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After visiting the Dolphin Research Center Eileen McDargh became fascinated with the corollary between engagement for high performance in order to create a resilient organizational life and engagement and high performance in the watery world of the dolphin. Read this article and discover what she learned.

Most businesses spend more time and energy trying to find new customers than retaining and making their current ones happy.  The logic behind customer retention management (CRM) is simple -- It costs far less money to keep customers happy than to spend much more money replacing the unhappy ones with new customers.  If you take care of your customers they tell their friends about your business and will in the long run end up spending more money.  It is not rocket science.

Effects-based thinking transmits through systems in three orders – kinetic, second and third order effects.   Kinetic effects describe the objectives of short-range operational plans – the plans and projects we carry out on a daily basis in our work.  These objectives must be clear, measurable, and achievable and must support the organization's overall objectives.  Although a plan or project may take some time to complete, its effects should be immediately observable and measurable.  That's the kinetic effect of effects-based thinking – a small but significant step toward a larger goal (i.e. second and third order effects).

Many organizations utilize scoreboards or dashboards to track progress toward goals.  Such methods have values that can be measured in a continuous manner to track performance.  But such tools are just that – measures of performance toward discreet objectives, but not necessarily a component of effects-based thinking.  These objectives do not always have a clear connection to the organization's overarching goals or vision that one gets with EBT.  For example, making a certain amount of revenue or delivering a particular earnings per share by the end of the year are great measurements.  How are we going to know whether the actions we are taking today and tomorrow are having the right effects upon those measurements?  How can we utilize effects-based thinking to know that we aren't just getting lucky?  Furthermore, how do we even know that those measurements are the rightmeasurements?  And how do we know that the sum of the individual actions taken to affect these measurements, which often form the basis of incentive systems, are not interfering with each other or ultimately damaging the organization? This is where effects-based thinking or EBT comes into play.

As the name implies, effects-based thinking (EBT) is an approach to strategic planning and decision making where the effects of specific actions are assessed, not in a narrowly defined and time-limited way, but through a perspective that is sensitive to broad-ranging and lasting impacts.  Effects-based thinking is the opposite of short-sightedness or myopia.