Deeper Dive - Force Field Analysis - November 1, 2022
A listing of "pros" and "cons" with a twist!
A common conundrum
How many times have organizational leaders been placed in the situation where we feel we run out of resources (time, money, staff) before we run out of good ideas? Given an unlimited amount of cash and time, we could literally change the world. Of course, we all know that many times we are limited by constraints that either we put on ourselves or are given to us by external factors. These are the things we just have to work around.
And when presented with an idea to help us meet a goal or an objective, we often need to analyze whether that idea is worth doing. In one sense it might make sense to move forward, in another sense, the juice might not be worth the squeeze. How can we determine what is worth doing and what isn’t worth doing? Better yet, how can we analyze the factors that are either pushing us forward in our work or keeping us behind?
The Force Field
One of the tools that can be used is a called a “Force Field”. It sounds fancy, but it’s really nothing more than a list of pros and cons. In reality,, this is the kind of stuff our moms and dads taught us to do when we were kids and had $20 burning a hole in our pocket and we wanted to buy something. What mom and dad taught us years ago still has relevance today.
Let’s take a look at a simple force field our team my create if we were discussing the merit of improving service delivery to our clients. It might look something like this:
On the left hand side we have our “pros” or our positive drivers. If we improved our service delivery, this might be the reasonable outcomes we can expect to see. On the right hand side, these are the “cons”, or the negative drivers. Often these are the obstacles we see that we need to overcome.
Using our force field, we take the analysis one step further, by assigning a value to each of these items. What scale or how you do it is completely up to you, but the trick is to discuss and analyze each item to really dive into the positive and negative drivers. After we do this analysis, our chart might look something like this:
In our discussions, we learned that increased resources can be a real positive driver for the team. More money coming into the organization will undoubtedly create an increased demand for our services and grow our client base. Both of which are nice, but without more resources, it would be difficult to accomplish.
We also learned that any new process is going to be difficult to implement; our staff would need new training and we might even need to purchase new equipment or new tools to improve delivery. We also learned that we say we don’t have enough time, but we always say that. Also, after further discussion, we discovered that while we think we have budgetary constraints, funding is solid and any new initiative to improve our service delivery will probably be seen as a good investment.
Through this process, we have discovered that yes, the positive factors for improving service delivery to our clients will outweigh the negative factors, but those negative factors can’t be ignored and it might spark a conversation on what are some blind spots our organization has — How can we make new processes work better? Do we need to invest in more training? Do we need to create new positions?
As it has been stated, the Force Field is certainly not a new concept and probably one you have used many, many times and never even realized it. Adding the extra step of assigning weight to the “pros” and “cons” might be a new idea and it really helps this tool gain more utility.
If you have found this idea helpful, please leave a comment or “hit the heart”, also feel free to drop me a line at pinnaclestrategiesltd@gmail.com if you want to talk offline and have some other ideas you want to explore.
Onward and upward!
Bill