What’s Your Unique Ability®?
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Written by David Ormesher on August 26, 2011
It was August, and that meant it was time for our third workshop of 2011. Our theme was unique ability, based on a process developed by The Strategic Coach®, and we looked at it both on a personal and company level.
Prior to attending the workshop, all of the members went online to fill out a special Kolbe Index questionnaire to determine their Kolbe score. This is a four-number score that indicates your natural abilities and instinctive talents. Everyone came to the workshop with their score in hand, ready to discuss. We started by having everyone fill out an 
Activity Inventory to list everything we do in our business in the course of a normal week. Then we scored our Inventory by whether we felt these represented Incompetent, Competent, Excellent, or Unique Ability activities. There was a lot of discussion about how we could begin to restructure our companies so that we could spend more time operating in our Unique Abilities and less in our Incompetent and Competent activities! Finally we incorporated an interpretation of everyone's Kolbe scores into an action plan.
The Experience Transformer is one of the most valuable Strategic Coach tools we introduce during the Bigger Future program. Its genius is in its simplicity. It asks the question, "If you were to do this experience over, 
knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?" As a group we each selected an experience from the last quarter, likely an experience that didn't go well, and worked it through the Experience Transformer. One of the key concepts is that even negative experiences can providing learnings, and if you don't capture those learnings, then the experience was a complete waste. We took time to capture the learnings and build a strategy for reacting differently the next time we are faced with a similar experience.
One of the biggest challenges for any company is to clearly define its positioning and brand. We spent the entire afternoon exploring what brand means in the context of Rwanda and the East Africa Community. We debated how focused a company can or should become in a small market like Rwanda. Then we began to work on refining our positioning statements for our companies. This is a very difficult process, and everyone worked very hard to define and refine and declare their unique positioning.
At the end of a very long day, we revisited the Entrepeneurial Time System. We brainstormed three specific Focus, Buffer, and Free Day activities to focus on in the upcoming quarter.
On Thursday during our one-on-one consulting time we organized ourselves into small groups of three and "workshopped" our positioning statements again, presenting them to each other and continuing to refine the language. It was a rich and productive time of challenging and encouraging each other.
Another exciting week in Rwanda with business owners who are really making a difference!