Author: Thierry Altenhoven, PMP

A special keynote was part of the Annual Members Meeting (AMM 2022) on the 10th of February. It was called “Impact Warrior Excellence: How To Master Tough Times!" and was presented by the special guests Michelle Xue Wang and Florian T. Hochenrieder.

Michelle and Florian both inspired and guided us to successfully lead ourselves and our teams through the tough and uncertain future.

Michelle is an award-winning keynote speaker and author of six books. She is a trusted advisor for global top companies, a master of exchange of change projects and sought after executive coach. Michelle describes herself as an impact warrior and survival talent. Today, she helps project leaders, executives and entrepreneurs, with her experience and expertise, to lead themselves and to shape their personal and professional change.

Florian lives and loves effective leadership. He has been doing it for almost 24 years. He delivers strong impulses and best practices for your leadership and business successes. Florian also teaches the SuccessFactors of bold digital leadership. He has successfully guided over 5000 executives and entrepreneurs worldwide to greater leadership and impact.

During the keynote, Michelle and Florian went through 6 pillars, the "6 C", the foundation to act like an excellent impact warrior, along life, the career or projects.

VUCA3

Victory loves preparation…and agility

Before showing how to master tough times by leading ourselves and others for impact and excellence, the environment had to be taken into consideration first.

They reminded us that we live in a VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous world). According to Florian, this VUCA world has been existing for a long time. (For example, the Egyptians during the building of the pyramids were already in this world). When he makes a flashback of his life, he also faced a VUCA world at each step of his career. So, it is an usual state of the current reality. That's why he reframed VUCA in a more positive way and translates it with the V for Victory loves preparation, Uncertainty replaced by Unfair advantages in the sense that we are clearly positioned and we create significant value-add for our stakeholders, C for turning Chaos into Clarity and A, 3 times with be Agile, be Adaptable and be Aligned with a great honorable cause.

Lead yourself

To perform the Impact Warrior Excellence, it's all about leading ourselves because the only enemy we have is ourselves. The idea is to stare down the bad rules inside ourselves and to nourish our inner positive and impactful energy. We are able to inspire, enable and lead others by our example.

Y = f(x_i) = 6C!

When we talk about impact, it stands for your results, your targets, your objectives, your outcome that you want for yourself, your team, your company and for your life. Michelle and Florian created a formula (see above subtitle). The Y is the impact, it is a function of several factors (x_i) influencing this impact. To maximize the impact, it has to reach excellence. Excellence is being effective, being efficient and being elegant at the same time. The 6C are the keys to reach the Impact Warrior Excellence.

80 / 20 / 0 / 0 -> 30 / 30 / 30 / 10

In our daily business but also sometimes in our life, we spend our time through a state of 80, 20, 0, 0. We waste 80% of our time, energy, resources and money on daily emergencies, on mails, on meetings, on tasks, on issues that distract us, get us off track, make us stressed. Just 20% of the time is used for the daily business, the standard work, the activities where we create value for our customers, our stakeholders. At the end, 0% is spent for space for continuous improvement and for strategic projects. And 0% is used to recharge, to re-energize, to stay on a high performance level. Florian discovered what some excellent companies do (excellent means: effective, efficient and elegant). They follow the state of 30, 30, 30, 10. 30% of the time are here for the top issues, mails, tasks, changes of scenarios. 30% (instead of 20) are at disposal to create real value in an excellent manner. 30% can be dedicated for improvements, for Kaizen, for changes. At his company, when Florian gave 4 to 8 hours per week for continuous improvement, for special projects, it was a game changer for him and his employees, letting the potential of each other make an impact on the business. And finally, 10% is a buffer for these 3 areas of work and for self-awareness.

After talking about the environment, the main formula and the repartition of time in business, place to the 6C, pillars of the Impact Warrior Excellence.

Clarity: why (not)?

Know yourself, know your scenario (the Spartans)

Michelle introduced the first C: Clarity. Know yourself, your goal, define your success. To know yourself, ask yourself first: who am I, where I want to go, what are my strengths and weaknesses, which competencies and resources will bring me to my goal, where am I now, where can I get those competencies and resources to bring me to my goal. In a second step, identify your unique niche. A niche can be a domain, an industry, a type of job, in which you are a genius and you can spend hours without having the feeling of work. The third step is to identify a potential market. And the last question to answer: will people pay for it?

Florian brought us further than the typical approach: to know your why, your what and your how. Asking the why but also the why not is better because it permits to identify both sides of your why and to say "no" to the things out of your focus. The same for the what and what not (some tools and methods like Hoshin Kanri, balanced scorecard or OKR method facilitate the answers to these questions). And the same for the how and how not? How do you get things done? You start to think lean, to get into an agile mode.

Courage: W.I.N.

Intelligence preserves. Courage evolves (Frederic II)

The second C is Courage. To illustrate Courage, Michelle told us a part of her youth, expatriating to Germany from China, without knowing the language, faced with a difficult reality to have a first job but with all her courage, she could find her way to success. For Florian, courage is based on what is necessary? and after you ask yourself this question, you get into your fear, you take uncomfortable actions and you consciously step out of your comfort zone. What you discover is that learning moments will happen, especially when it is done with your team, or your private circle. We are the average of the 5 persons we are the most with. So select your destination, your team, your business. Inspire them to get into courage mode, ask them what is necessary for them? And train that again and again, like a courage muscle, with the intention to impact! (The formula W.I.N. will be explained at the end.)

Collaboration: VOPA+

Collaboration determines success (Henry Ford)

Collaboration is the third C and Michelle reminded us that we are all social creatures. We can grow, succeed alone but with a team it is better, bigger, quicker. To be successful, you need to learn to respect others, their interests, their needs. An old Chinese quote says: "Show me your friends and I can tell you who you are". The environment has a huge influence on us and who you spend time with shows who you are and at the same time, determines who you will be and how far you can go. Unsuccessful people talk about people and problems but successful people talk about ideas and the future. Choose your environment, choose your inner circle carefully and be with friends growing with you, supporting you, developing you. Collaboration is key. Florian learnt from a swiss company the new word "collaborACTION". It perfectly represents collaboration, that is about action, collaboraction. From digital leadership, he applies the formula: VOPA+ to succeed in collaboration in business.

V stands for: be Virtually connected (using tools like MS Teams, Miro, meistertask, Monday.com…).

O stands for: maintain an Open mind. Establish a culture of innovation, a culture of mistakes and errors (where it is OK to fail as you learn from that) because "Failures are treasures".

P stands for: faster Participation. Synergy in the team, strengths, passions, backgrounds are brought from each other.

A stands for: Agility, to be impactful out of the movement and the momentum.

+ stands for: Trust. Trusting yourself, trusting your team, trusting your company, trusting your clients and stakeholders. Trust evolves by living and establishing credibility, by fostering reliability, by living a life of empathy and integrity, and by ideally getting the ego out of the equation.

Consequence: PDCA

Targets are intentions with a deadline

The next C is Consequence. Every action or inaction will have consequences. Don't believe in chance! Luck is the result of hard work and preparation. But how can we break the pattern of negative consequences? It is very simple: just have a plan, see at least three steps ahead. With the well-known tool PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act), we can generate the consequences we expect. Discipline is key to ensure these consequences, aligned with your clarity, your courage and the collaboration. Florian shared with us a book "The 12 week year" (From Brian P. Moran, Michael Lennington) that demonstrates a concept to produce efficient consequences.

Concentration: 11111

Do what you hate as if you would love it (Mike Tyson)

Concentration is one of the C to emphasize the Impact Warrior Excellence. Today our attention is requested at every corner of our life or of our work. To be efficient, we have to concentrate on one task after another. To have an optimal concentration on the business, Michelle advised us, for example, to have dedicated time to handle emails, to have phone calls, so only maximum two times a day, not every several minutes.

Florian explained another dimension of Concentration with the formula 11111. He used it in his consulting company with customers: they focused on 1 target group, they solved 1 problem for them, with 1 systematic approach, with 1 sophisticated delivery form and they reached them over 1 prioritized path.

Practice focus and concentration. Find a routine to energize like running, reading, doing a hobby, to focus and to concentrate on yourself.

Combat spirit: OODA

Boldness grows with opportunity (Shakespeare)

Finally after Clarity, Courage, Collaboration, Consequence and Concentration, it's all about Combat spirit.

To have this Combat spirit, apply the OODA formula that stands for Observe, Orient, Decide and then Act upon it. 

To close the meeting, Florian shared his final formula, to master the Impact Warrior Excellence: S M I L E, K I S S and W.I.N.

• S M I L E: Strategy -> Mission -> Inspiration -> Leadership -> Execution.
• K I S S: Keep It Simple and Smart, as simple as possible and as smart as necessary, specific, measurable, attractive, realistic and time-framed.
• W.I.N.: What Is Necessary, as a trigger to get into a bold action mode and to train your courage muscle.

Are you interested to watch all the details of this event? Please watch the video on YouTube: [Click here]

Have you already read the first part of the Annual Members Meeting 2022? If not, please enjoy the article: [Click here]

BR

Thierry Altenhoven, PMP

Author: Thierry Altenhoven, PMP

On the 10th of February, PMI invited the members to the Annual Members Meeting. This event was organized online and lasted from 18h00 to 20h00. It was moderated by the fantastic Pia Henzelmann. After 20h00, a session of virtual networking was opened for the participants.

The event was structured in 2 parts:

• The first part presented a summary of the year 2021 and an outlook of 2022 for our PMI Switzerland Chapter.
• The second part was a keynote called “Impact Warrior Excellence: How To Master Tough Times!”, presented by special guests Michelle Xue Wang and Florian T. Hochenrieder.

This article will cover the first part of this meeting.

Stefan Vesenmeier, our VP Events in 2021, now the newly elected Chapter President, introduced the event with a retrospective of 2021 for the Chapter.

A lot of things happened in this special year. Here are some highlights that he pointed to:

• 1st virtual annual members meeting
• Growing Social Media channel reach: 2’500 followers on LinkedIn
• First in-person evening event in August after 19 months of online events
• Tremendous celebration of the 20th Anniversary of the Chapter
• Successful 10th PM Conference in Zürich with 115 attendees
• Fruitful on-site “Volunteers Day” with 18 volunteers
• New sponsorship agreements achieved: STS, ProPM-P and the new gold sponsor, PwC, for 2022

After this retrospective, Claudia Rassalski, our VP Finance, presented the annual financial report of 2021. To summarize it with trends, it would be as following (the appreciation is compared with 2020):

• Membership fees: less less less
• Event income: plus plus
• Total income: less
• Expenses: less
• Net income: less
• Assets: =

Of course, Claudia showed a detailed overview of the accounting of the Chapter, followed by the observations done during an audit conducted in 2021:

• A decreasing trend in membership revenue in the last 3 years
• Lost income without sponsorship in 2021
• A positive uptick of income from Events in 2021
• As a trend, expenses for events are higher than the income
• Administrative costs have decreased mainly due to tasks being taken over by the Operations volunteers team
• Budgeting practices are not well defined which have contributed to an unrealistic budget for 2021
• Lack of reserve policy

After announcing the identified risks and the audit opinion, Claudia could initiate the vote for this part of the event. The financial results were largely accepted by the members.

The vote completed, Stefan could share the gratitude of the Chapter through the next section of the event: "Volunteer of the year".

First of all, he explained that at the beginning of the year all the volunteers were asked to nominate one volunteer who did a tremendous amount of work in the organization. Normally, each year, one volunteer is nominated. But in 2021, the board decided to enlarge their recognition to more than one person. Three of them were pointed out as outstanding volunteers: Benoîte Grisouard in the Social Good team, Ala Lutz in the Members team and Thierry Altenhoven, in the Branding team. Thanks a lot for your dedication in 2021 and enjoy further the journey by PMI.

The award "Volunteer of the Year" went to Pia Henzelmann. She has been a PMI member since October 2019, acting as the director of the Virtual team. Since she joined the virtual events team, Pia was an indispensable team member, and has been instrumental in making our virtual events a great experience for all involved. Well-deserved for you, Pia! Congratulations!

Next to this award, the president also rewards one special active member. The President's Award for 2021 went to Philippe Soupart. Karolina Letowska, Chapter President 2021, said about Philippe’s total engagement and motivation for the Chapter:

"Volunteers like you help make our Chapter a better and fun to be place with your time and efforts. Honestly, I don't think things would have run as smoothly without your help. Thanks a bunch". All of the volunteers can just confirm her sayings about his commitment. They are also very grateful to receive his advice and his support when needed. Congratulations Philippe!

Place to the game… In 2021 it was also a special year for the Chapter because it was its 20th anniversary. To celebrate this particular thing, the board decided to organize a game during the whole year. At the beginning of each event last year, the moderator communicated a word, describing a power skill of the project manager. The goal for the participants was to collect all the 20 words by the end of the year. The winner of this game would be the one collecting the most of the words: Pia Henzelmann won the prize "A weekend in the Swiss Alps". Excellent! Well done, Pia!

Finally, it was time to talk about the future. First with the election of the members of the board for 2022-2023: Adi Muslic, Stefan Vesenmeier and Joachim Dehais. We wish you a successful start for 2022! The board of director for 2022 was presented with Stefan Vesenmeier as our new President, Claudia Rassalski, as our VP Finance, Philippe Soupart as our VP Operations, Agnieszka Skalska as our VP Brand Management and Development, Joachim Dehais as our VP Volunteers, Adi Muslic as our VP Sponsors & Partners, Ala Lutz as our VP Members and Pia Henzelmann as our VP Events. We will have for sure an exciting year with you on board. We wish you all lots of great achievements in 2022!

To close this part of the event, Stefan, as new president, expresses his vision for this new year: it's all about VOLUNTEERS. The heart of the Chapter is our team of Volunteers. He will guide the Chapter to keep this heart beating with passion and commitment in 2022. 

He also communicated the outlook for this new year 2022:

• Resume on-site events as soon as possible
• Offer additional opportunities for networking
• PMI Switzerland Conference 2022, on-site (September)
• Continue our successful online events and keep them free for members to attend
• Grow mentorship & experience exchange
• Implement a Volunteer training program

Before the break, our PMI Brand Ambassador Team (Alexander Seeger, Lourenco Nunes and Loïc Hascher) was ready to welcome the participants of this event at the AMM Virtual Networking. A virtual chat room was at disposal to visit and to have a chat with the other visitors.

Are you interested to watch all the details of this event? Please watch the video on YouTube: [Click here]

Do you want to know more about the second part of the Annual Members Meeting 2022 with its keynote “Impact Warrior Excellence: How To Master Tough Times!”? Please enjoy the article: [Click here]

BR

Thierry Altenhoven, PMP

Author: Ethel Mendocilla Sato, PMP

Thanks to research on Human Microbiome, we know that our “microbial self” has a profound influence in human physiology, immunity, and metabolism. For example, extensive study of the gut microbiome has shown its most significant importance on our short- and long-term overall health. However, other parts of the human body are largely unexplored, including the vagina. Although the vagina is the second place most populated by microorganisms, which have a critical role in women’s health, it is under-researched. Surprisingly, the vaginal microbiome field only represents 3% of scientific publications related to the Human Microbiome field. This knowledge gap prevents the development of effective and practical clinical therapeutics that could protect and improve women’s health and well-being.

However, since the start of the pandemic, it has become harder to get funding for continuing research in topics unrelated to SARS-CoV-2 virus. Furthermore, the COVID pandemic has revealed how challenging it is to communicate science effectively and timely to the public. What we have learned and still learning from this pandemic is that now it is more important than ever to pay attention to our other self – that is, the trillions of microorganisms that populate our bodies, our microbiome. For this reason, our*goal is to implement the Marie project in Switzerland, a citizen science study with scientific and societal objectives. First, we want to raise public awareness about the importance of vaginal microbes in women’s sexual and reproductive health. Second, we want to engage citizens and work together to increase our understanding of the vaginal microbiome and its role in health and disease. 

In addition, we believe that the promotion of vaginal health knowledge within the women’s community in Switzerland is a crucial strategy for entrusting women to participate in self-care, and ultimately, enjoy healthier and happier lives. With that in mind, we decided to launch the Marie project in the well-known crowdfunding platform, Wemakeit. For this scientific campaign, we organised the project into four phases: 1) Planning, 2) Pre-launch, 3) Launch, 4) Follow-up of the campaign in Wemakeit. 

When we started the adventure of moving forward with the campaign for Wemakeit, we had never imagined facing various challenges that we had to overcome. We provide below a few of them:

1. Obtaining the support from key collaborators in the project

Making an alliance with Prof. Sarah Lebeer and her team based at the University of Antwerp (Belgium) was the most important milestone we could have achieved. Prof. Lebeer led the citizen science project called Isala and had the objective to study the vaginal microbiome of almost 6'000 participants from Flanders. Even though we managed to get their support, we had to find a host lab and local collaborators to support us with expertise in Public Health, Citizen Science, cutting-edge technology for the microbial DNA analysis, etc. We were fortunate enough to raise the interest of PD Dr. Sonja Merten, project leader and head of the Society, Gender and Health Unit at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (our host lab) in Basel, the Citizen Science Center and the Functional Genomics Center, both located in Zürich.

2. Understanding our stakeholder’s engagement needs

In July 2021, due to nationwide COVID measures from the Swiss government such as: quarantine rules and work-from-home order, most of our interactions with eventual collaborators happened via virtual meetings. What we learned is that from the very beginning, we ushould take time to understand each stakeholders’ motivation, concerns, preferred communication, and engagement frequency to determine the best way to work together. If the stakeholder analysis is done later in time, then it will be much more difficult to build their trust and future engagement.

3. Maintaining virtual team members engagement

A daunting challenge since the start of the project until now was to coordinate recurrent video meetings with our stakeholders, build effective and clear agenda with objectives and discussion points. Since most of our stakeholders are geographically distributed, we could not meet face-to-face and therefore, had to rely on various forms of technology and videoconferencing tools for communication and information sharing needs. By maintaining effective, meaningful and timely communication, we reinforced mutual commitments and achievements.

4. Searching for ambassadors and sponsors

It was surprising and discouraging to not receive any replies from the thirty small, medium and large companies we contacted. This showed once more how disregarded is the topic of vaginal health. On the contrary, we were lucky enough to find enthusiastic and supportive ambassadors, such as: Petra Volpe (movie director), Dagmar Bocakova (visual artist) and Fanny Georgi (science communicator).

The scientific campaign was launched on February 23rd and will run until April 8th, 2022. As of today, we have managed to raise 7% of our first financial goal of 70'000 CHF. 

If you support our mission of engaging citizens in vaginal microbiome research to advance discovery in this field and break taboos and misconceptions about vaginal health in Switzerland, please, help us with your donations on the following website: https://wemakeit.com/projects/unveil-vagina-s-microworld

Also, we would be very grateful if you could share the project link with your family, friends and networks.

- And…let’s work together today to make the future of women’s health look brighter! -

*Initiators of the scientific campaign called “Unveil vagina’s microworld”: PD Dr. Sonja Merten, Monica Ticlla Ccenhua and Ethel Mendocilla Sato.

Author: Adi Muslic, PMP

This is the third course in the OT Series (https://www.pmi.org/organizational-transformation/orchestration), which provides the leadership and strategic knowledge of transformation initiatives.This advanced course applies focus on assessing market conditions and trends, exploring frameworks for achieving outcomes, and applying a human-centric approach towards your organization.

The Orchestration course provides guidance on how to:

• Describe what it takes to lead a people-centered transformation.
• Identify and describe the various frameworks you will need to achieve transformation outcomes (such as Organizational Network Analysis, Exploit and Explore, and others).
• Assess different market conditions, trends, and disruptors for your organization.
• Describe the 4-phased framework of Waves, Horizons, Domains and Types that will enable you to frame the broader transformation picture. 
• Assess capabilities your organization will need to successfully transform.

There are 4 modules:

1. Leading a People-Centered Transformation
2. Achieving Transformation Outcomes
3. Market Awareness and Strategic Responses
4. Assessing Capabilities

Throughout all the modules in the course, we are engaged in real-life scenarios to explore how various concepts come to life. For many concepts, the scenarios refer to an organization that is recognized for its positive attitude to change - and which has driven its own transformation.

In the first module, we explore several leadership concepts, including:

• Leadership characteristics
• Exploiting the Core & Exploring the Edge from a cultural standpoint
• The People-Centered Transformation (PCT) Framework
• Each of the 10 PCT elements, including the Insights, Findings, and Shifts for each

Some of the key takeaways are:

Everyone has gaps in their leadership capabilities. We can use the PCT Framework to recognize, unravel and improve.

Organizations that are transforming must be agile. Organizations that encourage a cross-functional, agile mindset over a traditional silo structure are often the most effective at delivering successful transformations. Agile organizations decentralize decision-making to an appropriate level that will achieve an effective balance between autonomy and authority.

Leaders must empathize and understand what motivates their employees to change and deliver results. By doing this, employees can feel empowered to make decisions and contribute to the decentralized culture.

In the Achieving Transformation Outcomes module, we explore some business-oriented frameworks and strategies:

• The concept of organizational longevity
• Exploiting the Core & Exploring the Edge from a business perspective
• Creating a second operating system is important.
• The Business Portfolio Map
• The 9 most important frameworks while transforming

Some frameworks used by transforming organizations are: Program Management, Agile, Objectives and Key results, Portfolio management, Design thinking, etc.

Organizations that cannot keep up with the increased level of change and complexity have no future. High-performing organizations are more adaptable and can correct the course when strategic initiatives are going off the rails.

Organizations need to develop a second operating system that uses an agile network and a very different set of processes to explore new growth opportunities.

In the Market Awareness and Strategic Responses module, we learn how to perceive the market in which our organization operates. We explore:

• The Social, Political, Environmental, Economic, and Competitive (or SPEED/C) factors of a market environment.
• The Drivers, Opportunities, and Threats associated with each of these factors.
• How to plan the strategic response for each of the SPEED/C factors
• The Waves, Horizons, Domains, and Types of Transformation

Strategic leadership takes a curious mind, constant learning and vigilant research to determine industry trends and the environment in which the organization operates.

In the 4th module, the Assessing Transformation Capabilities, we learn that most common challenges in implementing strategy are:

• Skills gap within internal talent
• Insufficient technology
• Competition from smaller organizational
• lack of resources
• lack of efficient processes guiding strategy

In this module, we learn how to assess and bridge capabilities that are needed to transform, such as

• The capabilities (soft and hard) required for the transformation’s vision.
• The capability readiness of your organization so that you can achieve the desired transformation level.
• Prioritizing required capabilities.
• Approaches and choosing the optimal approach (build, buy, ally, or outsource) to close the transformation capability gap
• Assessing what must be done more, better and/or differently from a leadership perspective to close the transformation capability gap

Assessing Capability Areas helps identify an organization’s capability strengths and weaknesses. Closing the capability gap is critical for the organizational transformation to be successful.

Step 1 : Map the capabilities in 4 areas : People, Structures, Technology and Assets

Step 2: Identify the gaps in 4 areas and classify them in 4 capability types : Distinctive, Competitive, Foundational and Bridging.

Step 3: Determine how to fill the gaps by combining the urgency and 4 capability types in the Capability Landscape that show us what to build, acquire, partner, or outsource.

This is the last article about the OT Series. If you like to learn more, ask questions and get direct answers, register for our online event Leading dynamic people-centered transformations on 31 March at 18:30.

If you think that creation of an Organizational Transformation Community of Practice would be beneficial for you and your organization, please get in touch using out contact form and selecting Sponsors and Partners topic.