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The ONE Dream™ Over thirty years of working with leading organizations, The Secretan Center has discovered that the common, unifying experience among winning teams, great endeavors and extraordinary achievements— is a dream.  A dream represents the uniqueness that can be found in groups of people who achieve the extraordinary—creating revolutions, overthrowing despots, founding religions or nations (or fusing them into one), climbing Everest, reinventing organizations, creating breakthroughs, building something extraordinary or changing the way we live or think or how the world works.  It is true of organizations, sports teams, film crews, orchestras, states, cities, countries—even families. Over the last 50 years of business theorizing and academic and professional development, we have succeeded in expanding our capacity to quantify, measure and analyze but we have stifled our capacity to dream.  It has become conventional thinking that “dreaming” is too “out there” for a business environment.  So we no longer talk about dreams in organizations. Instead, we create “mission, vision and values” statements.  The stale barrenness of mission, vision or values statements pales in comparison to the inspiring power and passion that is embedded in a dream. The role of the leader is to identify, realize and sustain a dream. What we are really discussing here is passion and whether or not organizations today can ignite the necessary passion in their customers and colleagues that will fuel the accomplishment of something extraordinary—such as a dream.  Not a five percent increase in market share or a ten percent return on equity—but a bold, daring, impudent, audacious, outrageous, thrilling, exhilarating and inspiring dream. How did we land a man on the moon?  (The Russians had just successfully launched Sputnik and therefore effectively won the space race).  Jack Kennedy’s solution was to define a dream, and it was a dream so powerful, that thousands of people embraced it and made it their own and thus made it real.  Indeed, it was such a powerful dream that it restored America’s self-esteem, galvanized Americans and inspired much of the rest of the world.  Dreams are like that—they transcend differences, disagreements and petty arguments, because the dream unites us at a higher level, engages us in a higher purpose and unites us—as ONE.  And it is this elusive oneness for which we are yearning. Dreams are almost unique in their power to achieve oneness. We have worked with many organizations where the internal competition for resources, ideology, strategy or power is hampering the development of one vision and the creation of ONE Dream™ raise the aspirations of all the parties—inspiring them as ONE. Great historical leaders—Christ, Buddha, Lao-Tzu, Confucius, Mohammed, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., among them­—all had a dream.  In his famous speech delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King repeated “I have a dream...” eight times.  It was his ability to articulate his dream that united thousands of people and inspired them to usher in a new era of civil rights and liberties.  And that dream continues to inspire today. Dreams are like that—they have the power within them to change the world.  And great dreams, carefully executed, are sustainable. In order to unlock the potential and power of modern leadership to transform clients, organizations, communities, countries or the world, we must understand and harness the power of the dream. The ONE Dream™ for Organizations In our work with leaders of organizations around the world we've noticed that our work (called Higher Ground Leadership®) has resulted in amazing outcomes.  In fact, in the introduction of the book, Inspire: What Great Leaders Do, 15 CEOs and senior executives from large healthcare organizations wrote: The principles of Higher Ground Leadership® have helped our organizations reduce staff turnover by as much as 66%, double levels of employee morale and patient and customer satisfaction, increase the clinical outcomes of many procedures, implement Six Sigma programs successfully, thus contributing to dramatic cost savings and waste elimination, cut the time taken to prepare operating rooms by 50% and dramatically increase their throughput, increase profits by 1,000% and eliminate lay-offs and the use of outsourced labor. Higher Ground Leadership® touches the whole human, not just the working human, so it has helped to heal marriages, improve relationships between parents and children, among others, contributed to addiction cessation, strengthened values and beliefs and raised personal performance. Most importantly, it has contributed to personal fulfillment, meaning and inspiration and therefore organizational performance and reputation. One person stated simply, that after the birth of her children, Higher Ground Leadership® was the most important experience in her life. It is remarkable what happens when leaders are invited to describe their richly imagined ONE Dream™ for the organization—they focus on aspirations that are not the usual corporate vanilla statements—they describe their most extraordinary, outrageous, never-before-achieved aspirations, often secretly held until now, because they have permission to be fearless and imaginative, to think outside the box and be truly outrageous and extraordinarily creative.  Leaders come up with some remarkable ideas—hospitals who dream of eliminating all avoidable deaths, banks who dream of changing the world, corporations who dream of becoming environmentally friendly, regional communities who dream of becoming world-class centers of excellence and innovation, organizations who dream of a richly imagined future.  These are not the kinds of ideas that fit easily under a heading of "mission, vision and values".  They need a much larger container to accommodate such magnificent ideas—they need a dream. We invite leaders to believe in the dream, to assume that the dream is realizable and that when the energies of their entire organization are harnessed behind that dream, it will be achieved.  An organization with 10,000 employees, that harnesses their passion—the total energy of every employee (and vendor, customer,  union member, regulator, media, and others), behind that dream—begins a journey towards a previously unattained level of performance. Permission Space: The Foundation for the ONE Dream™ Many people have subjective views about what a corporate dream should look like. But it is dangerous to make such momentous decisions based on “hunch”, prejudice, bias or majority vote—or even conventional research methodologies.  Many leadership decisions—across sectors and issues—are made largely through intuition, or “gut instinct”. They are, in the end, intelligently derived “best guesses”. Leaders often then use tools such as traditional market research and the opinions of those around them to validate their best subjective guesses, even though these methods have routinely been shown to be flawed. The good news: We have found a way to eliminate the guesswork around the game-changing choice of defining the ONE Dream™. As a result, we assist leaders to “Lead with Certainty” by defining a rigorously built ONE Dream™. Scientific Intelligence, a unique research methodology, operates on the principle of being able to identify what we describe as the “Permission Space” that supports the ONE Dream™ leading to a sound and rigorously determined plan for change.  Based on recent advances in the behavioral sciences, holography and logic/mathematics, Scientific Intelligence’s formula for enabling organizations to identify the “Permission Space” is designed to uncover: A clear picture of the available energy that all relevant constituencies are willing to freely contribute, and which can therefore be harnessed to power the ONE Dream™. A deep and certain understanding of marketplace needs Comprehensive yet focused insights about current social attitudes Successful and sustainable implementation Using proprietary new research methodology, Scientific Intelligence identifies the “Permission Space”—quite literally the core “DNA” of an issue, and therefore the ONE Dream™—and the key drivers of success that will propel the organization towards that ONE Dream™. The most distinct advantage of the Scientific Intelligence process is its ability to bypass the unconscious filters that often lead respondents to give false or skewed answers.  This methodology works on the principle that the public mind has a very specific but largely invisible “belief structure”, composed of paths and key “stations”, much like the neural structure of the brain.  This belief structure accounts for why certain ideas, brands and products experience unexpected success—whereas others fail to capture the public’s imagination.  Understanding and utilizing that belief structure is the only consistent and reliable way to influence public opinion.  Using this methodology ensures that the ONE Dream™ truly reflects both the passion of the organization and the Permission Space that the organization has available to it in the marketplace. Identifying, Realizing and Sustaining the ONE Dream™ There are three phases to the ONE Dream™ process: 1) Identifying the ONE Dream™; 2) Realizing the ONE Dream™, and 3) Sustaining the ONE Dream™. Our focus in this document is Phase 1. How do leaders help to create and realize a dream?  Think about the circus or the State Fair—remember those “plate spinners” at the circus—performers who spin plates on the ends of sticks.  Typically, after getting about seven or eight of them going, the first one starts to wobble, and they then have to race back to the first plate and re-spin it, thus maintaining its momentum. This process is repeated to keep all of the plates from falling.  Leaders are plate spinners whose role is to keep the plates spinning, and the plates represent the inspiration of others. Dropping a plate happens when we do anything that is uninspiring or demoralizing because it sucks the passion from the dream by dampening the Permission Space. The role for the leader is to never do anything—we repeat, to never do anything—that is uninspiring or demotivating to any of those people—clients, associates, regulators, unions, vendors and communities—who are united in their efforts to achieve the dream.  Thus leaders are directly responsible for inspiring and coaching those who are realizing the dream, and who must be fully inspired—all of the time—to live their lives in a way that inspires others—all of the time—no dropped plates.  The purpose of this team of leaders therefore is to be inspiring and to ensure that they are inspiring everyone, every day, all the time, in every way, in every communication and action so that every decision, communication, feeling and relationship moves customers and colleagues closer to the realization of their ONE Dream™.  The first act that demoralizes someone who is trying to realize a dream will break the spell, trash the passion and waste the opportunity. We don't need charts and graphs and matrices and complex theories for this.  It's pretty simple.  When we try to think about what's possible, even if never attained before, and identify it as a dream that we hold dear and seek to realize, and then make the commitment to align the entire team who is serving the customer—as well as the customer—behind everything necessary to achieve that dream—the dream becomes possible.  And identifying the ONE Dream™ that gathers and galvanizes the passion of all constituents is a vital step in igniting inspiration. Martin Luther King showed us how—so did Jack Kennedy. So can you. The Benefits of ONE Dream™ The magic of having ONE Dream™ is remarkable: A committed group of “constituents” share the rigorous process of defining the ONE Dream™, co-create it, and then become the organization’s main champions for realizing the ONE Dream™. The entire organization becomes focused around a richly imagined future, that harnesses ALL the energy of ALL the constituents behind the attainment of the ONE Dream™ Internal and external languaging and messaging is dramatically simplified and clarified—there is only ONE Dream™ Many buzz-words and jargon-loaded slogans, tag-lines and marketing themes dissolve in the presence of ONE Dream™ resulting in more focused and aligned communications—both internally, and with the outside world Leaders share an inspiring story—ONE Dream™—and use it to market, recruit, persuade, inspire, build, grow and excel The “buzz” around the ONE Dream™ excites new opportunities, retains and inspires existing associates/employees, builds new business opportunities and enables the organization to manage and fulfill its destiny This process is remarkable for what it omits—where there is no Permission Space, the message is clear; there is insufficient energy to propel certain strategies, priorities or pet projects, and they should be relegated to a lower priority status or dropped altogether since they do not contribute to the realization of the ONE Dream™ We look forward to helping you Identify, Realize and Sustain your ONE Dream™! For further information please email us at info@secretan.com or call us at 519-927-5213