Every year I have hesitated to “Wish a Happy New Year” to my friends, colleagues, and partners; what disturbs me is how weak and uninspired this greeting is.
- “Wishing” is something kids do when they want the tooth fairy to leave them a gift.
- “Happy” is ‘nice,’ but not very uplifting; it doesn’t shift anything.
- Just for the “New Year?” Time flies; the year is over fast! Why not far into the future??
Albert Einstein believed the entire universe functioned based on a ‘design architectures’ that governed everything from the largest galaxies to the smallest atoms. For the last 25 years our team has believed that humans and organizations also function based on critical design architectures, and we have been dedicated to creating “Breakthroughs in the Architectures of Cooperation” to discover how leaders can shift the potential of people, teams, alliances, organizations, and entire value chains to produce extraordinary results. Looking over this time period, here’s what happened:
- Strategic Alliances: The ‘first generation’ of breakthroughs emerged from 1987-1998 with the best practice architecture of strategic alliances. This important body of work produced 70% to 80% success rates in alliances (triple the normal rate), and led to the founding of the professional organization: Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals.
- Collaborative Innovation: The ‘second generation’ of breakthroughs gained momentum from 1999-2007, as alliances demonstrated themselves as highly effective collaborative innovation engines. This new architecture used the ‘differential energy’ of alliances as a means of producing massive new innovations in technology, systems, product integrations, new processes, new business models, new services, and better delivery coordination. Using the architecture of collaborative innovation we were able to transform supply chains into innovation networks, and our ‘Collaborative Lean’ programs achieved better than 90% success rates.
- Trust, QuadrActive Behaviour, & Synergy: The ‘third generation’ of breakthroughs started in 2008, and is demonstrating even more dynamic results. These began with the powerful architecture of trust which was based on a revolutionary breakthrough — the Quadractive architecture of human behavior. Another breakthrough soon followed –considered the holy grail of organizations: the architecture of synergy; the culmination of over 40 years of searching to understand how ‘dynamic differential energy’ in humans and in organizations can be harnessed to create a bold new future. The combination of these three new breakthroughs has been producing extraordinary results and excited many leaders.
As a result of these new capabilities, this year we will be launching a new initiative to embody these powerful architectures in Organizational, Value Chain & Personal Transformation. To support this work, our team is developing additional applications for these architectures in Synergistic Leadership, Synergistic Negotiations, and Synergistic Selling, among others. This year I wrote a series of six books called Cracking the Synergy Source Code (to be published later this year) to support this new initiative.
I look forward to you being a leader in this exciting next evolution — the Great Synergistic Shift.