The List of People We Want to Invite


If your involvement work is on track, Chapter 2 will have challenged you to consider inviting extraordinary people into your work. You should now be looking at a list of names. The list will include people who care, people with authority and responsibility, people with information and expertise, people who will be personally affected, people with diverse points of view, and people who are considered troublemakers. You might not have lists of names for each of the categories of people, but you will have an idea about how you might reach them.

You should also have decided how many people you want to involve in the work. You should have gone through the ideas generated by the categories and considered who was essential and who was desirable. If your work is complex, you may even have completed separate lists of people for each phase of the work.

We deliberately take the question of whom to invite and separate it from the question of how to invite them. Then any nervousness about actually issuing an invitation won't deter us from putting people on the list.

We have heard people use "They won't come" as a reason to eliminate people from involvement. Guess what? If you don't even ask them, they won't.

In Julie's house, they called this kind of speaking for other people "tractoring." The word comes from a story Julie's dad used to tell about a farmer whose tractor breaks down. He decides to ask a neighbor if he can borrow his tractor. On the way to the neighboring farm, the farmer thinks about the man he is going to see. He remembers stories he heard about other people being refused favors, and he remembers something he borrowed from this farmer a while ago and has not yet returned. He begins to wonder whether the farmer will lend him the tractor and becomes more and more anxious about asking. Finally, when he gets to the door and rings the bell, the neighbor cheerfully answers, and the farmer angrily says, "You can keep your bleeping tractor!"

Don't tractor—don't speak for other people.

How challenging is your list? Do you wonder if some of the people you've listed will come? Are you beginning to think about not even asking them? Does the thought of asking them make you nervous? Nervous is good. You can tap into your nervousness and use it to inspire you to invite with confidence and originality.

How you invite people can be critical to your success in involving them and getting things done. It is worth being creative about finding ways to invite the people on your list to join you that are compelling and galvanizing. Here are a few ways to be compelling:

  • Sometimes just telling people about the activity you want to involve them in is compelling. We barely need asking twice to a close friend's birthday or wedding celebration.

  • On the phone, in the corridors, and in presentations, talk about your project in a way that is galvanizing. When you speak with passion, people will want to join you.

  • The form of the invitation can be unusual. We once saw people being invited to a farmer's market with apple-shaped balloons.

  • Sometimes the name or the title of the work can be intriguing. One pharmaceutical company who wanted to invite people to join them in developing a new identity for their website called it "The Mad Hatter's Tea Party" and invited people to "come and lose their marbles" with an activity using marbles.

Or you can have another type of creative theme. We have seen many other themes with invitations to match, from "movie tickets" for a research project in Cannes during the Film Festival, to "travel passes" to invite people to join a Learning Journey project, to footballs to tempt people to join in work on values at a football field.

When you focus on the list of people you want to involve, use it to inspire and motivate you. You are not going to be doing this alone. All these people may join you. You are going to get great things done.




You Don't Have to Do It Alone(c) How to Involve Others to Get Things Done
You Dont Have to Do It Alone: How to Involve Others to Get Things Done
ISBN: 157675278X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 73

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