The constant changes in market conditions put companies and their employees under great pressure. In many cases, leaders find it difficult to assess whether their decisions or actions are healthy for the other individuals in the organization and the ecosystem.

The Minimum Healthy Step, or MIHS (pronounced MISS), is a model with concrete practices and strategies that enable leaders to recognize the nature of the new reality and have techniques to build healthier connections with people in the company, even when faced with challenging situations of great magnitude.

Exponential markets bring mounting disruption that demands organizational agility. Companies must respond rapidly yet in ways that engage rather than overwhelm people. The Minimum Healthy Step approach from Enterprise Agility offers a structured yet adaptive way to accelerate progress.

• Exponential Markets: Understand the dynamics of the waves in highly changing markets and acknowledge your company is now exposed to a new reality.
• Sense: By scanning exponential markets, companies maintain awareness of what’s emerging in these unpredictable environments. Continuously sense the horizon using Enterprise Agility’s Collective Strategic Sensing and other models to identify threats and opportunities in these fast-changing landscapes.
• Situation: Reframe brewing issues as opportunities and challenges rather than problems to spark potential-focused thinking across the organization.
• Engage: Apply Enterprise Agility techniques like the Change Journey Pyramid to foster transparency, psychological safety and ownership at all levels as new situations emerge.
• Focus: Promote disciplined focus on key priorities using Enterprise Agility tools while allowing flexibility on methods to achieve goals amidst turbulence.
• Reframe: Build collective capacity to reframe unexpected challenges in empowering ways that lessen stress and catalyze adaptation.
• Mobilize: Equipped with the above foundations, activate and motivate incremental steps that spur progress and momentum even amidst uncertainty.

Like tuning an engine, leaders can calibrate each component to find the optimal voltage that converts potential into progress. Avoid overtaxing human systems with reactive demands. Instead, spark sustainable change through engaged pluralistic buy-in.

With consistent Minimum Healthy Steps, organizations can accelerate their shared purpose and cultivate the collective energy to flourish despite disruption’s headwinds. Progress gains its own momentum when nourished by human spirit.

The Minimum Healthy Step (MIHS) is based on concepts from the neuroscience of change, organizational psychology, and others (Science of Accelerated Change). It's part of our Certified Enterprise Agility Leadership Program.

For more detailed information about MIHS, check Enterprise Agility Fundamentals, Chapter 5, page 201.