Project 10X
Unleashing the ‘10X Shift’ in Individuals and Organizations
Never has the business environment been so challenging and performance bar so high for organizations. Businesses must learn to innovate, perform and adapt better, faster and more economically than ever before – while still continuing to deliver their short- and medium-term results. That’s a steep hill to climb even with the best people. Yet the odds are that close to two-thirds of your workforce is disengaged.
In solving this conundrum, business leaders are faced with three critical challenges:
Project 10X is a strategic capacity-building framework that helps your organization address these three challenges while growing your company’s overall capacity for adaptive learning and change.
While many organizations invest their training and development dollars in one or more of the three areas, those efforts tend to be isolated and piecemeal, thus rarely achieving the desired lasting shift in culture and organizational capacity.
Project 10X ‘works the sweet spot’ where the three capabilities ‘dance in dynamic concert’ and multiply each other, growing the organization’s adaptive capacity at every level of system.
Project 10X is distinct from more traditional, packaged, classroom-based, push-style training programs in several ways:
If you would like to explore Project 10X for your organization, please contact Max Shkud or Bill Veltrop
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“In the industrial age, an exemplary worker might produce 25% more than average; now, a great engineer may create two-hundred times the value of an ordinary engineer” – Jay Cross
We agree with Jay Cross. This is why Project 10X is designed to grow an organizational culture and environment where everyone is inspired, supported, and has opportunities to create 10X shifts in the lasting value of their contribution — a culture where such growth is organic, fulfilling and fun — where it is a norm and basic expectation.
“If you were to create a 10X shift in the lasting contribution you are making to the organization and its stakeholders, what would it look like?”
At the core of Project 10X is a powerful concept and process we call ‘10X Commitments’. It is a personal commitment to a radical shift in the lasting contribution one is making to the organization and the world. “10X” refers to an order-of-magnitude shift, one that feels impossible – a shift that demands exploration outside the box of one’s current thinking – a shift that requires creative collaboration. The following features help provide a better sense of the 10X Commitments process:
What is the design for a Project 10X initiative?
The design of Project 10X is customized to the unique culture and challenges of the client organization. Here is one picture of how Phase 1 of Project 10X might unfold:
What organizations should consider Project 10X?
Project 10X could be relevant for complex organizations in any sector (private, public or NGO). Some of the criteria for a good fit might include:
Why is Project 10X a potent leadership development strategy for an organization?
Traditionally, leadership development has focused on developing the leadership abilities and attitudes of individuals. In recent years there has been more attention to ‘systemic leadership development.’
Project 10X goes beyond both definitions by focusing on developing leadership ‘capable of transforming today’s complex, non-linear, whole-system challenges into rich opportunities’ to grow the many organizational capacities to survive and thrive in a world of uncertainty and turbulence.
Project 10X is pioneering new leadership development territory. Cohort participants will be discovering and inventing pragmatic, highly valued ways of addressing highly urgent systemic challenges facing the organization – all the while consciously growing the organization’s ‘capacity-building capacity.’
Project 10X is based on the assumption that the development of leadership for today’s world is a ‘pull’ rather than a ‘push’ challenge.
| PUSH | PULL | |
| Organization | Machine-like, hierarchy, rigid, static | Living organism, network, flexible, dynamic |
| Strategic stance | Assumes demand is predictable; anticipates | Assumes the world is unpredictable; poised to respond in opportunistic ways |
| Challenges | Predictable, linear, isolated | Complex, non-linear, interconnected |
| Change | Top down, centralized, staged | Organic, distributed, driven by feedback loops, always evolving |
| Innovation | Planned, directed, controlled, linear | Everywhere, all the time, exponential |
| Learning | Formal, training programs | Informal, learning environments |
| Motivation | Extrinsic, carrot-and-stick | Intrinsic, purpose-driven, fulfillment |
| Optimized for… | Control, predictability, efficiency, conformity, compliance | Innovation, responsiveness, engagement, learning, collaboration, resilience |
Project 10X initiatives will be designed as generative initiatives. These 10 Design Principles for Generative Initiatives will help illustrate the potency of this approach.
How does Project 10X build organizational capacities? What capacities are you referring to?
Phase 1 of an organization’s Project 10X initiative would focus on the organizational capacity that the leadership team agrees is its highest priority — the capacity most important to now and future sustainability and thrivability of the organization.
Examples of potentially important organizational capacities include —
The selection of the ‘organizational capacity’ that the leadership team sees as its top priority is a crucial step in a Project 10X initiative. Ideally the team spells out why developing this capacity is so important and is truly united around its priority. Some rationale for its importance:
The 3-Span Bridge Lens distinguishes organizational capacity building from individual capability building:
Who would be engaged in a typical Project 10X initiative?
How can my organization justify the time investment from the participants?
A Project 10X initiative will take a significant investment of time and attention from the participating changemakers (i.e. cohort members.) Let’s look at how some of the most innovative companies in the world justify such investments.
Google, 3M and W.L. Gore allocate 10-20% of their employees’ time on self-directed innovation. And that’s only part of the investment. These companies understand that critical systemic capacities – such as “Meaningful Innovation Everywhere, All The Time” – don’t get built through slogans, famed guest speakers, classroom trainings, copied best practices and/or top-down culture change efforts. Building strategically important systemic capacities requires time, attention and ownership from the carriers of the organization’s culture — formal and informal leadership throughout the organization. This would ensure that change is (a) meaningful, (b) well supported, and therefore (c) lasting.
Whether your organization is ready and willing to tap its best and brightest talent is a good test. Just how important is the desired systemic capacity to your organization’s success?
Why do you emphasize ‘quality of relationships’ so strongly?
Please refer to the Quality of Organizational Energy picture and Quality of Relationships and Agreements charts.
Developing high-quality co-creative relationships plays a pivotal part in evolving and bringing to life the 10X commitments of the Project 10X participants.
In addition, over the last 12+ years we have seen strong consensual validation from multiple organizations that there is an exponential relationship between quality of relationships and such organizational variables as —
Quality of Relationships is not the only important variable. However, it always seems to be one of the top 1-3 factors associated with both dysfunctional/toxic and sustainable/generative cultures.
You emphasize the open-ended, organic, self-managing, self-evolving nature of Project 10X initiatives. Why is this important?
We’re entering a new era where the Industrial Age ‘PUSH-approaches’ to leadership development are grossly inadequate. The increasingly complex, systemic, non-linear and interdependent challenges facing organizations today demand approaches to development that are more ‘PULL-style’ – organic, open-ended, purpose-filled, self-managing, self-propagating and self-evolving.
We are convinced that organizations that have mastered the art of weaving the capacity for systemic learning and change throughout the fabric of their operations will have an enormous competitive and collaborative advantage in these turbulent times.
What is the difference between leadership skills and systemic capacities?
Systemic capacities can be seen as complex and purposeful configurations of skills, relationships, stories, visions, values, processes, structures, etc. that enable the system to survive and thrive in rapidly changing environments.
So while systemic capacities certainly include leadership skills, they go much beyond them. Systemic capacities cannot be attributed to any particular individual or even a group; rather, they are a property of the whole system – they, in essence, ‘live’ in individuals, relationships, stories, visions, structures, etc. – the ‘social fabric’ of the organization. This is why growing systemic capacities is a much bigger challenge than building individual leadership skills, but also a much wiser investment in the organization’s long term success – an investment that has a much higher ‘True ROI’.
Please review ‘How does Project 10X build organizational capacities?’ to get some clues for what is involved in systemic-capacity building.
You may ask, what kind of leadership is required for the special work of building new organizational capacities? The leader capabilities we’ve found most important include —
Project 10X is designed in a way that naturally helps leadership grow these individual capabilities in the service of growing crucial new organizational capacities.
What outcomes can be expected from a Project 10X initiative?
Project 10X is designed to organically grow an organization’s capacity for learning and change critical to surviving and thriving in the rapidly changing world. In particular, Project 10X aims to:
Because of the open-ended nature of Project 10X, more specific outcomes will vary depending on the challenges and focus selected by the sponsoring leadership team. At the very least, the participants will:
What are the costs and potential risks of a Project 10X initiative?
Out-of-pocket costs — GlobalGEA is offering to design and guide the initial phase of an organizational Project 10X initiative on a pay-for-performance basis:
Other costs — The larger investment is the time and attention required of the cohort and management. See “Who would be engaged in a typical Project 10X Initiative?”
Potential risks
The risks are miniscule if —
Meeting those two conditions will ensure minimal risk. Why? Because the harvest in terms of leadership development (for both the cohort and the leadership) can far outweigh the total costs — independent of the immediate systemic outcomes.
Why is GlobalGEA offering to do Project 10X on a ‘pay-for-performance’ basis?
Though the many elements of the Project 10X approach have been proven in various organizational projects and initiatives, we are pioneering new territory. GlobalGEA’s pay-for-performance offer reflects both a willingness to share the risk — and a confidence of the generative value-adding potential of this approach.
Assuming there is Project 10X Phase 2, how might it be different?
Every organization is unique, with its own culture and character, its own history and mix of challenges and opportunities.
Phase 1 is truly a phase of exploration and learning — a vehicle for beginning to explore the highest potential of the organization and its members.
Phase 1, if engaged fully, will be full of rich learning and growth for all involved. As we move together toward the conclusion of Phase 1, we will have a solid basis for deciding if there is to be a Phase 2, and if so, how it should differ from Phase 1.
The possibilities are endless, e.g., it could be optimal —
