Let the [Substack] journey begin...

It’s all too easy to be overwhelmed with everything going on around us. If your experience is anything like mine, you’re bombarded on all sides by news, reviews, opinions, facts, non-facts, cats, Mexican recipes, and more. Constantly.

As rather rich guy Warren Buffett has said: “Knowing what to leave out is just as important as knowing what to focus on”. The first step in making sense of everything is knowing that we can’t. But we can make sense of a part of everything. And that part is to be consciously and consistently chosen by you.

The part that matters. The part that you decide to have control over or not. The part that is worth the value of your attention and effort or not.

It’s a strategic choice you make every day.

Knowing what to focus on, and how to make sense of it, is an art and science and alchemic guessing game I’ve been engaged in through my work for over 20 years. Based on this experience, it’s an area I often see teams struggle with, which is what drives me to help. Things like:

• Struggling to come up with an organisation vision and mission statement, and not really knowing why, or what to do with it

• Coming up with a bag of goals for strategic planning, but not being able to connect those goals to either an organisation purpose, or to the day-to-day work everyone is doing

• Trying to turn strategy into action, only to see it lose momentum and relevance throughout the organisation

• Trying to translate customer research results into useful insights

• Trying to translate those insights into meaningful product improvements

In essence: I enjoy helping teams tell the right story that connects, energises, activates, and shapes an organisation’s future. To me, this is sense-making: seeing teams co-creating, surfacing, connecting, and aligning.

The way I do this is with three major moves:

FACILITATION - crafting meetings, workshops and gatherings to get the right people having the right conversations at the right time, with the right outcomes

VISUALISATION - bringing complex and vague business content to life through real-time scribing and strategic illustrating

DESIGN - creating products and processes to help customers, employees and communities do their best work together

If you’re tired of the regular corporate script, you should find this interesting. If you already help teams work better together, and you want to add more tools to your toolkit, this is the place for you. If I can share a trick or two, a drawing or two, a template or two, that you can use straight away to have a brighter impact in your work, then I’ll call this Substack a success.

I can’t promise weekly posts, and I’m guessing you probably don’t want ‘content’ just for the sake of ‘content’. I’ll post tips, insights, drawings and templates whenever I can.

Paid subscribers will of course get all the regular posts, plus downloadable PDF templates and more in-depth how-to guides and examples.

Founding Members will also get access to the ‘Virtual Ben Crothers’ (aka BenGPT, a digital ‘me’ where you can pick my brains, drawing from all of my existing writing (like Presto Sketching, Draw in 4, 50 Remote-Friendly Icebreakers plus more), plus heavy discounts to training sessions and videos.

I do my best to cultivate an open mindset, and try to be learning all the time. So, if you have any thoughts to share, please jump in and let me know. We’ll all benefit.

Thanks for being here, and for reading. 🙏