“It is not often that I get the opportunity to read a book that is informative, provocative, useful, and funny. Kery and Tim have done an exceptional job of balancing purposeful content with inviting questions of reflection coupled with practical handouts. Add Performance-Eating Rabbits to your must-read list.”
Creating robust improvement can be daunting and difficult. At times, you may feel like the magician who must quickly and magically pull a rabbit out of a hat!
While we wish we could make results happen like a magician, more often the Performance-Eating Rabbits (PERs) are not cute or cuddly. They often are not pulled from a hat. They emerge from a different orifice - hence a brown Performance-Eating Rabbit has emerged along with their performance-eating cousins. Yikes!! Rabbits of this variety have one priority: to devour and destroy the performance you were hoping to achieve and/or sustain in your organization.
Performance-Eating Rabbits come in many different types, sizes and appetites. They are hungry and anxious to eat your improvement initiatives early and often. PERs live in your sphere of influence and may be difficult to spot. They blend in easily with their surroundings. These furry creatures could already be wreaking havoc and preventing new innovative ideas. They swiftly derail the outcomes you were hoping to achieve. If you are complacent with the status quo and allow PERs to exist, they will derail any chance of achieving success for your enterprise.
Through our experiences, we have identified and characterized seven types of Performance-Eating Rabbits. This chapter provides insight on how to recognize each PER, their characteristics, and how they work both independently and in concert with other PERs.
In addition to seeing the system and its components, we also must be BOLD in our approach to establish, drive and measure the strategy of our organizations. What is BOLD? It is a simple acronym that provides a framework for describing the behaviors exemplar strategists exhibit, while driving results that can (and should be) achieved in their organization. BOLD is simply:
B – Be authentic to your core values – regardless of your circumstances.
O – Open-minded to new ideas and ways of thinking.
L – Lead with courage and humility.
D – Define new standards for excellence and performance in yourself and others.
This publication provides a colorful road map to rapidly drive transformational results. We leverage a creative and measurable blend of performance technology tools that align with the strategic needs and underlying purpose of the organization. The innovative nature of this conceptual blend breathes new life into the tried and true standard tools of learning, organizational development and performance technology. It also leverages measurement tools and impactful story-telling techniques. The practical application of this process rapidly enables the reader to identify, select, communicate, implement and measure a strategic plan (while keeping a pulse on the cultural fabric of the organization). Each of these systematic stages of the performance technology process presents readers with challenges we like to call “ledges.” It is these ledges that we must rapidly decide to either pull our organization from, or simply push them off, while always being aware of the dangers the “Performance-Eating Rabbits”present.