In my previous post, I talked about Vital Behaviors, which I learned about in my Influencer Training. I’m elaborating here on Crucial Moments because they are one of the key ways to help you find Vital Behaviors. A Crucial Moment is the point in time where you have a critical choice to make. It’s the event or trigger where, depending on how you respond, you can positively or negatively impact results in a significant way. For example, a critical moment is when your alarm goes off in the morning. You can do your workout routine or you can hit the snooze alarm and put it off another day. It’s the moment of temptation when you wonder whether to take the off ramp and spiral down, or take the on ramp and accelerate toward your results.
The Power of Crucial Moments
Crucial Moments are powerful because if you do the right behaviors, you can prevent a host of downstream issues. They mark the beginning of a domino effect. They are critical choice points where your actions will shape the outcomes either positively or negatively. They help you find and test Vital Behaviors because you can find the root cause of the results you’re getting. Changing the actions at Crucial Moments changes your results.
Finding Crucial Moments
Here are a few ways to find Crucial Moments:
- Walk the process or flow and find where the key decisions are.
- Identify events or triggers that start a chain of events.
- Work backwards from a result and trace the actions that got you there. Note the key decision points along the way.
Example of Crucial Moments in a Project Cycle
Here is an example we used during our training. It’s a list of crucial moments for a project cycle:
- Fact-free planning – planning without all the stakeholders present.
- Leaders pretend to involve others.
- Leaders propose an impossible plan.
- Team members face conflicting priorities.
In each of these situations, you can imagine how actions influence the outcome. I’ve seen many projects fail because of failure to push back on fact-free planning or impossible plans. When leaders pretend to involve others, they lose trust and credibility. If you don’t resolve conflicting priorities, projects can die a slow death, or succeed only through heroic efforts. In each of these cases, you can identify the Vital Behaviors for these Crucial Moments that lead toward successful outcomes.
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