CTQ in 2018 - Recapped
(This is from Edition 28 of The Upleveler, our weekly smartletter)
Choose to Thinq is now 5 years old
For our clients, we usually do a mix of deep upleveling projects, 'workships' and one-off assignments. On the upleveling front in 2018 (where we closely work with our clients, helping to design and execute interventions, bring knowledge and run practice grounds), we began working with two new clients on their upleveling journeys. One was a mid-sized MNC making the shift to an innovation-led tech culture. The other was a very small and feisty company where the founders are trying to build the learning and excellence muscle of the rest of the young org. Both have helped us expand our horizons and pushed us to close the gap between knowledge and practice.
One of our clients received the award for 'Best Place to Innovate in India', partly due to the program that we contributed to creating and running for four years in a row. Sometimes, it takes time for results and recognition, so you just need to plug away.
One interesting 'Work Ship' we conducted in 2018 was on the topic of 'Behavioural Economics' for an IT Product Sales team during their offsite. How do you get a sales team, used to operating from a conventional playbook, to use some of the techniques and ideas from the behavioural sciences to influence their market?
A big addition to our repertoire was the notion of 'Compounds' for knowledge and behavioural habit building. We experimented in-house and with a client on building habits around reading, writing, and creating knowledge capital. Some succeeded, some failed, but all of them taught us how habits can be built. More on this in 2019.
Like in every year, apart from 'Compounds', we ran other major and minor experiments. It's too early to talk about most of them, so we'll let you in on them some other time.
Six months ago, we launched our 'smartletter', for with 5 years behind us, we were ready to start sharing some of our accumulated insights with the world!
We launched 'Pause at Yellow', our first subscription-based service. The purpose is simple: how do you enable thinking minds to constantly reflect on various topics, using what we call 'big little questions'?
In 2018, we designed and published three kinds of calendars: one on learning, one on mindlevers, and one on reflection. In previous years, we had focused on book summaries and business stories, so this was a big change. People have loved them!
All of us at CTQ continued to read, listen, think, engage, and converse.
In the last two months of 2018, we began reflecting on the core purpose of CTQ. Until then, we had seen our purpose as 'Upleveling' i.e. helping the growth-minded beat the status quo, whatever it be. Based on this exercise and talking to friends, clients, and well-wishers, we have tweaked our purpose statement as "upleveling today to be relevant tomorrow". Almost all our work is with "tomorrow" in mind while dealing with "today". "Future Relevance" is a topic whose importance accelerates as the rate of change accelerates. From 2019, you'll see us talking more about how all of us can make strides towards staying relevant, using timeless wisdom as well as newly emerging ideas. (More here)
We hope you've enjoyed being with us in 2018. We look forward to your company in 2019 as well. Do tell us in the comments what else you'd like us to cover and speak about.
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