Strategic Initiatives: What’s Hot & What’s Not?
How Can You Tackle the Hidden 50% of Project Success?
F1 Insider Mark Gallagher shared his thoughts on the role of pitstops in business performance and the approach we adopt at Growth Pitstop in a Linked-in article recently. The article is reproduced below.
Since I spend most days providing business insights from Formula 1 motor racing, it should come as no surprise to learn that clients are often interested to know about the teamwork and process involved in delivering a pit stop in less than 2 seconds.
Considering that a pit stop gives the team the opportunity to recalibrate the performance of its car and driver prior to the next phase of the race, this raises an interesting question;
Has your organisation ever considered making a pit stop?
The opportunity to tackle issues, examine what is and isn’t working properly and adjust strategy accordingly should not be confined to Formula 1. The very essence of agility is the preparedness to rethink the direction of travel and move performance to the next level.
Growth Pitstop is a Dublin-based company which works with companies to improve business outcomes. Their goal is to help companies realise their performance potential by taking ‘corporate pit stops’ during which they take a data-driven, analytical approach to accelerating performance.
In the same way Formula 1 teams recognise that the truth is in the data, Growth Pitstop works with leadership teams to understand the reality of an organisation’s performance versus the perception.
It’s an intriguing approach, and one that founders John O’Gorman and Ray Collis are passionate about.
“Pitstops are a technique for sustained performance in dynamic high-pressure environments where effective mid-race adjustment is key,” says O’Gorman. “The driver starts the race with the perfect strategy & set-up for the track, but must be ready to adjust in an instant to changing conditions. The same applies in the dynamic high-pressure environment of business, making the essential mid race adjustments required for success.”
O’Gorman and Collis find that, on average, clients are operating to 64% of their potential, leaving significant room for an improvement in business outcomes. They have also come to recognise that many leaders waste valuable time – in many cases up to two hours each week – as a result of misalignment in relation to company strategy, tensions arising from workplace relationships and performance lost when under pressure to deliver critical initiatives.
In order to gather the data concerning a client’s performance, John and Ray have developed a unique toolkit which enables organisations to gain real insight, providing the catalyst for the changes which will unlock business performance.
“At the race track the driver’s job is to push the car to the limit,” says Collis, who developed the analytical tools used by Growth Pitstop. “In an increasingly fast-paced business environment, the leader’s job is the same. Our aim is to provide leaders with speedy access to alternative data sets and modelling revealing where the real ‘limit’ actually is… which is generally much further away than they think.”
What is interesting about the approach taken by Growth Pitstop is that they understand how difficult it can be for busy leaders to take time away from the day-to-day pressures of operating a business.
“The idea is just like in a physical pitstop,” says O’Gorman. “To come together as a team to identify what is working and fix what is not. But it has to be fast – our online pitstops tackle real business challenges but take only 3 hours. The more teams pitstop their strategic priorities and teams the more agile and innovative they become.”
The best pit stops make the difference between winning and losing. That very much reflects the approach John and Ray take to helping businesses realise their potential.
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