Story

“There’s always something” is a phrase you will commonly hear around the OneSmartWorld® office.  For anyone who has ever tried to innovate, create or change the status quo, you probably have a very similar phrase to deal with what happens in a positive way.  Building something new is never easy.   The “somethings” are the obstacles, the setbacks and the surprises that you never really anticipated.  They're occasionally serendipitous, generally difficult to work through but can always be transformed into a tremendous learning experience if you choose to.  While the 'somethings' could be a whole story in themselves, what follows is the story of what we set out to do and why we were  driven to do it.  

The Beginning

In 2000, we decided it was time for a bold move in the learning and people development business. We felt that the world was rapidly shifting into an intelligence economy and there were few tools to help people gain new skills. It was no longer what you knew that mattered most - thanks to Google and the web - it was how well you could think, problem solve and collaborate in teams with others. After 30 years in consulting, we knew that, as the saying goes, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste." We saw so many smart people going to work everyday and not having the opportunity to use their best thinking or contribute their full potential. Yet for too many organizations, we knew that the chronic waste and under-utilization of human intelligence was a critical and largely unrecognized leadership issue.

The Motivation

For 10 years, Bob Wiele, our Founder had begun his corporate training workshops with senior executives and teams from all types of organizations with a simple question: " What percent of your brain power do you have an opportunity to use everyday? He defined brain power as your intelligence, your skills and experience, what you know, your motivation, your spirit.  While the answers ranged all over the map, the consistent average was in the 25% -30% range. Considering that organizations commit 85% of their budget to their people and this 'asset' was reporting a 70% -75% under-utilization. We asked where else would this level of under use be tolerated? This represented a massive opportunity - an powerful 'something' - for smart, progressive leaders to work on to improve productivity and performance. So many smart people were going to work everyday wanting to make a positive contribution. Yet too many organizational leaders had no means of understanding the operating styles of their people. Leaders and managers were looking for answers in all the wrong places - conventional personality testing, spreadsheets, strategies and re-engineering...We believed then and now more so than ever that engaging people and their total intelligence would be the driving force of innovation and the key to sustainable high performance.

The Big Idea

What if we could develop a human capital management system with tools that progressive leaders could use to map, tap and harness the talent and intelligence of their people?  We believed that the new core competencies people, teams and organizations would need in the 21st century, would be thinking, problem solving and collaboration. We embarked on a journey to change the landscape of learning in business and education. Our strategic intent was to design, develop and deliver a game changer - a platform with a set of easy to use tools that business and education could both implement to prepare their people and teams with the knowledge, skills and tools to deal with the unrelenting changes that were a part of everyone's lives. We had over 30 years of experience in people development and change management. We had over a million end users of programs and products we had brought to the marketplace and we had worked with more then 1500 private sector organizational clients. We had experienced their pain over and over again. we set out to develop what we hope will become a new standard of excellence in our industry.

The Opportunity

We conducted environmental scans of the challenges organizations and education were dealing with in the global, knowledge-based economy.  We assessed the current solutions provided by the training/performance improvement industry.  Leading edge clients told us there was a sense of market saturation and to some degree stagnation, with the persistent use of conventional, tried and true, four quadrant models.  Leaders wanted practical solutions that could make a measurable difference in productivity - and - to deal with the age old problem of the chronic waste of time and talent in meetings, bloody meetings. People in organizations wanted skills and tools to help them expand their skills and to work better with people who were different from them. HR leaders told us their clients needed an answer to the 'So what?' and 'now what?' questions.  Innovative organizations wanted a system, an end to end solution that had electronic support embedded in it. They wanted to find a better way to optimize the intelligence of their people.  We saw an opportunity.

The Research

After an incredible amount of research the decision was made to focus on intelligence, not personality, as ultimately a more useful construct for organizations and the people that work for them.  In creating the OneSmartWorld system, the challenge was to integrate mind, heart and spirit into an all-in-one model of human performance.  We wanted a system that went beyond psychological type into learnable strategies that have a direct impact on performance.  Our goal was to determine the core skills people can learn and use to achieve the success they want and a simple process for collaborative work.   Our focus was on developing a scaleable solution for three levels of performance impact: personal success, team performance and enterprise wide capital management.  

The Developments

Our first task was to develop a new and original model of human performance - one that shifted the performance focus to the essential underlying thinking and emotional strategies of successful, intelligent behaviour. Our model was the first in the world to incorporate mind, heart and spirit into one integrated framework of learnable behaviours. After months of in-depth research and testing with experts in the field of human performance, we developed a four dimensional model that incorporates creativity, understanding, decision-making and personal spirit. The model is based on our unique portfolio of 21 essential skills for success that underpin intelligent performance at work and in life.

Our second task was to develop a scientifically reliable and valid assessment instrument to measure the preferred use of the 21 essential skills. We engaged Jackson Leaderships Systems (JLS), a leading firm of organizational psychologists and professor Kevin Kelloway, Ph.D. from St. Mary’s University, to help us test out our model of human performance and to design the instrument. JLS did original empirical research in the item development and the instrument design. The instrument, subsequently named the 4D-i®, was originally normed by JLS, on data collected on 1300 people from 11 countries and since has been normed two more times, most recently in 2008 on 25,000 people.

The third task was twofold: first to develop a universal common language for the 21st century workplace, using colors and symbols to make the system easier to learn and use in the global organization; second to convert the universal language from a focus on person and expand it into task applications that would help people get on to the same page to accelerate business results in team planning, problem solving and decision-making. Using the dimensions from our framework and the colored symbols of the universal language, we identified 12 core, generic color-coded processes. We called these Smart Tracks and used them as the basis for our lean meeting management system, Smarter Meetings, to use in such situations as personal problem solving, one-to-one presentations, team meetings and project management. These generic processes are designed as a definable, consistent, repeatable set of methods for dealing with complex issues in 1:1 meetings, project management, team and management meeting settings. 

The final task was to put the tools and processes into a suite of programs and into an online format, accessible 24/7 so people and teams across the world could communicate and work together off one simple platform.

Still, just the beginning. 

Over the past decade we have had the privilege of working with some amazing clients in business, governments, not for profits and education. Our system has been adopted in a wide variety of settings from executive leadership development, to team building to change management. Schools are using our system to teach kids thinking skills and to appreciate that others think and operate differently and how to tap into each other's intelligence and work smarter and better together.  Ten years ago the “somethings” always seemed overwhelming. Today it’s simply part of our everyday work helping our clients succeed.  What we've learned from our journey is that no matter how difficult your issues, how small or big your team, if you can tap into the total intelligence of your people and give them a common language and collaborative processes to work through problems, smart agile minds can achieve remarkable things.