Tag: small business

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Force Field Analysis: A Strategic Approach to Goal Planning

goal setting

Force Field Analysis is one of many goal planning techniques that you can use as a small business owner or online marketer.

Often you will find that your approach to goal planning and goal achievement proves to be inadequate or incomplete (the evidence lies in the fact that you may not achieve your goals). The beauty of Force Field Analysis for goal planning is that it offers a strategic way to approach your goals. It is easy to use, but incredibly powerful.  It can give you new insights into what is getting in the road of your goals, including lack of awareness of your strengths and the inability to capitalise on them.  It will also help you identify the things that you need to work on and strategies you need to employ to achieve your goals.

I’ve used this approach, as an organizational consultant, since the early 1980’s with small business owners, managers in organisations (public and private sectors), university faculties and doctoral/masters students. I have also used Force Field Analysis with colleagues in action learning groups as we planned our career transitions.

[Image credit: Goal by Sean MacEntee]

How to use Force Field Analysis for goal planning

Force Field Analysis was first used by Kurt Lewin in 1946 when he was working with minority social groups.  What struck him was how people were becoming stuck in their disadvantaged position in society.  He needed a way to help them move beyond where they were now – to achieve their life goals.  

Lewin was acutely aware that many things conspired to maintain the status quo.  He realized that what gave effect to the current situation for these people was a group of hindering and helping forces that created the current equilibrium represented by the status quo.  He recognized that if you analyzed these forces and put in place strategies to address them, you could change the equilibrium and move towards your goal.  Hence the name, Force Field Analysis – analysis of the helping and hindering forces within a particular arena (field).  Lewin was able to create major social change by using this method with people who were suffering social disadvantage.

So it is with any goal you wish to pursue, whether expanding your small business, developing your small business marketing online or improving personal productivity.  Once you identify what is helping you move towards your goal (helping forces) and what is hindering you (hindering forces), you can plan concrete strategies to address these forces.

Specifically, you can work out ways to strengthen the helping forces and weaken the hindering forces – thus changing the equilibrium of the current situation and enabling you to move towards your goal.  It’s this two-way approach that creates the major shift.  So it is not enough just to work on the hindering forces, you also need to strengthen the helping forces.

Force Field Analysis: An Example of Goal Planning

Let’s assume that you have set a goal, “To be effective in small business marketing online”.  I have developed an example Force Field Analysis based on an imaginary set of forces (helping and hindering) that are impacting on your goal achievement.  Ideally, you would do this analysis with at least one other person, but you can definitely do it by yourself. 

So what you have here is the second rung of goal planning – you have a goal in mind and now you have to establish sub-goals and strategies to move forward.  Force Field Analysis helps you to do this as illustrated in the example below:

FORCE FIELD ANALYSIS 

GOAL:  To be effective in small business marketing online


Hindering Forces


Helping Forces

1. lack of time

 1. good brand recognition
2. lack of knowledge

2. motivated
3. don’t know where to start 3. have a good speaking voice
4. not a good writer 4. have friends who are good at small business marketing
5. have no presence on social networks 5. access to good online resources
 6. don’t know how to create a WordPress blog 6. prepared to have a go

 

So now you have to decide which helping forces you will strengthen and which hindering forces you will work to reduce. So some options might be:

In relation to the helping forces, you might employ two or more of these strategies to strengthen the things that are working for you:

  1. develop a podcast blog (to build on your speaking capability)
  2. set clear, achievable milestones to maintain your motivation
  3. use specialists in online branding to strengthen your brand online
  4. talk to your friends about what works for them
  5. study up on your online resources with a particular focus and goal in mind
  6. join a small business online forum or group on one of the social networks.

To reduce the impact of hindering forces you might decide to do two or more of the following:

  2. use your online resources to build your knowledge (in a focused way)
  3. purchase a resource that covers “small business marketing online”
  4. outsource your writing
  5. start with one social network that you are comfortable using, e.g. Squidoo or LinkedIn, and build from there
  6. outsource the design of your WordPress blog to a web design service.

Force Field Analysis has many applications including evaluation of outcomes and processes.  MindTools.com explains how to use Force Field Analysis for decision making and offers a free worksheet for using the tool. 

Force Field Analysis offers a comprehensive approach to goal planning and has been proven over many years to help small business organisations and individuals achieve their goals.

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Sometimes You Have to Stop to Move Forward: A Montville Break

View from Montville

 View from Montville

Over the weekend, I spent two days in a cabin in Montville, a mountain village on the Blackall Range in Queensland, Australia.   It was great to take in the mountain air and the glorious vistas and to stroll through Montville village, an arts and craft centre that I featured in one of my Squidoo lenses.  

I had deliberately left my laptop behind on this trip and took a real break from computers, the Internet and work generally.  There are times when you need to stop to move forward – to slow the momentum of your body and your mind.

Improve your blogging productivity with a rest

Without rest and relaxation, you can become stale in what you are doing whether it is article writing, social media marketing or writing blog posts. 

With a break, you can return to your daily blogging with renewed energy, insight and enthusiasm.  A break can also improve your productivity through the energy renewal and new perspectives you gain.  Often you will find that the solution to your current issue or problem lies in front of you – you just need time out to see it.

 This is particularly true when you are engaged in running a small business offline.  The daily demands can mean that you are constantly ‘chasing your tail’.  Eventually, you can’t ‘see the wood for the trees’ – you are blind to the bigger picture because of reacting to small things. 

Stepping back, taking time out, is essential to develop a new perspective.  You could take a weekend away to refresh your mind.  The beauty of a place like Montville can be really invigorating.  

View from The Potter's Place Montville
View from The Potter's Place Montville

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Time seems to stand still when you stop – minutes turn into hours and hours become days.  This is in stark contrast to when you are busy chasing deadlines. 

I was able to take heaps of photos on my Samsung Galaxy S11 Camera (8 Megapixels) on my Montville break and now I have these available for blog posts (see images in this post) and for creating videos via Animoto.

I was also able to identify ways that I could add more content to my personal productivity membership site:

  • Re-purpose articles I have written for Ezinearticles.com
  • Create a series on MP3’s on productivity and energy levels
  • Expand productivity tips from some of my Squidoo lenses
  • Develop a series of promotional videos for the membership site.

By taking a two day rest at Montville, I am now able to resume my blogging with improved productivity through an increase in energy, resources and ideas.

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The Challenge of Daily Blogging and the Need for Improved Personal Productivity

3Cs of blogging

There are many things that work against you when you attempt to achieve daily blogging. 

However, the effort to maintain a daily blogging schedule is well worth it.  I noticed that since I have missed a few days of publishing Small Business Odyssey, the Alexa ranking has changed from 860,000 to 1,100,000 – in other words, my web traffic has dropped.

 Daily blogging enables you to build momentum both with your writing and your blog traffic. 

 Photo Credit: cambodia4kidsorg

Creating a related blog – How to be productive

Sometimes you may need an infusion of new ideas or a new perspective on your blogging.  This can come through creating a related blog and using a drip-feed automated process.

Over the past week I’ve been building another WordPress blog, a productivity membership site:

http://www.how-to-be-productive.com

 Whilst the membership site was pre-built in terms of its drip-feed content, I decided to develop audio content for the first 9 lessons via Audacity.  Again, once I gained momentum in creating these recordings, I found the task easy and enjoyable.  I was able to produce the audios (MP3’s) for the membership site on personal productivity  in two sittings – one involving three recordings, the other six.

The associated task of inserting the audios into blog posts was made so easy by the very clever, free software, podPress, discussed in an earlier post.

So while I was not writing and publishing on my Small Business Odyssey blog, I was developing and refining my productivity membership site hosted on a WordPress blog. 

Personal productivity and daily blogging

 While the creation of the new productivity site may seem like a diversion from this blog, I believe that it actually reinforces the Small Business Odyssey blog.  Personal productivity underpins much of what I am writing about on Small Business Odyssey.  Fundamentally, if you can’t improve your personal productivity as a small business owner, you will have real difficulty engaging in any form of small business marketing.  Worse still, you may end up doing the wrong kind of work (e.g. wasting hours on Twitter, reading and writing Tweets).

One of the core challenges involved in daily blogging is, in fact, finding ways to improve your productivity. To make the time to achieve a daily, published blog post (a minimum of two hours taking into account locating images and editing), you need to find ways to improve your use of time. 

There are numerous things that can distract you or consume your time as a small business owner and it is easy to fall into old habits ( e.g. reading emails for hours) – with the net result that you do not make time for blogging.

Over the past three weeks, for example, I have been engaged with others in creating four tender submissions for our human resource consulting business. a mind-numbing task but essential for business survival and growth in the current economic and political climate.

It would have been very easy to give up daily blogging but I had to find a way to schedule my blog writing at a time when my productivity and creativity were at their best – early in the morning. 

To engage in daily blogging, takes a huge commitment but it is rewarding both intrinsically (personal satisfaction and sense of achievement) and extrinsically (increased web traffic and income).