As Q1 2025 draws to a close, and before you power forward into Q2, do you know how to effectively process and consolidate the lessons from the past three months?
Quarterly progress should be progress, which means it needs to include reflection, association, and conscious knowledge in order to be purposeful, and bring genuine benefit to your organisation.
So, what is RACK, and how can you effectively apply it to your team's planning?
Reflection
What did you fail at in Quarter One?
- List all your failures.
- Go through the list, and using either different coloured text, or different symbols, whichever is most effective for your team, identify each item on the list, distinguishing them as:
. Failures that are entirely down to your own/your team's human error
. Failures which are partly, but not wholly, down to your/your team's human error
. Failures which are down to circumstances beyond your control
Be as honest as possible with yourself and your team - this will be important as you move through the process.
Immediately strike off the final category (failures down to circumstances beyond your control), in such a way that you can return to them later. (ie, you can recover the text, or in some way still read it.)
Start with the failures which are wholly your fault. Discussion of these should avoid blame, but centre on actions which can be taken in the future, additional information that needs to be made readily available in your company and to your team/s, and consider which aspects could be addressed by more relevant training, simplified processes, better inductions, etc.
Once you have fully addressed these, do the same for the aspects of the failures which were only partly within your control.
Once that stage of the process has been completed, explore what resources or awareness you might need to acquire in order to mitigate the impact of things that are outside your control.
Finally, repeat the exploration of what additional resources, awareness, or training may be needed with the failures which are entirely beyond your control.
Your corporate inductions, mandatory training, and processes should centre on providing the resources and awareness you've identified, and then on the learning from those aspects which are wholly your fault - still without blame.
Association
Consider the challenges and failures you faced in Q1, with a focus on identifying those that are linked to each other. (ie, are associated).
Those associations will help you identify the systemic problems in your organisation, giving you a focus of what to work on that will help you avoid repeated failures, give you greater resilience to outside challenges, and improve team cohesion, which results in greater morale, and lower absenteeism.
Conscious Knowledge
Conscious knowledge is the process of identifying, affirming, and making relevant to your business activities the things everyone in your team knows without knowing they know.
What is something you "know without knowing you know?" - it's the unexpected skills that people have never consciously learned or been taught.
It's the knowledge about people, conditions, etc that people have picked up on their travels through life, but which they feel is "not relevant" to their work.
It's the skills people bring from their non-work activities, their lived experiences, and their domestic labour.
Conscious knowledge holds that these "unknown knowns" can, and should, inform team dynamics and working practices, and the process of identifying, sharing, and applying them enhances your team's performance and productivity.
Active engagement with conscious knowledge reduces your recruitment spend, as it can not only eliminate the need to go out to recruitment, as you identify relevant skills held by people who are already in your organisation, but it also improves retention, as people feel appreciated for themselves, beyond the very niche strictures of their job description.
If you're interested in exploring RACK further for your business, we can facilitate a half-day workshop for just £150, remotely or in person (plus expenses if hosting on-site)
Email us: theproductivepessimist@yahoo.com
Quarterly progress should be progress, which means it needs to include reflection, association, and conscious knowledge in order to be purposeful, and bring genuine benefit to your organisation.
So, what is RACK, and how can you effectively apply it to your team's planning?
Reflection
What did you fail at in Quarter One?
- List all your failures.
- Go through the list, and using either different coloured text, or different symbols, whichever is most effective for your team, identify each item on the list, distinguishing them as:
. Failures that are entirely down to your own/your team's human error
. Failures which are partly, but not wholly, down to your/your team's human error
. Failures which are down to circumstances beyond your control
Be as honest as possible with yourself and your team - this will be important as you move through the process.
Immediately strike off the final category (failures down to circumstances beyond your control), in such a way that you can return to them later. (ie, you can recover the text, or in some way still read it.)
Start with the failures which are wholly your fault. Discussion of these should avoid blame, but centre on actions which can be taken in the future, additional information that needs to be made readily available in your company and to your team/s, and consider which aspects could be addressed by more relevant training, simplified processes, better inductions, etc.
Once you have fully addressed these, do the same for the aspects of the failures which were only partly within your control.
Once that stage of the process has been completed, explore what resources or awareness you might need to acquire in order to mitigate the impact of things that are outside your control.
Finally, repeat the exploration of what additional resources, awareness, or training may be needed with the failures which are entirely beyond your control.
Your corporate inductions, mandatory training, and processes should centre on providing the resources and awareness you've identified, and then on the learning from those aspects which are wholly your fault - still without blame.
Association
Consider the challenges and failures you faced in Q1, with a focus on identifying those that are linked to each other. (ie, are associated).
Those associations will help you identify the systemic problems in your organisation, giving you a focus of what to work on that will help you avoid repeated failures, give you greater resilience to outside challenges, and improve team cohesion, which results in greater morale, and lower absenteeism.
Conscious Knowledge
Conscious knowledge is the process of identifying, affirming, and making relevant to your business activities the things everyone in your team knows without knowing they know.
What is something you "know without knowing you know?" - it's the unexpected skills that people have never consciously learned or been taught.
It's the knowledge about people, conditions, etc that people have picked up on their travels through life, but which they feel is "not relevant" to their work.
It's the skills people bring from their non-work activities, their lived experiences, and their domestic labour.
Conscious knowledge holds that these "unknown knowns" can, and should, inform team dynamics and working practices, and the process of identifying, sharing, and applying them enhances your team's performance and productivity.
Active engagement with conscious knowledge reduces your recruitment spend, as it can not only eliminate the need to go out to recruitment, as you identify relevant skills held by people who are already in your organisation, but it also improves retention, as people feel appreciated for themselves, beyond the very niche strictures of their job description.
If you're interested in exploring RACK further for your business, we can facilitate a half-day workshop for just £150, remotely or in person (plus expenses if hosting on-site)
Email us: theproductivepessimist@yahoo.com
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