Seven Rituals of Innovation

Welcome to the Force for Good tool of the week.

The Force for Good system is an elevated model of perpetual growth.

And so each week we introduce tools and mindsets that help you, your team and your company grow and prosper.

Did you start your company with the vision of creating positive impact for customers and team members alike, while also building prosperity and freedom for yourself?

But now maybe you feel like the business is more of a job and less of a calling?

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the challenges of scaling your company and keep trying new things, but find it difficult to see what's really working and really seeing progress?

You are not alone.

I have been there time and time again.

And what I invite you to know and receive into your heart is that a new way, a better way is available for you.

I want you to imagine being able to come to work every day, come into your business, or maybe even sit on a beach while your business is running.

And know that every single member of your team is aligned with the core values, the purpose and vision of your company and everybody on your team every day is getting up and knowing what their highest and best uses.

And every day, you and everyone on your team takes the most prolific, powerful, impactful action that the company needs to fulfill its goals.

And every day, you and your team members feel ready to bring their very best to the company, to the purpose, to the team, to each other, to your customers.

This is what the whole Force for Good system is designed for.

Today we're going to talk about the seven rituals of innovation.

We're going to introduce the idea to you, how it fits into the bigger model of the Force for Good system, why we use the word ritual and what the rituals themselves are so you can start to get going.

And a tool that you can use, the seven rituals of innovation roadmap that you can download.

You can implement these seven rituals and start to see the results.

Let's get started.

The Force Record system is an elevated model of leading high impact, high growth companies.

It's an operating system filled with rituals, habits and practices that you install a little bit of time into your company and you add certain activities, rituals into your company and that fosters innovation, growth and transformation.

The Force for Good system is a flywheel for growth.

It helps build your company, team you as a leader and it also inspires your own personal growth.

So the best of you is always coming forward.

The best of your team is always coming forward.

The seven rituals we're going to talk about today are the glute that makes it happen, the force, forget system is a flywheel.

I'm going to show you the three the essential tools.

The first one is the beautiful four page growth plan.

It is the flywheel.

It has four pages.

In those four pages are all the things you need to focus on your business.

Once you draft your four page plan, the next thing that we invite you to do is start the rituals.

As I'll talk about later, we want you to focus not on all seven at first, but on the weekly most important goal session and the monthly dashboard.

You and your team talk about and focus on certain parts of your four page plan.

So at the rituals, you look at the four page plan and you focus on different areas of it.

And it helps everybody to know exactly what to do, how to be of highest and best use, taking action or innovating on the habits that produce progress on your most important goals.

We like to have a most important goal at all time.

A 12 month breakthrough.

This is the wheel that allows the whole process to spin.

The third essential tool is the transformation map.

And this is the visual model of change.

So while on the four page plan, this is our core purpose, this is our customer, this is telling us what our products are, what our customer acquisition funnel looks like, all of our KPIs, what our financials look like, what our strategy is, what our short term and long term goals are.

It's telling us what we're working on.

It's our plan.

Whereas this transformational map is showing us what we need to do, both skills and creating systems and also what's going on inside of us.

So we bring to each of the rituals, the transformation map and the growth plan.

The Force crooked growth system is a growth system for your business.

First step you do is map out your business plan on the four page plan with every goal you have.

Use your transformational map to help you see what you need to do to create it.

And then you start your innovation rituals.

Your rituals help you to take the action, hold people accountable, create the culture, the feelings of belonging and connection.

So that every week, every day, every week, every month, every year, you are making progress on the goals that matter most.

All right, so what are the seven rituals?

Seven rituals is what allows you to spin your flywheel and you can get the roadmap for the rituals at a forceforgood biz weekly tool.

And now I wanna talk to you about the word ritual.

Why do we call it the seven rituals of innovation?

Why don't we call it seven Meads?

Right?

They are meetings in other companies, you might think of them as meetings but we use the word ritual to be very intentional.

Rituals are routines or ceremonies that are special and connect to us in a certain way.

They're meant to be more than just something you do out of rote habit.

They're meant to invoke a feeling.

Each step in a ritual is meaningful and follows a specific order that's familiar and comforting.

So as you start to install the rituals, they have an agenda in order and they start to become familiar because there's moments throughout it that create moments of connection, curiosity, acknowledgement, celebration.

It's a cherished practice that becomes part of your community and traditions.

And so as you're starting to install this, it's important that it we think about how to make it a cherished practice rather than just slamming it in the way that it's written on the page, which is the way that I've offered it to you in the roadmap.

You may need to think about your culture, your people, and modify it so that it fits who you are and so that it can become a cherished practice.

Maybe you start with somebody every week who tells a joke, right?

We did that with one, with one founder's team, you, you might have somebody on the team who always comes with a quote or a poem of the week, or maybe there's a song of the week.

So you want to create your weekly, your monthly, your daily, all of them.

You want to create them.

And so they do feel cherished and they bring us together.

Rituals bring us together, allowing us to share our values, allowing us to share our purpose, a vision, our values, and celebrate our milestones.

Through rituals, we strengthen our bonds with each other and we connect.

This is the idea behind the seven rituals of innovation.

We do annual retreats, quarterly reviews, monthly dashboards, weekly most important goal sessions, daily huddles, town halls and board meetings.

The word ritual here is important because it implies that we come together not just to talk about numbers, which if you do, it will probably make everybody uncomfortable and it may make people feel defensive.

It's more than their minds.

We want to have these rituals feel more embodied, more senses included, more laughter, more feelings, more feelings of excitement, fullness, curiosity, engagement.

So that these are not Flat Stanley experiences.

I don't know if you ever read the book Flat Stanley when you were a kid, but it's not about being flat.

It's about having a more robust experience and being engaged.

So the seven rituals at all of them, what we want to you is grab the two other essential tools, the force for good, four page plan and your transformational.

Map which is showing you these are the things we need to do, these are the thresholds we need to cross, these are challenges we are facing.

And so that as we go into each of these rituals, we are all talking from the same place and then we're revising it over time.

Each time is an opportunity to have the four page plan and the transformational map become a centerpiece of conversation.

A place where people can shine their wisdom and their light and where you can continue to iterate and make it even better.

We're going to go through each of these in more detail, but you'll see each one has a different timeline of focus.

The timeline of focus is on what are my actions, how can I be of the highest and best use?

What do we need to do in three to 10 years?

What do we need to do in six to 24 months?

Because if you never put attention on anything other than what you're doing today, or this week, or maybe this month, you will never reach those goals.

If you have a long term big vision and you don't have goals attached to it, and you don't have time associated with it, and in this case it's just an annual retreat, one and a half to two days a year, you don't dedicate at least that much time.

Chances are those visions, those ideas will never become reality.

Each of these rituals has a particular time horizon that it's focused on.

It's inviting us to become actualizing magnets and propagators and so that we can create all the things we desire.

Some of them, like the town halls, halls and board meetings, have a more general timeline and all encompassing timeline, whereas the others are dedicated to a specific time horizon.

Annual retreats, the objective is strategic planning for long term goals three to ten years out.

In the four page plan, you set a ten year goal.

You also set three year milestones, a twelve month breakthrough goal and quarterly milestones.

Quarterly goals.

And so in the strategic planning session every year you set those long term visions and goals and then every year you come back to it and you see where you you are and you revise.

So in the workshops of these annual retreats, which is described in the seven rituals of Innovation Roadmap, which you can receive at A Force for Good Biz Weekly Dash tool this week you will be able to see exactly what goes on in the annual retreat.

It is a series of workshops to help you define your core purpose, help you map out your customer, what your value proposition is, things like your core competitors, helping you identify your area of chosen greatness, how you want to grow your marketing funnel, which products and services to lean into.

Decide on your gross model.

And we have terms like the whale model, the deer model and the mouse model.

Which one is your model?

You can do the four page growth plan and figure out what that is.

It helps you figure out, okay, if These are our 10 year goals and we look at it in terms of impact, scale and profit, then what do we need to do?

How do we get there, what's our chronological strategy and what are our milestones three years from now, 12 months from now.

All of this happens in the annual retreat.

The outcome is you have a refined strategic plan, which is this four page plan.

And you also come away with everybody, all the different teams.

So your marketing team, sales team, product team, customer service team, financial team, everybody, cross function comes away with their most important goal and their most important leading indicators that leads to their goal.

All that leads to a 12 month breakthrough.

All that aligns with your 10 year goals.

So all this happens if your annual retreat, the details of that agenda are at a forceforgood biz weekly tool.

It's in the seven rituals of innovation Roadmap, the quarterly reviews.

Again, we come back to the same tools, right?

We come back to four page plan and the transformation map and we assess progress.

So we set the goals at the beginning of the year.

Now we're going to see where are we on our 12 month breakthrough goal, have we made progress?

Where are we on our quarterly goals, have we made progress?

Have we run into challenges?

And during the process we look at data, we look at our financials, we look at our KPIs that we've selected and we start to see how we're doing and if we need to make any adjustments, right?

This isn't where we think about the really big picture.

We don't try to adjust our 10 year goals here.

We think about what in the next six months and how is all of what we're doing affect the next 24 months?

Are we on track to our three year milestones?

Are we on track to being able to meet all of our goals and help us get to where we want to go?

The output is any adjusted strategies and renewed focus areas for the next quarter.

So again, you're going to come back to the four page plan.

You might make some adjustments in how you're going about it.

You'll also probably find new ways to measure success, right?

You might adjust your KPIs, you might come up with new ways for you and your team to do things so that you can produce more results.

Maybe if your 12 month goal is to double the number of customers, it has something to do with your customer funnel or some part of that funnel becoming better, improving or more streamlined.

Right.

So during your quarterlies, that's what you're going to do.

It generally takes about a day out of your quarter.

You could probably do it in half a day.

It's a great thing to do with your leadership team and then each of your teams.

So if you have a finance team and a marketing team, they can do it too, focusing on their goals, they're part of the picture.

Then on a monthly basis, this is one that I invite you to start right away.

You get together, you look at your four page plan, you remember where you're headed and where you're going.

What is my core purpose?

What are our values?

What what's the vision?

What's the 10 year impact goal?

What's our inception story?

Who's our customer, what do they need from us and what's our positioning and where are we trying to be great?

Where's our area of chosen greatness?

What's happening with our competition?

We don't make any changes.

We just remember this is who we are.

This is the context, the narrative under which our whole company is growing.

And then you start to look at the data, right?

You start to look at where am I today?

Where was I last month?

Where was I the month before?

You look at financials, so this is where you would look at your income statement or profit and loss statement.

You look at your balance sheet, you look to see what your cash flow statement looks like.

So you look at all that information and data.

You also look at all the other KPIs.

So you may have KPIs that are associated with your customer funnel.

If you're growing your customers, you may have it with something to do with customer service or customer success.

So you look at your data from the last, the last quarter, the last month, the year to date and you see how things are going.

But provides a snapshot of your key performance indicators to monitor the health and progress of your business.

And you review the data across all your functional teams, focusing on critical metrics that align with short and midterm objectives.

At the end you have clarity about how to continue to improve towards your 12 month breakthrough goal and other quarterly goals.

Then we move on to the weekly session.

The weekly session is a dedicated time separate from all other meetings where you focus with your team.

So if you have a team of less than 8, then it's all of you together.

If you start to have more than eight, then you start to need to make it into more than one team.

But you meet with your, we call it the Mig team, your Ming session team.

You get them together every week and you focus on helping everyone make progress on their most important goal that contributes to the 12 month breakthrough goal.

So it's not about everything that's going on.

This is not a progress report meeting.

This is a clear meeting on the 12 month breakthrough that you are going to have in your company.

Now this idea of a 12 month breakthrough is really important because what happens is we start to say, oh, we have five goals this year or I have three goals this year.

And what ends up happening is the most important goal gets left behind.

It's the most important, the one that probably needs the most attention.

The one that when you finally resolve it makes all the difference and makes all the other goals happen faster.

People worry, look, I need to have more than one goal.

I have to accomplish more than one goal.

It doesn't mean you won't accomplish the other goals, trust me.

It means that in the wake of this most important goal, those other goals will also likely get handled or they become infinitely more easy to take care of.

So this is a weekly opportunity for everybody on the team to iterate to come together, be curious and say, how can I be of highest and best views this week on that breakthrough, on doubling our number of customers, on creating this new product and getting it out to market, on improving our average revenue per customer.

Whatever your big breakthrough is, that will make all the difference everywhere else.

And so every week you come in and everybody in every team, so every functional team has one big breakthrough goal that's aligned with the company breakthrough goal.

And then you have lead indicators, so one team goal and three other leading indicator goals and then everybody individually contributes to those and comes with their metrics and talks about, okay, this week here's what I accomplished and this was my results.

I, I said I was going to do 20 sales calls and I did 17.

The result was I was able to get from those 17 calls I was able to convert five.

Right?

So here was my conversion rate and here's what I did and, and, and here's what I did differently last week and here's what I want to do differently this week.

It's a focused conversation, innovation, conversation where you create connection, excitement, you can create contests that are team based.

When everybody hits a certain goal, then you celebrate or individual based or anybody who passes A certain threshold, whatever it is, you create connection and acknowledgement.

And all the time, even when you, when you say, well, my goal was to do 20, but I did 17.

17 is still good.

Tell us about the 17.

So we always look for what's good.

We always identify the lesson, we always identify the next step.

It's never about the not enough factor.

This is one of the important things about the weekly MiG.

You acknowledge your success, you acknowledge your lessons learned, you acknowledge each other, you state gratitudes.

It's all part of the regular ritual.

And you set up new ideas, everybody comes up with a new hypothesis, a new experiment to try.

And so the output is everybody has that weekly action plan, weekly commitment, here's what I'm going to do this week, then you come back the next week and say last week I committed to X and here's what I did.

So that's how it works.

And in that time period you really focus on fostering a place where people feel connected, belonging, acknowledged, accepted, all those good things.

Then we have the daily huddle.

The daily Huddle is quick.

You do it in small groups of under eight.

You, you can read about in the seven rituals of innovation roadmap, you can read about it and hear about what you do in the daily Huddle.

But basically you're checking in to prioritize the actions that are focused on your 12 month breakthrough.

And so definitely you're going to have all these things other than your 12 month breakthrough happening.

You're always going to have customers calling, you're always going to have buyers to put out.

You're always going to have things in your email that you didn't expect.

This is again creating a precious space to do those things that move forward your 12 month breakthrough.

Because if you don't in on a daily way, they won't happen.

So this is where we fall short, right?

We set these goals and then life takes over and we never do the things that we need to do.

In all in order to cultivate the breakthrough, we're going to cultivate doubling the number of customers you have.

So this is where it happens.

And every day we support one another.

Not by saying you have to make time, let's talk about how to help you get the time.

Let's figure out how to reposition your day.

You need time off the phone.

Suzy in customer service, John is going to take the calls between 9 and 11, so you can do the things that are of highest and best use for the business for you to do and it's going to help us move forward.

So that's how it works on a daily basis.

It's a quick stand up type of meeting.

Members share their daily goals and highlight any immediate needs or blockers.

And the output is just knowing what to do.

Everybody knows what to do.

How do I create impact today on the long term goal?

Again, you can get this at a forceforgood biz weekly tool.

The next ritual is town halls.

These are when the whole company gets together either in one physical location, if you can do that, or in a virtual or hybrid environment.

The idea is to foster a small a strong company culture, align the entire organization.

This is where you do more and more language about your trainings on core purpose, core values, your long term 10 year impact goal.

You talk about the inception story, tell the stories of your company, you tell stories of your customers.

There's a whole bunch of tools that are part of the Force for Good system and you can get the whole toolkit when you buy the book.

The customer journey, for example, is a great example of a activity you can do in the town halls.

Each town hall is an opportunity to connect, to share parts of that four page plan and to unite your workforce so that everyone feels motivated, informed, engaged, acknowledged and that they belong to a company that cares about them, cares about a purpose, cares about their customers.

And the last is the board meetings.

And for many, many founders, especially those who don't have outside investors, board meetings may not be something you typically do.

I strongly encourage all founders to form advisory boards or have an official board.

The idea is so that you can hold yourself accountable and have a rhythm of sharing what's going on.

It's really to leverage external expertise and receive the help of others.

If the people on your board can help make connections work for you, that is also a great way to build your company.

I recommend four times a year you meet with your board of directors or advisors and you talk about what's on your plan.

You discuss the challenges you're facing in the transformational map.

You ask for guidance.

You just come away with strategic decisions that guide your company's long term direction.

Ensuring that you have compliance in alignment with industry standards and stakeholder expectations.

So those are the seven rituals.

I invite you to start with a simple weekly and monthly ritual where you review your most important KPIs.

A great way to get started is to go back a few weeks on the force for good show.

We did one on the four page growth plan.

So get the four page growth plan, map that out with your team and then every week come back and look at the KPIs, the key key performance indicators, the weekly map of data to help you move towards a 12 month breakthrough monthly look at your critical reports, look at your financials, start to see how you can align and then get the Innovation Rituals Roadmap and pick that up as part of what you can get at a forceforgood Biz Weekly Tool.

Get that there this week.

It's the free tool of this week and you can pick that up and it's a detailed agenda for each one of these rituals that you can implement.

I recommend that you get the book A Force for Good because it outlines all of the rituals itself.

So in the book you can get the rituals and all the tools in the toolkit.

You can also work through through a guided program.

The Force for Good Growth Accelerator.

You can get at a ForceForGood biz accelerator and it helps you install create each of the parts of the four page plan and helps you install each of these rituals over time and talks about the leadership concepts surrounding them.

So a lot today and I thank you for being a part of my journey and I hope you will come and visit me.

Go to the website, grab the business tool and schedule a time with me.

Find me on LinkedIn comment below and let me know any tips on how you create a great weekly monthly quarterly meeting with your teams.

What are the tips that make these rituals more special, more engaging, more safe for our team members to interact?

As I always like to say, the word world is made better by women led business.

So let's all go make the world better.

Agenda R and A forceforgood Biz Weekly Tool.