Consolidating Nuggets into Bars — A Menta-Morphosis Competency

Introduction:

Following a Mining Information session, we are often left with a list of nuggets.  If we are mining gold in South Africa, we’d have to melt those nuggets into gold bars befor they would be useful.  In this Menta-Morphosis competency, we turn the list of nuggets into something useful – an initiative or two – and maybe a Leap Forward.

This competency describes the  process of turning a few items into a consolidated fusion.

Used for

Turning a short list of selected items into one or two initiatives. An initiative is the statement of an act or strategy intended to resolve a difficulty or improve a situation. Think of it as a fresh approach to something.

Specifically, we use it after we have created a list of nuggets in a Mining Information session.

Input/ Output

The input is a list of nuggets in a Mining Information session, or a short list of items following a Prioritization session.

The output is a statement of the most positive action – an initiative.

How to

To use this competency for a list of nuggets:

1. Review the beginning list of nuggets.
2. Brainstorm. Develop a list of possible initiatives.

“We could ask, “What action(s) could we take that would answer the beginning question, and take into account our new understanding of the nuggets?” Notice that this is a brainstorming question and will typically produce more than one answer.   It’s possible that we will have a long list of possibilities.

3. Prioritize them, combining and editing where it is appropriate.

The next step is to turn the long list into a short list – in this case, one or two items to which we want to commit.  We make the big jump from what is – your list of nuggets — to what should be – our initiatives or ‘leap forward.”

However, it has been my experience that the leap forward is often obvious and rarely needs any teasing out.   It usually raises its head above the others and is clear to everyone concerned.

If that is not the case, and we have a long list of possibilities, then we Prioritize, and render them down to a short list — in this case, one or two actions that we feel answer the beginning question and represent a leap forward.

Let’s work with our example of the small businessperson with cash flow problems.

His list of nuggets (abbreviated for the purposes of our discussion) includes these Nuggets:

1.  There is more potential for purchases in most of our customers than we are currently enjoying.
2. Many of our customers would prefer to conolidate their purchases into more items from fewer vendors.
3. That it is possible to secure a lne of credit, using our receivables as collateral.

In this case, Leap Forward looks like this:

1. Make arrangements to secure a line of credit based on our receivables. This will give us some temporary operating capital.
2. Put together a “Primary Vendor “program, wherein we offer our customers the arrangement to buy almost everything from us, in return for a set of unique services/prices. If we can convince two or three customers to do this, we’ll have a monthly cash flow that will bring us the stability we need.

Notice that the “Leap Forward” describes a fairly radical change in the company’s operations.  They’ll need to tighten up their invoicing and receivables in order to meet the requirements of the ‘factoring’ vendor.  And, they’ll need to change the entire mindset of the company and the sales folks from selling products to offering custom-designed prime vendor contracts.  That change can filter through the organization and cause changes of all kinds.

So, “Consolidating Nuggets into bars” is a specialized version of “Brainstorming”  and “Prioritizing” which utilizes a list of nuggets to begin and produces a set  (or only one) initiative as an output. Sometimes, that initiative is a  “Leap Forward.”