What do you need to do to improve your business? According to Dr. Clint Longnecker, professor at the University of Toledo and author of Two-Minute Drill: Imperatives for Rapid Organizational Change, you need to use the same thinking applied by football teams when they execute two minute drills during critical games.
Most organizational change takes time and Longnecker says that it is time to think about change as a two-minute drill. “Any change worth making, is worth making faster,” he says.
There are a number of factors that make two-minute drills successful. These include great quarterbacks (leaders), a desire not to lose a sense of urgency, exploiting your opponent’s weakness, great individual effort and teamwork.
Longnecker suggests that the assumptions you have about change may not be true and that you need to understand what factors get in the way of change.
The first step to making change is to develop a plan. “Only 45 percent of the organizations we surveyed have improvement processes in place,” he says. But he cautions that having a process in place does not mean it is used, used well or used quickly.
No matter which type of improvement plan you decide to use make sure it contains the following steps: Problem identification, data collection and analysis, benchmarking and gap analysis, brainstorming, action plan, execution, measurement and follow up and adjustment.
“The quicker you get through the change process, the more energy you will have to implement the plan,” he says. Longnecker believes people spend too much time on the front end of the process and then lose energy for the implementation steps.
