It's a dessert topping - it's a floor wax- it's BOTH (a dated reference to a SNL skit) a.k.a. What's Old is New

How often do we see something in our business lives and careers (at least for those of us that have been around for a while!) that we mentally translate into some other experience, or tool or approach that we have run into before? For me, it's fairly often.

What's Old is New Again.  Or is it??

Now that is either a function of how old I am (and therefore - have had statistically more opportunities to try and experience different things in my career), or possibly a function of my ability to assimilate new things (so I reach for analogs and similarities to help my "old" brain cope).

At a recent MBB day at LSI, we were exposed to the Harada Method.  Now while the Harada Method is focused on "self reliance" and developing people to their fullest capability, it was when we worked with some of the artifacts that I had that 'deja vu' moment this time.

You see - one of the very practical and pragmatic tools that is included in the Harada Method is something called the "64 Chart" - which in itself is a bit confusing as there are 81 cells on the actual Harada chart - not 64.  And to make it even more confusing, there are 121 cells on our "modified" Harada chart.

This tool is used to capture a broad, long term goal that you want to achieve at the centre of the chart (the very middle cell), and then in successive rings spanning out from that goal, you are meant to capture the things you need to do and complete to achieve that goal; going from the highest level activities (in the ring of cells immediately around the "goal" cell) to finer and finer levels of granularity as you move out through successive layers of the grid.

Colours & Design by Colin Jones: MBB Candidate

 As a simple tool for planning activities to achieve that goal in the centre of the matrix, it works rather eloquently.

But as we were experimenting with matrix and using it to try and get a feel for how to build out the successive "rings" of cells, it occurred to me that the outcome was not dissimilar to what you would get from a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) - a technique / methodology used in Project Planning.

The good news is, because I can make that connection, it makes it easier for me to assimilate and understand the potential and uses of the new tool (the matrix above).