How to get good feedback

Postcards from Rethink Central

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How do you get good feedback on what’s happening with a large team?

My name is Liz Scully and

for many years I worked in the film industry.

Often I was brought in to a production just as it had managed to produce the first one or two episodes of a series. I will be brought in to make the many other episodes as smooth as possible.

What we were aiming for was a sausage factory.

I remember one particular show that when I arrived they had done the first episode and it had taken a year and a half. The second episode took six months. I was brought in to speed that up. And by the end, the 40th episode was only taking 3 weeks.

A year and a half down to 3 weeks. That kind of optimisation is what I specialised in.

Imagine a factory where the output is images and story. Final frames on the TV, final frames on the film. That’s what I did. It’s like optimising a factory.

So, I was brought in and, of course, there are people there who have struggled to make the first thing. And part of why the first episodes of anything take a long time is you have to build a set, you have to work out how you’re going to do it. It’s always going to take longer.

So I learnt that turning in and going ’Why the hell are you doing it this way?’ was not going to get me anywhere.

The question that I found truly opened people up,

and this is something I use in coaching all the time, is I would look at something and say

‘tell me the thinking behind that.’

And that opened it up. This is years before I was a coach but that is a classic open coaching question.

Because tell me the thinking behind something, is exactly that. People would explain that there used to be a problem with so-and-so and they learnt to do it this way or this piece of software isn’t very effective or even, that they had a really annoying production manager and they insisted on this piece of reporting.

With that information, we could change things.

We could then wind back and suggest that maybe that person wasn’t in place or we weren’t using that software anymore.

Now with my strategy clients, I often find that they’ve become convoluted almost stuck in a way of working. Part of what I do is prise hands away from doing too much and making things over-complex.

Because one of the joys of what I do is I can help people see that making money is actually quite straightforwards. Finding clients, it’s all very, very basic. We can do it. It’s not hard. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. But we can simplify the process.

A few places where we concentrate our thoughts, we can wind back that stress and

make everything easier and more free-flowing.

I want that for you and I’m really glad that we can start from that point of what is the thinking behind that.

If you have questions about your own business come along to one of my regular Q&A sessions. There’s a box below just drop your email in there. It would be lovely to see you.

Next live call is October 10, 2023 - Noon Eastern / 5pm UK.
Come along to ask your questions about launches, strategies for marketing, Masterminds or whatever you're stuck on in your business.

Add your email below and I'll send you the zoom info for the calls. See you there!

Or come say hello on Instagram here.  I microblog daily.