A note from me

I am both excited and exhausted at the moment. 

Excited because we are finally going live with The Dodo Club! I hope you've been finding the newsletters valuable and that you are ready to take this next step with me.

I intend for the Dodo Club to be an empowering place for us to encourage each other, and share the insights we’ve gained through our experiences. Inspired by our avoiding the fate of that unfortunate dodo bird, the aim is to build a stimulating and sustainable community that empowers us to thrive both individually and collectively. 

This has been quite an exhausting time as well. 

(And not just from the time and effort that has gone into building our new community!)

I've been doing a lot of work helping guide the production of new Scenario Foundations for the World Energy Council in advance of this week's World Energy Congress. Then I spent two days with one of the international organisations where I'm a senior advisor. After all this I then went to a different city to lead a masterclass in an executive programme for a university business school. Busy, to say the least.

At the weekend I couldn't fully relax as my beloved Everton Football Club had a must-win game in their quest to avoid relegation from the Premier League. So, a lot of stress. They didn't play well which made things doubly stressful but at least they won in the end. Phew!

Now I'm at the World Energy Congress where I'm on a couple of panels and I've just recorded a podcast on Talking Transitions. Double- phew!!

Like Everton, I maybe need to work on my resilience. Most of us probably need to work on this as well. I hope The Dodo Club will be a space where we can encourage and motivate each other.

My Bi-Weekly Guide

Developing Our Dodo Club Community

In our last Newsletter, we considered rich relationships, their characteristics and their importance in a thriving community.  In this Newsletter, we focus on some additional features of such a community, drawing on my experience of the characteristics of high-performance teams.  If you are particularly interested in this topic, I’ll cover it in more depth in one of the future online courses I am preparing.  

With some reference to developing the Dodo Club community, these “high-performance” characteristics relate to: 

1. Assembly:
Clearly, any team will comprise a number of roles which, although they may overlap, need to be filled by people with the necessary competence and experience to contribute. Premier League football teams need a squad with goalkeepers, defenders, midfielders and strikers.  Everton’s thin squad of competent strikers is the primary reason they are struggling at the moment.
However, there is much more to assembling a team than putting people in boxes. 

A wise, retired head of a major university taught me that, as long as their basic needs can be met, people would do the things they love without any financial reward.  Of course, any activity also requires attention to things we don’t love, and people generally need to be paid to do those. That’s why salaries are often called “compensation”!! Fortunately, different people love different things, so an art in team assembly is creating the best matches between what different individuals already love to do and the different activities that need to be done. 

In our case, we are gathering a community rather than assembling a team.  However, this has the advantage of being a voluntary activity that we are choosing to join and invest in because we are particularly interested in, or “love”, the topics we hope to explore together. That’s already a good starting point for developing a thriving, high-performance community.

2. Strategic Narrative:
Each high-performance group evolves a clear understanding of their essential  nature and direction. I call this Strategic Narrative. It is not just a sound bite, although it may be possible to summarise it in this way. Importantly, neither is it a long, 20+ page document!  

Each team member should be able to express this strategic narrative succinctly, and in their own words. For the Shell scenario team I used to lead, our strategic narrative was summarised as, “surfacing important insights and bringing these to life in the minds and actions of top decision-makers”.

As a starting point, my sound bite expression of the strategic narrative of the Dodo Club is “a stimulating, sustainable and learning community that encourages forward thinking and resilience that is helpful to each other, and others”.

3. Credible performance feedback:
There needs to be a mechanism for a team to understand how well it is achieving its purpose or strategic narrative, learn from this, and adapt accordingly. This mechanism can also be helpful in demonstrating the credibility of the team to others.  

This will be important for our community in both remaining vibrant and also gathering new members that can benefit from participation. You can expect plenty of opportunities to give feedback in the Dodo Club!

4. Positive emotional energy:
A high-performance team develops a “positive vibe”. Successes are celebrated – both collective and individual. Difficulties are shared and support is forthcoming. There will always be ups and downs, but the positive emotional energy carries individuals and the team through the roller-coaster days. 

In the Dodo Club, we will need to share with one another, be authentic and honest in our opinions, but also be encouraging about what is going well and how the Club can improve. 

5. Legacy mentality:
A high-performance team develops a collective sense that it is participating in something important or noble and that, 10 years ahead, members will be able to look back on what they are doing now as significant. That their attention and participation has left a legacy in their own lives and has also benefited others.  

Different members of the Dodo Club will participate to different degrees – we all have our own circumstances and different interests. But I hope that, collectively, we will be benefiting each other in a particular way and developing an approach to different circumstances that promotes better lives on a healthy planet.  

I hope that someday, the Dodo will become a Phoenix!

Question of The Fortnight

Every fortnight I’ll be asking a thought-provoking question in hopes of sparking interesting and enlightening discussion.

I’d love to hear your response! You can do so by simply responding to this email.

Today’s question is:

What does community mean to you?

Join The Dodo Club

The Dodo Club is officially live!!!

This is a space for collaboration, learning and mutual support; and I would love to see you there.

In the interest of avoiding that unfortunate bird, the dodo, this community aims to help us secure our legacies and to leave a better planet for future generations.

Dodo Clubbers will have access to weekly webinars, our community resource hub, weekly themed discussions, and Q&A sessions. Once in the community, members can access roundtable discussions mediated by, original learning material, and 1 on 1 coaching sessions with myself.

To be a part of the discussion and to have your voice heard, please join the community through the button below.

I can’t wait to show you everything we have in store, see you there!