones. So, when a list of ideal operating conditions is sorted from most interdependent to most independent, the first condition is the most impactful, and the last one is the least impactful. This technique has been woven throughout the Growth River OS. Examples include the Three Domains of Change, the Seven Crucial Conversations, the Four Business Capability Types, the Four Metrics for Competitive Advantage, Systems of Teams, and Systems of Strategies. All of these models are based in explicit cascades of key conditions that can be applied through gap analysis with data to identify primary constraints. This links to the Driving Focus crucial conversation. See Primary Constraint Analysis, and Game Changer.

Centralized Leadership

refers to a system of roles in which the decision-making powers are concentrated in a few leaders at the top of the organizational structure. Decisions are made at the top and communicated to lower-level managers for implementation. This links to the Specifying Capabilities and Roles crucial conversation.

Centralized versus Distributed Leadership

refers to the relative strengths and weaknesses of two approaches to decision-making process and organizational structures (see Figure G.3). See Centralized Leadership and Distributed Leadership.

Challenge Statements

refer to a statement that is written to define a critical gap or opportunity in a way that frames the solution required. A good challenge statement meets the adage “a challenge well defined is one half solved.” Drafting and aligning challenge statements is an integral part of Leading Through Narratives. It is also important for aligning stakeholders and creating the conditions for distributed leadership to drive higher performance and for planning and leading transformational journeys. See Leading Through Narratives.

Change Team

refers to a best practice for leading change in which a team leader forms a sub-team of close confidants to support in planning and managing the transformational journey of a team or company. Growth River consultants typically work with these change teams to design, customize, and co-lead transformational journeys for teams and companies. Ideally, there will be an enterprise change team that is responsible for tracking the company's overall journey as well as the developmental journeys of key leaders and teams across the organization. This book can be used as a primer for change teams.

Channels

refer to the capabilities or platforms where products and services are sold and delivered in a business. Channels encompass a subset of the Sell and Deliver capabilities and roles in a given Business Triangle. See Business Triangle. Channel leadership teams are a type of team that creates and aligns channel strategies. See System of Teams. This links to the Aligning Strategies crucial conversation.

Choice to Align

refers to team members choosing to align with team decisions to speak and act with a single intention. Alignment doesn't necessarily require agreement. Leaders must become skilled at breaking complex issues down to the key choice points and Breakthrough Experiences, which is the purpose of the Seven Crucial Conversations. See Facilitation. The Choice to Align is a behavior linked to the Law of the Lid and to Leadership Clearing. Both link to the Activating Purpose crucial conversation. See Alignment Is Required, Agreement Is Optional.

Chronos:

See Kairos and Chronos Balance.

Coachability

refers to team members demonstrating a willingness and ability to receive and apply feedback in a way that creates high levels of trust and confidence for others. Coachability is a behavior linked to Accountability for Leadership Impact and to the Shifting Mindset crucial conversation.

Company

refers to a legal entity that represents an association of people dedicated to a shared business. See Enterprise.

Compelling Requests

refers to team members making time-bound, specific, and actionable requests that compel others to engage. The objective is to set up a collaborative conversation. The method is to ask the other party to help you frame a request to that in a way that they will be compelled to reply with “yes” or “yes-if” instead of “no.” Applying this method is key skill for Aligning Between Roles and Aligning Between Teams. This links to the Shifting Mindset crucial conversation. See Speech Acts.

Competitive Advantage

refers to a situation in which a company has superior business capabilities that give it a healthy lead over competitors. This links to the Aligning Strategies crucial conversation. Differential advantage is a related term. See Four Metrics for Competitive Advantage.

Complete System of Roles

refers to a system of roles in which every key issue, decisions, capability, creative tension, and strategy has a single capable owner and advocate driving resolution. This links to System of Roles, of Strategies, and of Teams. See Leveraging Creative Tensions.

Complex Adaptive Social System

refers to a network of individuals or a collective that exhibits purposeful, self-organizing, and adaptive behaviors. This links to Setting the Stage for the 7 Crucial Conversations. See Three Domains of Change.

Continuous Improvement

refers to team members identifying and resolving gaps in systems to create higher performance. There are two different paths towards continuous improvement (1) optimizing at the primary constraint or (2) resolving the primary constraint. This links to the Driving Focus crucial conversation. See Horizontal versus Vertical Improvement.

Creative Tensions

refers to differences of opinion or perspective that naturally arise between roles or between teams. They exist in the system of roles in every team and in the system of teams in every company. In teams where team members are not intentional about how they work together, creative tensions can become sources of unhealthy conflict. This links to Leveraging Creative Tensions. See Vertical and horizontal balance.

Cross-Functional Interdependencies

refers to team members planning and managing cross-functional processes to build knowledge, streamline work, share information, and drive alignment. Examples of this way of working include designing or implementing information systems or communications protocols. This links to the Streamlining Interdependencies crucial conversation.

Crucial Conversations

refer to team members planning and implementing structured dialogues or multilogues that generate breakthrough insights, encourage continuous improvement, create alignment, and lead to higher and higher levels of productivity and performance in a team. Crucial conversations are how social systems evolve. Development in teams and companies happens at the speed of conversations, especially those that identify and resolve points of greatest impact or primary constraints. This links to Setting the Stage for the 7 Crucial Conversations.

Culture

refers to how people think and act in groups. Natural culture is what people do when no one is telling them what to do. Natural culture refers to the natural flow of the social system when leadership is unintentional. In contrast, intentional culture is the ways of thinking and acting that are taught and reinforced in a group in the direction of leadership, hierarchy, and influence. Leadership and Culture are the first of the Three Domains of Change. This links to Setting the Stage for the 7 Crucial Conversations.

Customer

refers to a role in the buying process. High-performing teams and companies create exceptional value by being customer-focused. The term customer can be applied with different levels of strategic sophistication. In less strategically mature organizations, a customer is a person who buys and uses products or services. In a more strategically mature organization, a customer is a system of roles, made up of different kinds of customers that influence each other to decide, buy, and consume products and services (channels, end-users, payers, gatekeepers, and influencers). The System of customers is in the center of the Business Triangle. See System of Customers.

Customer Analysis:

See Stakeholder and Customer Analysis.

Customer Experience

refers to how customers experience and remember the interactions they have with a business. The develop, sell, and deliver business capabilities around the business triangle create the customer experience. The customer experience is part of the third domain in the Three Domains of Change, which describes how change unfolds in teams and companies.

Decision Analysis

refers to team members following a structured process to facilitate, document, and align complex decisions. The decision analysis process involves four steps for clarifying and aligning decisions by scoring alternatives against weighted decision objectives in a grid. This process is helpful with any of three main styles for Effective Decision-Making however it is most often part of consultative decision-making. It is a powerful facilitation tool that supports Leading Through Narratives. The steps include the following (see Figure G.4):

1. State the Decision: Use a short phrase that describes the decision to be taken. What is the purpose of the decision? Who is the decision-maker?
2. List and Weight Objectives: What are the “must” objectives? What are the “want” objectives? What are the relative weights (1–10) between these “wants”? “Must” objectives are initial threshold conditions for filtering alternatives.

   

3. List and Score Alternatives: What are the “alternatives” to be evaluated? How do the “wants” score for each “alternative”? What are the total scores (weight × scores)?
4. Best Balanced Choice: Are the risks for the highest-scoring “alternative” acceptable, and if not, is the next-highest scorer the best choice?

Decision Mechanism

refers to the process for driving a decision to closure in a team or organization. An Effective Decision-Making process requires an effective decision mechanism. See Final Call.

Depersonalizing Conflicts

refers to team members empathizing with the roles that others play and understanding the perspectives that they bring. This behavior relates to Leveraging Creative Tensions as well as Giving and Receiving Feedback.

Design Thinking

refers to an approach for being customer-centric by designing solutions and solving problems based on empathy and customer-needs analysis. Books and courses on Design Thinking are widely available. This process links to Customer and Stakeholder Analysis and to User stories.

Differential Advantage

is a term used mostly in not-for-profit organizations and institutions to describe the core principles of competitive advantage, but with a higher emphasis on value delivered than on profit generated. See Four Metrics for Competitive Advantage.

Directive Leadership Stage 2

refers to companies in the second of the four Enterprise Evolutionary Stages. In this stage, a single intact business leadership team leads the organization with the goal of nailing and scaling one business model. Functional capabilities are organized to support this business model. Aligned leadership is based on autocratic decision-making by the leader of the business and team, as required. See Enterprise Evolutionary Stages.

Disruption

refers to radical changes to circumstances that make new ways of working necessary. Event horizons are a way to think about the impact, experience, and leadership challenges of disruption. Teams that seek to identify and resolve primary constraints are in practice seeking to self-disrupt.

Distributed Leadership

refers to a system of roles in which decision-making powers are delegated across hierarchical levels and assigned to leaders closest to value creation. Leveraging distributed leadership is the key to creating flat agile organizations. It is an objective in stage 3 and 4 companies. This links to the Capabilities and Roles crucial conversation. See Enterprise Evolutionary Stages.

Distributed Leadership Stage 3

refers to companies in the third of the Four Enterprise Evolutionary Stages. In this stage, the organization is a portfolio of capabilities that serve multiple business models and segments. It has been restructured into a team-based matrix, based on intact high-performance teams (HPTs). Aligned leadership is driven mostly by consultative decision-making, direct conflict resolution, and other HPT ways of working. Decisions are only rarely escalated for autocratic decision-making by the enterprise leader. See Enterprise Evolutionary Stages and Single Journey Owners.

Dynamic Interpersonal Relationships

refers to members building intentional relationships in which there is a dynamic back-and-forth conversation toward mutual success, learning, and leadership development. Such relationships are critical to building high-performing teams. This behavior links to Accountability for Leadership Impact. And it relates to Setting the Stage for the 7 Crucial Conversations. See Sensing.

Effective Decision-Making

refers to team members practicing a transparent decision-making process that is informed by the minimum number of relevant perspectives. There are three main styles of decision-making:

1. Autocratic: One person, usually the leader, decides with minimal input from team members, who are expected to comply with the decision.
2. Consultative: With input from the team, and process support from a Single Journey owner, a call is made by a designated decision-maker and communicated with clear rationale. Although agreement may be desired, alignment will be expected. A decision analysis process may be used to structure this alignment conversation. To achieve alignment, it may be necessary to clarify a date or other conditions for when it will be okay for team members to revisit the decision.
3. Consensus: All team members are involved in agreeing on a course of action (majority rule). Individual team members may have veto power. Once the decision is reached, all team members are expected to comply.

Growth River's experience with many different teams shows that the decision-making style that allows a team to become high performing is somewhere between consultative and autocratic. Ideally, the team leader has the authority to make critical decisions but does so with input from team members—as it makes the logic and rationale for decisions transparent. See Decision Analysis. This links to the Activating Purpose crucial conversation.

Engaged Response

refers to team members designing strategies and solutions by collaborating across business and functional roles. The objective is a healthy top-down and bottom-up conversation, which is especially critical in transformation where change impacts many stakeholders (e.g. Straightening the Spaghetti). This links to the Specifying Capabilities and Roles crucial conversation.

Enterprise

refers to a matrix structure that includes functional capabilities supporting multiple business segments/business triangles. The Enterprise Map is a tool for visualizing an enterprise. A mature stage 3 enterprise will have a complete System of Teams. This links to the Specifying Capabilities and Roles crucial conversation. See Enterprise Evolutionary Stages.

Enterprise Change Team

refers to a subteam that works closely with an enterprise leader to plan and guide the HPT transformational journey of an enterprise team. Enterprise change teams are essential for scaling and sustaining HPT ways of working in companies. See Change Team.

Enterprise Evolutionary Stages

is a model that describes the natural journey that all companies go through as they grow and scale through stages. This links to Setting the Stage for the 7 Crucial Conversations. See Figure G.5 depicts the Enterprise Evolutionary Stages.

• Stage 1, Independent Contributors: A loose confederation of partners, each with its own business approach. Central leadership is based on achieving consensus among senior partners.
• Stage 2, Directive Leadership: A single intact business leadership team leads the organization to nail and scale one business model. Functional capabilities are organized to support this business model.
• Stage 3, Distributed Leadership: The organization is a portfolio of capabilities that serve multiple business models and segments. It has been restructured into a team-based matrix based on intact high-performing teams (HPTs). Aligned leadership is driven chiefly by consultative decision-making, direct conflict resolution, and other ways of working. The enterprise leader only rarely escalates decisions for autocratic decision-making.

  

• Stage 4, Leaders Leading Leaders: The enterprise has developed the capabilities to build and support self-managing teams. The organizational structure is a flat agile team matrix. Aligned leadership is driven by consultative decision-making, direct conflict resolution, and other HPT ways of working. Only rarely are decisions escalated to the enterprise leader.

Enterprise Journey Awareness

refers to team members being clear about how the company creates value and governs itself and what needs to change to grow and scale. Pragmatically, to effectively engage and align teams toward business transformation, leaders need to create enterprise journey awareness. This way of working relates to Enterprise Evolutionary Stages and Primary Constraint Analysis. It links to Setting the Stage for the 7 Crucial Conversations.

Enterprise Maps

are a way to visualize a matrix of business triangles and functional capabilities. The various business segments will be on one axis and the four types of capabilities on the other, and it will show the intersection points between them (see Figures G.6 and G.15).

Enterprise Strategy Map

refers to a system of strategy documents that captures the critical dimensions and objectives of a company's enterprise strategy. Businesses segments and functional capabilities strategies should align with enterprise objectives. This cascade of strategy documents may include:

1. Enterprise Purpose
2. Enterprise Culture
3. Enterprise Brand Promise
4. Enterprise Value Promise
5. Target Market Scope
6. Business Segment Scope
7. Product and Service Scope
8. Enterprise Capabilities and Basis for Competitive Advantage
9. Enterprise Operating Model/Organizational Structure

Enterprise Strategy

refers to team members being clear about the overall enterprise strategy and any impact it should have on the team's strategy. Enterprise Strategy Maps are used to summarize enterprise strategies. This links to the Aligning Strategies crucial conversation.

Event Horizons

refers to team members accounting for moments in time beyond which they cannot plan and, as such, calibrating energy and time invested in speculation in order to stay focused on actionable conversations. Managing the uncertainty before and after event horizons is a fundamental leadership challenge, which is critical to controlling the speed of change (see Figure G.7). Event horizons often relate to primary constraints being resolved. This behavior links to Transformational Journey Mindset and Agile Innovation.

Facilitation

refers to the skills, methods, and tools that a facilitator uses to guide a group through crucial conversations to adopt new ways of working and behaviors, to align decisions, and take actions to achieve a common goal. The Seven Crucial Conversations is a powerful framework for facilitation.

Final Call

refers to the mechanism or process for driving a decision to closure in a team or organization. See Effective Decision-Making.

Five Pathways

refers to a process for analyzing the optimal focus for a company on its unfolding transformational journey. The approach is for team members to discuss and analyze the pattern of primary constraints in the following five pathways and then to align roles and priorities accordingly. The five pathways include:

1. Leadership Effectiveness
2. Team Effectiveness
3. Systems of Capabilities and Roles
4. System of Strategies
5. Metrics for Competitive Advantage

This is a type of Stack Analysis. See Cascades of Key Conditions.

Flat Agile Organizations

refers to a team matrix organization in which the top team is a high-performing transformational leadership team. The subteams reporting into it are high-performing teams or self-managing teams. Building a flat agile structure is an objective in a stage 4 leaders leading leaders company. This links to the Capabilities and Roles crucial conversation. See Enterprise Evolutionary Stages.

Forecasting and Budgeting Resources

refers to team members planning and forecasting capacity to deliver. This way of working links to the Implementing Initiatives crucial conversation.

Four Business Capability Types

refers to team members distinguishing between four fundamental capabilities around the business triangle. Each type has a different purpose, as shown in Figure G.8.

Four Metrics for Competitive Advantage

refers to a method for aligning decisions and strategies toward competitive advantage. The root question is—what ideal outcomes characterize an optimal business investment? There are four: (1) 100% share of a target market, (2) no constraints to meeting demand, (3) no significant business risks, and (4) above average returns. The Four Metrics for Competitive Advantage are an application of that logic—competitive advantage means having the attributes of an optimal business investment. They include:

1. Market Potential—team members prioritize choices that optimize demand for the company in its target market. The ideal is 100% share. It is to be “the alternative of choice” for all key stakeholders, including:
   1. Provider of choice
   2. Employer of choice
   3. Channel partner of choice
   4. Investment of choice
   5. Community member of choice
2. Operational Scalability—team members prioritize choices that eliminate constraints to the company meeting demand in a target market. The ideal is no constraints.
3. Business Model Sustainability—team members prioritize choices that minimize risks to the company’s performance and to its key capabilities. The ideal is no significant business risks.
4. Financial Returns—team members prioritize choices that best mitigate financial risks and optimize financial returns. The ideal is above average returns.
5. Between strategic trade-offs or between competing investment opportunities, the optimal choice will be the one expected to most contribute toward these four metrics in the order of the cascade. This robust logic cuts through inherent biases, enabling all members in a team and all teams in a company to fly in formation toward overall competitive advantage. See Decision Analysis and Cascades of Key Conditions.

Function

refers to a type of role that is responsible for execution in a business or enterprise. The term can be applied with different levels of strategic sophistication. In less strategically mature organizations, function is simply a moniker for a nonexecutive role, job, or team with an area of expertise, such as marketing, sales, or quality. However, in companies with greater strategic sophistication, in which teams Analyze Capabilities, a function is a label for a cluster of closely related capabilities. So, for example, the marketing function will be responsible for managing and improving capabilities that include market research, customer experience, market messaging, and so forth. Functions are responsible for formulating and aligning functional capability strategies. See System of Teams.

Functional-Capability Strategies

refers to team members creating and aligning functional-capability strategies. The objective is for these functional strategies to align with business segment strategies and enterprise strategy. This links to the Aligning Strategies crucial conversation. See System of Strategies.

Functional leader

refers to the leader of a function, a functional team, or a capabilities leadership team. This links to the Capabilities and Roles crucial conversation. See Business Triangle.

Functionitis

refers to problematic situations in which functional-capability teams override the business or enterprise perspective, causing growth to stagnate or stop. It is often a situation in which horizontal improvement is being achieved at the expense of vertical improvement. See Vertical and Horizontal Balance. Functionitis is a system-of-roles problem that relates to the Specifying Capabilities and Roles crucial conversation. The solution is a complete System of Roles and System of Teams enabled to leverage creative tensions.

Gap Analysis

refers to a method of analysis. A checklist of conditions or criteria of success is created (these are the “shoulds”). Data is applied to identify performance gaps in these conditions (which are called the “actuals”). Then priorities and plans are created to resolve the performance gaps in the “actuals.” See Transformational Journey Map.

Game-changer

refers to an event that resolves one or more primary constraints across a stack of subsystems. When radical transformation occurs in companies or industries, it is the result of game-changers. An example is an innovative product, service, or organizational change that resolves constraints in marketing, sales, and delivery. See Stack Analysis.

Giving and Receiving Feedback

refers to a way of working in which team members demonstrate being responsible for the success of others through giving and receiving feedback. This way of working is vital to creating and restoring trust and therefore fundamental to developing high-performing teams. It links to the Shifting Mindset crucial conversation.

Grand Unveiling

refers to a situation in which a plan or solution is presented as a done deal without creating sufficient input and buy-in from key stakeholders or customers. See Agile Innovation.

Growth River

refers to a company that is dedicated to unleashing the potential of leaders and teams to grow and scale businesses through proven ways of working. See Growth River OS.

Growth River Operating System (OS)

refers to the system of thought presented in this glossary. The objective is to systematically build high-performing teams that grow and scale companies toward competitive advantage. See Setting the Stage for the 7 Crucial Conversations.

Guiding Coalitions

refers to change leadership approach. The challenge is for team members to structure and manage guiding coalitions that create two-way collaborative relationships with larger target audiences with the goal of creating adoption of change. This links to Setting the Stage for the 7 Crucial Conversations.

High Performing Company

refers to a company in which high-performing teams come together and align to create business competitive advantage. High-performing companies are a natural result of applying the 7 Crucial Conversations with the top leadership teams in a company over time.

High-performing Company Journey

refers to the sequence of event horizons, milestones, and breakthrough experiences that comprise a company's optimal journey toward higher performance. The purpose of the Seven Crucial Conversations is to build high-performing teams that lead and manage high-performing company journeys.

High-performing Team Journey

refers to the sequence of event horizons, milestones, and breakthrough experiences that comprise a team's journey toward higher performance. The purpose of the Seven Crucial Conversations is to accelerate high-performing team journeys that, effectively navigate the swirl, and ultimately create high-performing companies.

High-performing team (HPT)

refers to an intact team with a single team leader developed toward higher performance through intentional ways of working. The purpose of the Seven Crucial Conversations is to build and sustain high-performing teams. See Team Structures.

High-performing Team Connectors

refer to individuals who are members of more than one team. They can be leaders of one team and members of another. Connectors help to align teams, and they also model best practices across the system of teams (see Figure G.9).

Home team

refers to a team in which a given member is peer but is not the the team leader. For example, the home team for a marketing executive is the senior leadership team, where she is expected to give and receive peer-to-peer feedback. In contrast, the marketing team for which she is the team leader is not her home team. Home teams can be a powerful distinction for developing and leveraging strong dynamic peer-to-peer relationships and creating accountable organizations. A common misinterpretation of this idea is that your home team is one that you lead or a place where you spend most of your time; this may or may not be the case.

Horizontal Improvement

refers to improving the performance of a system by managing or optimizing conditions at the present limiting constraint while not resolving the constraint itself.

Horizontal versus Vertical Improvement

refers to two fundamental approaches towards continuous improvement (see Figure G.10). See Vertical and Horizontal Balance.

Independent Contributors Stage 1

refers to companies in the first of the four Enterprise Evolutionary Stages. In this stage, a loose confederation of allies has joined forces, and a nascent business is born. The goal of the group is to pool resources, but it is not necessarily to align as a single business. Aligned leadership in the group is based on consensus. See Enterprise Evolutionary Stages.

Influence Analysis

refers to assessing the levels of influence in a Stakeholder and Customer Analysis as a basis for planning how to best lead change. Influence can be of two kinds. Power to promote: some roles will have the power to promote your purpose and solutions. These will be the target partners in your coalition who you will need to assist you in selling or advocating internally or externally. Power to block: some roles will have the power to block your purpose and solutions. These will be a target audience for your change narrative and to influence through your guiding coalition. The roles with the most influence will have both the power to promote and block. These will be your target customers. This links to Setting the Stage for the 7 Crucial Conversations.

Innovation

refers to a process for creating better solutions to meet new requirements, unarticulated customer needs, or existing needs. See Vertical and Horizontal Improvement.

Interdependencies

refer to team members managing and improving the points of intersection between roles or teams. This links to the Streamlining Interdependencies crucial conversation.

Issue Action Lists

refers to team members prioritizing issues and concerns to routinely review, track, and drive closure. This links to the Driving Focus crucial conversation.

Intact Teams

refers teams that have a single team leader who is responsible for team performance, dynamics, accountability, and continuous improvement. See Leadership Mechanism.

Kairos and Chronos Balance

refers to two Greek words for time and to two types of meeting agendas. Chronos refers to thinking about time as a limited resource allocated to tasks and constrained by resources. Chronos meetings have clear agendas and a tight schedule. Kairos, on the other hand, is what happens when we immerse ourselves in crucial conversations around goals and realities. (See Figure G.11.) Participants work together to process complex topics—studying, listening, sensing, designing, choosing, and aligning. This links to the Driving Focus crucial conversation.

Law of the Lid

refers to team members recognizing when their leadership is the lid on team or company performance. The principle is that a team or company can never sustain performance at a higher level than its leader(s). John Maxwell initially proposed it. This law links to the Activating Purpose crucial conversation.

Leaders Leading Leaders Stage 4

refers to companies in the fourth of the four Enterprise Evolutionary Stages. In this stage, the enterprise has developed the systems needed to charter and support agile self-managing teams, at the level below intact teams that are required at senior enterprise, business, and functional capability levels. The organizational structure is flat, with the fewest required intact teams at the top and self-managing teams reporting into those teams. Aligned leadership is driven by consultative decision-making, direct conflict resolution, and other HPT ways of working. Decisions are only rarely escalated for autocratic decision-making by the enterprise leader. See Enterprise Evolutionary Stages.

Leadership

refers to the art and the science of building relationships that inspire, guide, and develop people to align and navigate the uncertainty of change. Leadership is critical to the Activating Purpose crucial conversation.

Leadership and Culture

refers to the first of the Three Domains of Change. See Three Domains of Change.

Leadership Clearing

refers to team leaders having the license to address factors that undermine team purpose. This license includes removing toxic rock stars and resolving other dysfunctions. This behavior links to Team Charter. See Intact Teams.

Leadership Mechanism

refers to the idea that teams require an effective mechanism for defining purpose, clarifying roles, setting goals, taking decisions, and ensuring alignment. In an intact team that mechanism is a single leader who is responsible for team performance, member development, and strategic alignment. See Team Structures.

Leading Through Narratives

refers to team members framing challenges in writing to clarify logic, test thinking, and drive alignment. Narratives are an essential tool for leading change, creating alignment, and building Guiding Coalitions. The key to a good narrative is clear, concise communication, focusing on articulating the Challenge Statement first. This links to Setting the Stage for the 7 Crucial Conversations.

Leveraging Creative Tensions

refers to team members leveraging creative tensions between different perspectives and roles as sources of accountability, insight, learning, and innovation. There are Natural Creative Tensions between: the roles of team members and team leaders, the roles responsible for the Four Business Capability Types around the business triangle (Develop, Sell, Deliver, and Support), and the Operational Purposes of different types of teams in a System of Teams. At times, these tensions might be personalized as conflict, or viewed as blockers to innovation rather than supporting it. However, creative tensions can and should be leveraged as a source of insight and innovation under the right conditions. This way of working depends on Depersonalizing Conflicts. (See Figure G.12.) This links to the Specifying Capabilities and Roles crucial conversation.

Limiting Stories and Beliefs

refers to team members managing stories and beliefs that negatively impact perceptions and performance. Examples include: “My teammates don't respect my skills and expertise because I'm new on this team.” “My team leader gives all the best projects to the teammates who are loud and ask for it. I'm not like that, so I have no chance here.” Often, we are so habituated by our self-talk that we have become unconscious that these limiting beliefs and stories are blockers. It cannot be overstated how important it is for team members to become aware of their own limiting stories and beliefs and manage them. This links to the Shifting Mindset conversation.

Manifesting Team Purpose

refers to putting a purpose or intention into physical reality through thought, feelings, and beliefs. It means that whatever you focus on is what you are bringing into your reality. The 7 Crucial Conversations are a cascade of conditions for teams to manifest their purposes. See Cascades of Key Conditions.

Measuring Performance

refers to team members assessing progress against people, process, and business metrics. This links to the Implementing Initiatives crucial conversation.

Natural Path (or Natural Development Path)

refers to the order in which transformation naturally unfolds in a complex adaptive social system, like a team or company. It comprises the best sequence for you to drive performance improvements in a complex system for maximum impact, and minimum resistance. See the Three Domains of Change.

Natural Creative Tensions see Creative Tensions. Nirvana Meeting

refers to an optimal strategic alignment process. In this ideal process, business segment leaders will present their business strategies, then functional capability leaders will respond with their functional strategies; natural creative tensions and conflicts will surface key strategic trade-offs, which will be resolved by the enterprise team, toward overall competitive advantage. See Strategic Planning Process.

Onboarding Team Members

refers to team members orienting new members to the team's purpose, priorities, behaviors, and ways of working. The objective is to acclimate new team members to the team's leadership mindset and shared ways of working. This links to the Aligning between roles way of working.

Operational Purpose Statements

refers to statements in team charters that describe a team's shared value streams. Types of teams in the system of teams will have different operational purposes. This links to the Activating Purpose crucial conversation. See Figure G16.

Optimal Path

refers to the ideal sequence of interventions or event horizons for evolving a complex system toward higher performance. The Three Domains of Change are a natural path that helps to reveal the optimal paths for leading social systems to higher performance. Primary constraint analysis reveals optimal paths. See Primary Constraint.

Organizational Structure

refers to how organizations divide roles, authority, and reporting relationships. This links to the Specifying Capabilities and Roles crucial conversation.

Organizational Swirl (the Swirl)

refers to a state of inertia in which teams and companies become so absorbed in the whirl of everyday problems, dramas, and turf battles that they don't feel motivated to think more clearly about a shared journey toward higher performance. The Seven Crucial Conversations are designed to enable teams and companies to break free of the Swirl. See Seven Crucial Conversations.

Primary Constraint

refers to the one key condition that currently most limits higher sustainable throughput or performance in the system. All systems will have a single primary constraint. Once you identify the primary constraint, you have two choices. You can choose to resolve it, and then the new one will emerge to take its place, requiring you to plan and manage any related event horizons. This process is called Vertical Performance Improvement. Alternatively, you can choose to optimize at the constraint, meaning that you intend to keep it where it is and use it as a single point of control for managing the system. This process is called Horizontal Performance Improvement. See Cascades of Key Conditions.

Primary Constraint Analysis

refers to team members analyzing those blockers that will have the most significant impact on performance when managed or resolved. See Cascades of Key Conditions.

Project management

refers to the process of planning and leading the work of a team to achieve all project goals within the given constraints. This links to the Implementing Initiatives crucial conversation.

Responsibilities

are duties to act. These duties relate to the Specifying Capabilities and Roles crucial conversation. See Accountabilities.

Role

refers to the function, responsibilities, and accountabilities assumed by a person or a team in a particular situation, scenario, or system. Roles are the building blocks of organizational structures. Roles may be defined by their title; however, they are much more than the title itself. A role definition should include a variety of aspects of daily work, including responsibilities, accountabilities, interdependencies, and business capabilities. This links to Architecting Systems of Roles.

Scrum

refers to an agile development methodology for teams to design, validate, and test solutions in an iterative and adaptive way. See Agile Innovation and Versioning.

Sensing

refers to a way of working in which leaders intentionally create and apply dynamic learning relationships with other leaders to clarify shared intentions, surface intuitions, and creatively follow a gut sense to anticipate and define risks and create opportunities. What is the ideal future state for the company? What are the gaps in the current state? What are the target milestones and breakthroughs for the company, as an adaptive social system? Ideally, the top leadership team is a sensing team, operating from a strategic purpose-driven perspective. See Dynamic Interpersonal Relationships.

Setting the Stage for the 7 Crucial Conversations

refers to the conversation that creates understanding and buy-in to the Seven Crucial Conversations as a basis for building high-performing teams. This book is designed to help with that.

Seven Crucial Conversations

(the 7CCs®) is a system of thought for building teams and growing and scaling companies toward competitive advantage through an optimal sequence of crucial conversations. This sequence aligns with the natural path of the three domains of change. As such, the 7 Crucial Conversations are a roadmap for transforming teams and companies. They include:

1. Activating Purpose
2. Driving Focus
3. Shifting Mindset
4. Specifying Capabilities and Roles
5. Streamlining Interdependencies
6. Aligning Strategies
7. Implementing Initiatives

These Seven Crucial Conversations play several roles in the journey of a team and organization. They establish the key conditions that a transformational template is based on. Each conversation includes specific ways of working that outline the basic ways in which the team is are going to interact and work together, becoming a shared language for a team's performance and growth.

Seven Crucial Conversations

and the Three Domains of Change. See Three Domains of Change.

Shared Purpose

refers to the reason a team or company aligns to create value and for which it exists. See Team Charter.

Single Journey Owners

refers to team members assigning each important topic to a “single journey owner” with clear accountability for resolution. This practice is an essential element in Effective Decision-Making, and it relates to the Activating Purpose crucial conversation.

Social Systems, Not Machines

refers to team members envisioning and leading teams and companies as systems of evolving relationships between people. They recognize that teams and companies are complex adaptive social systems, not mechanistic systems and that these systems evolve through crucial conversations, which require building dynamic interpersonal relationships. The Three Domains of Change describe how change naturally unfolds in these systems. This links to Setting the Stage for the 7 Crucial Conversations.

Socialware

refers to a system for working together in a social system that enables higher performance through shared ways of working. It is an upgrade for the human system in the same way that software can be an upgrade for a computer system. See Social Systems, Not Machines and Seven Crucial Conversations.

Solving Conflicts at the Source

refers to team members resolving conflicts directly, crossing hierarchical and functional lines as needed. This behavior is critical to giving and receiving feedback. It is also essential to Leveraging Creative Tensions, Aligning between roles, and Aligning Between Teams.

Speech Acts

refers to how some words and phrases are most pivotal to conversations, changing and aligning shared understanding around situations, relationships, and probable outcomes—for example, “you're fired,” “I'm sorry,” and “I'd like your help on this project.” Speech Acts links to Compelling Requests.

Stack Analysis

refers to team members applying an approach to analyze primary constraints for each level in a stack and then using the pattern to surface game-changers. A stack is a visualization of the set of components or subsystems needed for a complete platform or solution. See Five Pathways.

Stakeholder and Customer Analysis

refers to team members validating the perspectives and needs of customers and stakeholders as a basis to define value. It involves identifying the customer and stakeholder groups for which the team creates value and then drafting and validating user stories. This way of working links to the Activating Purpose crucial conversation. See Influence Analysis and User Stories.

Straightening the Spaghetti

refers to team members versioning and aligning capabilities, roles, and strategies to resolve redundancy and duplication toward higher performance. The challenge is that the circular interdependencies between strategies, capabilities, and roles make it necessary to iterate solutions. Each iteration must be thoughtfully led. An objective for high-performing teams is to navigate these iterations and event horizons with grace and style. (See Figure G.13.) This links to the Capabilities and Roles crucial conversation.

Strategic Planning Process

refers to the activities and meetings by which strategies are formulated, advocated, and aligned in a system of strategies. See Nirvana Meeting.

Strategies and Customer Experience

refers to the third of the three domains of change. See Three Domains of Change.

Strategy Canvases

refer to one- or two-page documents used to summarize, discuss, and align strategies. The Business Triangle is applied in the Growth River OS to structure business strategy canvases. See Figure G.14.

Strategy

refers to a framework of choices designed to achieve a particular goal. Ideally, these choices guide everyday work and decision-making to create the conditions for team and business success. Strategies outline the ideal future state to achieve and the path forward, including current priorities and planned breakthroughs. See the Aligning Strategies crucial conversation.

Swirl.

See Organizational Swirl.

System

refers to a group of things or parts that interact to create outputs or outcomes. To apply Primary Constraint Thinking you must visualize the system, describing its parts and how they interact. See Systems Thinking.

System of Capabilities and Roles

refers to the division of responsibilities and authority between roles for managing and improving specific capabilities. This links to the Capabilities and Roles crucial conversation. See Straightening the Spaghetti.

System of Customers

refers to the roles that different customers play at the center of the business triangle. Types of customers in this system include:

• Channels/Channel Partners: Resell or deliver your products and services.
• Clients/End Users: Use your products and services.
• Payers/Buyers: Pay for your products and services. It could be the same as clients/end users, but not necessarily.
• Gatekeepers: Control access to channels, clients/end-users, and payers.
• Influencers: Influence the choices of other roles.
• Markets/Personas: Types of customers that are grouped by similar attributes for focus and influence.
• See Stakeholder and Customer Analysis.

System of Meetings

refers to team members organizing meetings to cover the full scope of their shared work. This planning process includes team members setting aside time to work both in and on the business, with Chronos and Kairos agendas that balance vertical and horizontal improvement. This links to the Awareness of Focus. See Kairos and Chronos Balance.

System of Roles

refers to the division of roles within a team or organization. For a team, the system of roles depends on the purpose and the type of team and the capabilities to be managed. In a complete system of roles, every key issue, concern, capability, creative tension, and strategy has a capable owner and advocate. See Architecting Systems of Roles. See Figure G.19.

System of Strategies

refers to team members being clear about how the team's strategy aligns with and contributes to business and functional strategies. This way of working links to the Aligning Strategies crucial conversation. The seven types of strategies provide an excellent taxonomy for the different kinds of strategies in a complete enterprise system of strategies:

1. Enterprise Strategy
2. Business Segment Strategies
3. Develop Functional Capability Strategies
4. Sell Functional Capability Strategies
5. Channel Strategies (for those companies that need them)
6. Deliver Functional Capability Strategies
7. Support Functional Capability Strategies

System of teams

refers to the different types of teams in a mature enterprise (see Figures G.15 and G.16). These types follow the logic of the Business Triangle. They are a helpful template for writing Team Charters as part of the Activating Purpose crucial conversation.

Systems Thinking

refers to team members identifying, modeling, and analyzing systems. A system is a group of things or parts that interact to create outputs or outcomes. Analyzing a system begins with identifying its purpose, parts, critical interdependencies, and outcomes. See Primary Constraint Analysis.

Team

refers to a group of people who work together to achieve a shared purpose. Teams are the building blocks for scaling companies for creating effective cultures in companies.

Team Charter

refers to team members clarifying the team's purpose, outcomes, and in-team commitments. Different types of teams in a company's System of Teams will have different purposes. To truly activate purpose, team leaders must be licensed to create effective Leadership Clearings. Naturally, team charters need to align with organizational purpose (see Figure G.17). This links to the Activating Purpose crucial conversation. See System of Teams.

Team

Structures refers to the different ways in which teams can be organized and led. Capabilities to build and sustain these different team structures roughly correspond to the four Enterprise Evolutionary Stages.

1. Workgroups or Natural Teams
2. are a group working together to achieve common interests. The key point is that workgroups or natural teams are not led, designed, or developed intentionally as is the case with high-performing and self-managed teams.
3. Intact Teams
4. are teams with a single team leader responsible for team performance, dynamics, accountability, and continuous improvement. The team leader is fully in it with the team, doing the work of the team.
5. High-Performing Teams (HPTs) are intact teams designed and developed intentionally by the team leader and by implementing specific ways of working, using an approach like the 7 Crucial Conversations.
6. High-Performing Transformational Leadership Teams
7. are high-performing teams that are top leadership teams responsible for leading transformational change across multiple teams and stakeholder groups.
8. High-Performing Self-Managed Teams
9. are high-performing teams that are not intact teams but have been trained and coached to be self-managing. Self-managing teams will report to a leader, but they will not necessarily have all the leadership strengths of intact teams. This kind of team will report to a leader, but it will not necessarily have all the leadership strengths that intact teams will have. Agile work teams are typically a form of self-managed teams.

Throughput

refers to the flow through rate and capacity of a system to create intended value in a given time frame. See Systems Thinking.

Three Domains of Change

refer to the Natural Path by which transformation unfolds in social systems, including teams and companies.

Toxic Rock Star

refers to an individual who plays a critical role in the success of a team, business, or organization and has a negative impact on the effectiveness of others and organizational culture. Managing toxic rock stars and other sources of resistance is critical to leading change. See Leadership Clearing.

Transformational Change

refers to a shift in how something works that is significant, fundamental, and irreversible. In living systems, like teams or organizations, transformational change is a shift in leadership mindset or business culture, leading to profound changes in the organization's ways of being and working.

Transformational Change Leadership

refers to the art and the science of planning and leading transformational change and transformational journeys.

Transformational Journey Map

refers to team members mapping the team's journey from the current state to the ideal future state and planning steps on the journey. This links to the Driving Focus crucial conversation. Envisioning that “ideal future state” is the first step in being on a transformational journey together. The following is a four-step process for mapping out a shared transformational journey for a team, business, or organization.

1. A Vision for a Better Future: What is the ideal future state you're working toward?
2. The Urgent Need for Change: What is the current state, including the gaps and constraints?
3. Priorities for Tomorrow: Given those gaps and that ideal, what are your priorities from today to tomorrow? How can you get your immediate needs met? What initiatives will drive horizontal optimization of your current state?
4. Breakthroughs to the Future: What are the breakthroughs you're targeting to move from tomorrow to the future? What do we need to learn? What skills do we need to master? What initiatives or ahead-of-the-curve investments will drive vertical transformation?

If you're not aligned around these four elements, you're not on a transformational journey together. Once you are aligned around these, the team truly comes into focus. And it removes the anxiety that change often creates. See Primary Constraints.

Transformational Journey Mindset

refers to team members recognizing that the path of change will reveal itself through engagement and learning. They commit to fully engaging and participating in the transformational journey; even when journey outcomes are unknown, there are event horizons to manage and breakthrough experiences to facilitate. This links to Setting the Stage for the 7 Crucial Conversations.

Trust

refers to a belief or an experience that something is reliable, dependable, and true. In leadership, trust is a belief bestowed to unleash human potential. In relationships, trust is the residue of kept commitments. Broken trust is restored through giving and receiving feedback.

User Stories

refers to a format for representing and validating customer needs. The format is: in my role as ____, I need ____, so that ___. This approach is commonly used in Agile Innovation and Design Thinking methodologies. See Stakeholder and Customer Analysis.

Value Streams

are operational processes optimized for customers. Using the term value streams instead of similar terms like process or activity is a way for team members to signal the importance of remembering the customer. SIPOC (Supplier, Input, Process, Output, Customer) is an acronym for value streams from the worlds of Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing.

Versioning

refers to managing the interdependencies, ripples, and speed of change by ensuring a structured process for versioning releases and updates. Matrix organizations and companies are like big spider webs, where each strand is connected to countless others. Touching one strand will vibrate through the whole network. The challenge is to manage changes to these interdependencies, relationships, and ways of working, while each strand continues its work. This links to Engaged Response and Agile Innovation.

Vertical and Horizontal Balance

refers to team members intentionally leveraging the natural creative tension between roles focused on vertical versus horizontal performance improvement. Figure G.19 shows a complete system of roles in an enterprise team matrix. This balance is especially critical in stage 3 Distributed Leadership companies. See Vertical and horizontal improvement, Creative tensions, and Enterprise Evolutionary Stages.

Vertical Improvement

refers to improving the performance of a system by resolving and removing the limiting constraint, leading to a breakthrough that allows the team to attain a higher sustainable level of performance, awareness of focus, creative tensions, and disruption. See Horizontal Improvement.

Visualizing Shared Work

refers to team members visualizing workflows, processes, and systems as a basis for continuous improvement. We human beings are visual creatures. If we can see it and accurately name it, we can align to engage with it, whatever it is, together. Envisioning the processes and systems around us is the first step toward creating a shared language, defining accurate challenge statements, defining shared work, and aligning solutions. This links to the Driving Focus crucial conversation. Figure G.20 shows one method for teams to visualize shared work as a bullseye.

Visualizing the Matrix

refers to team members mapping the systems teams across the enterprise. See System of Teams and Enterprise Maps.

Ways of Working

refers to impactful agreements, deliverables, processes that enable teams to achieve higher performance. Artifacts of these ways of working serve as tangible evidence of a team's progress and continued commitment to higher performance. The ways of working in the Growth River OS are organized according to the Seven Crucial Conversations.