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Team Succession Planning
Ideally a team should function on all eight cylinders. It is essential to have all the right people in place to do so. The bad news for a team and its supply chain trading partners is to experience any level of people discontinuity in its ranks. Turnover or discontinuity is a very expensive proposition. It is estimated turnover can cost an organization 2-3 times the cost of replacing the individual but in reality, it has many other soft costs that tend to have a negative impact on overall team productivity. Successful cross functional teams have an active Succession Plan in place. This plan, by design, creates contingencies for handling work, customers, suppliers, timetables, and communications. This allows the team to maintain stability in the supply chain and "nip the dip" by reducing the negative impact so often accompanying discontinuity within a team environment. Our module creates the need for the team to create a succession plan. It provides a process to maintain the constancy of purpose and urgency of the team by defining how to handle all the work during a transition period and by providing effective tools to use to measure a variety of activities and results during a transition. In doing so, an effective, on-boarding experience for the new team member is created. How has discontinuity affected the productivity of your teams?

Team Finance 101
The ultimate success of the team, both short term and long term, will be determined by their return on investment (ROI). ROI should not be a concept used only by the Accounting Department to determine success or failure at some point after the fact. Instead, ROI should be a strategic tool used by the team in its work process of planning, designing, implementing and measuring the work flow. All team members need to gain a basic understand of the "cost of doing business." This will allow the team to make more strategic ROI based decisions beginning, during and after the project. All aspects of conducting business today are base cost components and ROI. Our module will focus on building understanding for cost productivity in people, time, activities, materials, resources, and structure. This learning will allow us to weave together how cost information can be used to create a new form of logistic currency, how it can be rolled into value added definition for products or services, how it can be used to unbundle pricing, and how it acts as basis for determining what propositions the team should stop, start, or continue doing. Bottom-line, the lessons learned in this module will act as a catalyst for building productivity and continuous improvement in all the team's work. All of the Productivity Loop modules will feature a component that stresses the need to understand ROI.

Mind Sights: Facilitated Thinking Environment
What would it be like to benefit from the wisdom of many of the best facilitators, consultants, and mentors? What if there was a tool to improve thinking and creativity anytime you choose? MindSights is such a tool. Like a skilled consultant or trusted friend, MindSights provides timely advice by asking just the right question, recommending the right tools to use, and putting at your fingertips successful methods and insights for your consideration. We call this process "Facilitated Thinking" because it provides intellectual guidance that amplifies natural human thinking to arrive at higher levels of thought.

Facilitated Thinking Environments(FTE's) empower worker thoughts. FTE's are designed to break scripted mental patterns by prompting users to respond to mental prompters or "thought switches". Instead of searching the mind for routine solutions these switches prompt different thinking patterns with the results of obtaining new ideas, concepts, and solutions. Knowledge workers require tools to enhance awareness, promote new ways of thinking, and speed the thought process and response time in terms of predictable action. The choice of using thinking methods and tools should be based on the same principle that underlies the selection of any tool: choose one appropriate method for the task at hand. MindSights' critical success factor is Ease of Use. This means a "walk up and use" delivery of the single right question or set of questions, the right single tool or set of functional tools, the right single thinking strategy of the entire MindSights environment as needed.

To accomplish the task at hand, MindSights was developed as a Softbook. Softbooks are a unique combination of word processor, browser and software functionality. The result in an ultra-easy-to-use software like application that runs on word- meaning no difficult software applications to learn, install, run and maintain, while eliminating deployment problems.

Expected Outcomes
Listed below are the expected outcomes an individual team member, a team, an organization and its supply chain trading partners will receive from the Organizational Productivity Loop Process Modules:

• All "team players" will understand their role, team expectations,
  and purpose and urgency of the work.
• Enhance productivity of strategic planning process and create
  an environment understanding ownership, responsibility, and
  accountability.
• Team will be made up of the right people which in turn will create
  a work environment valuing and pursuing the critical customer
  needs of reliability, speed, cost containment, value added and
  relationships (internal and external)
• Team and supply chain will benefit by creating a clear understanding
  around the need for effective communication creating a flow of
  timely, accurate, safe and secure information.
• Everyone agrees to importance of meetings as a planning conduit
  for handling work process.
• All meetings will be strategic, agenda and principal driven and
  with the right people in attendance.
• The overall capacity, capability, and productivity of the team will be
  increased by providing team members with skills and process for
  effective delegation, problem solving, meeting management and
  ROI - Team will insulate itself from affects of discontinuity by having
  a Succession Plan in place
• Knowledge Workers on team will learn how to build individual
  and collective "Thinking Capacity" by asking the right questions,
  using the right tools and selecting the right strategies.
• Team will be able to "compete and win" by becoming an effective
  "Selling Organization.