The Five Functions Wheel identifies five primary functions needed to achieve continuous growth for your organization.
These functions play out in a set sequence that becomes ubiquitous to all groups, departments, teams, projects, etc. within an enterprise, as well as to you personally.
Do you have Clear Goals?
Focus on your Goals in all your decision making.
You are responsible for maintaining effective communication within your group as well as with your customers and suppliers.
You are 100% accountable for Results.
What is Available to you?
Build and Manage the Resources available to this Group/Project to deliver on the desired Goals.
This includes managing the relationships you have with your Suppliers.
Determine your Capabilities: your ability to Reliably deliver variety, quantity, quality and volume within time specifications.
Your Team is included in Build.
Customer defines Value
This is the Generating and Meeting of Customer Demand to achieve target Results.
Deliver includes managing the relationships you have with your Customers.
Are you achieving your Goals?
Interpret actual Results and Feedback against targets, and determine the causes.
Where have we exceeded expectations, where have we met expectations, and where have we fallen short? How has the market changed? How have our competitors changed?
This process will bring to light potential New Opportunities, Opportunities to Adjust, and Cost Cutting Opportunities.
This will help you get a clearer picture of your Purpose/Mission.
Model Opportunity Changes:
1. Select an Opportunity Change.
2. Plan how this Change would be implemented into the Operating Model.
3. Predict the Results of the Change to the Value Proposition.
4. Assess Cost and Return of this Change.
5. Determine how much in alignment this Change is with your long and short term Goals/Mission.
Select and Plan the next change.
The Wheel reveals the value of aligning the five primary functions to a central focus on common goals. The Focus function is central to leveraging two creative tensions, the company’s core competencies found within its value chain of key tasks, and the real opportunities for its advancement. Harnessing both is a sure step towards short and long-term growth. The ability to coordinate these tensions will transition the enterprise into a higher gear.
This same Wheel can be used for your own Personal growth.
Do you have Clarity of Purpose?
Take 100% Responsibility for Everything in your life.
Be clear on your Goals and Focus on achieving them. Always word them as a positive, and you should get excited just thinking of them.
"You become what you think about most of the time." - Earl Nightingale.
What can you do?
These are your knowledge, skills and abilities.
This is where you track each of your different Abilities, those that are used in your career and some that are not.
What do you want to do better, or that you want to expand in different directions?
You define Value
Where are you using your Skills and Abilities?
This is where you qualify your career. Are you happy with your current job? Is it progressing where you want it to?
Do you love your life?
Get clarity of your passion in life, and determine what is working for you and what is not.Clarity of Passion
Focus on an aspect of your life.
Are you happy with where you are and where you are going with it?
If not a clear Yes or No, then break it up into smaller components and ask this question again of each component.
Where you find a clear Yes, your excitement level thinking about it will guide you towards your passions.
Clarity of Progress
Repeat the above Extract process on a Goal you have for yourself.
This will help you determine how well you are progressing, what is working and what is not, and whether you are doing what you want with your life.
Clearing Bad Experiences, Mistakes and Failures
If you haven’t failed at anything in your life, you are not trying hard enough.
Focus on an something you tried to achieve that didn’t work or didn’t work well. Alternatively focus on a bad experience from your past.
1. Acknowledge the reality of what actually happened, that things didn’t work out as they should have. Be present with the experience, and all the emotions that come up. State it out load in a clear and concise way. Be brutally honest - you can’t release what you don’t acknowledge.
2. It is important that you take full responsibility for it. Don’t blame others: firstly you can’t change other people, and secondly you were there - you could always have done something differently. State it out loud: "I am 100% responsible for ........ !".
3. Now forgive yourself for what YOU caused. Also, forgive all others that were a part of the experience. Do this out loud to yourself.4. Now you are ready to release the experience from your subconscious. Let it go. Imagine setting it on fire and watching it burn up. Say goodbye to it.5. Finally, imagine your life moving forward where this is no longer a part of it. Feel the weight that has been lifted, and be thankful.
Create meaning in your life: Define your Goals and Plan on Achieving them.
"If you want your life to change, you must change things in your life."
Creating Space
Everything in your life should be taking you towards a Goal or it should be something you enjoy doing. Picking up on what you discovered in the Interpret process, focus on something specific:
1. Is this something I no longer want to do - can I eliminate it?
2. Is this something I can do better or more efficiently a different way?
Your most limited asset is time. Are you using it efficiently? You may need to eliminate something in order to make room for something else.
Imagine the Possibilities
Once you have created space in your life, you have room for something new. Now is the time to Imagine without Judgement.
1. Eliminate everything from your thoughts creating an emptiness in your mind.
2. Take one of the things in your life you like doing and place it into this emptiness.
3. Allow ideas to materialize in your mind, trying your best not to have expectations. Think: "I wonder what will turn up". These ideas resonate in some way with what you have placed in your mind, and are attracted to it. Do not judge, just record and wait for more.
4. Look at each of these ideas and try them on for size - How excited do you get thinking about it?
Repeat this process for other things in your life you like doing. You may want to do the same with some of the ideas that materialized in the process above.
You will start to build a picture of those things that you would enjoy doing, those things you would like to achieve. There will likely be more things than you could possibly do in 100 lifetimes.
"Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve." - Napoleon Hill.
Choosing a Great Future
It is likely that something materialized that really stood out.
You want to choose something that you have the most excitement about, and that you believe you can achieve. Take this as a Goal and follow it relentlessly.
"You become what you think about most of the time." - Earl Nightingale.
Planning Change
Have a clear picture of your Goal, and carefully Plan the next step towards reaching it. Be constantly open to changing your Plans in the future as circumstances and opportunities present themselves.
Before making any changes, be honest and clear about all the consequences of any change - what do you have to do, what are you giving up, and how will this affect everything else in your life.
"Happiness is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal or goal." - Earl Nightingale.
Live your life deliberately!
