A few years back, our team gath­ered to work on our busi­ness plan for the upcom­ing year. We were in the early days of this eco­nomic cri­sis, and our num­bers were falling like never before. It was a very tough time for us cham­pion builders.

One of our Exec­u­tive Coaches by the name of Ray­mond Glea­son asked, “Do we need to make incre­men­tal or rad­i­cal changes in order for us to pull out of this?” It was a great ques­tion, and it helped to frame much of our con­ver­sa­tion as we con­tin­ued to work on our plan.

In the past two weeks, I have had con­ver­sa­tions with two dif­fer­ent busi­ness lead­ers from dif­fer­ent indus­tries who are ask­ing them­selves this same ques­tion, but in two unique ways.

One leader is ask­ing if he needs to make incre­men­tal or rad­i­cal changes to the way he leads and oper­ates per­son­ally. The other leader is ask­ing if incre­men­tal or rad­i­cal changes are required within their lead­er­ship team.

There are times when incre­men­tal changes just will not get us to where we want to go. They may seem eas­ier and safer than the rad­i­cal, but they are not always better.

There are also times when a rad­i­cal change might shake things up, but it could ulti­mately take you in the wrong direc­tion. Fear can cause us to over­cor­rect when a mod­er­ate and incre­men­tal change would be per­fectly sufficient.

When con­sid­er­ing how to improve in your role or your busi­ness, you are wise to con­sider what types of changes are necessary.

Should they be incre­men­tal or radical?

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Tags: Business Plan, Change, Decision Making, Fear

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 29th, 2010 at 8:30 am and is filed under Strategy and Planning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.