Early Win - Session 6

I was really drawn to the idea of an "early win" in this week's reading/class. It was something I hadn't really thought about before, but made immediate sense. Part of the reason it makes so much sense to me is that I think it can be a useful strategy to use in one's personal life. I sometimes have difficultly dealing with stress in my life, especially the kind that comes from having too much work to do. When faced with too much work to do or a particularly difficult task, I've occasionally had the bad habit of shutting down and simply putting off the work. This of course only makes my stress worse and leaves me less time to do the work. To combat this tendency, I've tried to concentrate on giving myself an early win. If I have a variety of tasks to complete, some of which are easier than others - which is normally the case - I try to tackle the easier less time consuming tasks first. Completing one task boosts my confidence and decreases my stress enabling me to move onto the next task.

When thinking about creating a strategic plan for organizational change, it seems obvious that securing an early win is even more important. Organizations are made up of people, and can be helped by the momentum created from an early win just like people. When I've thought about getting Malawi Children's Village to create and implement a strategic plan, the task definitely seems daunting. I think of so many things that would need to be considered, and major changes that would need to happen in order for the organization to succeed. I now realize that whatever strategy the organization seeks to use, we should make sure that it includes an early win. I'm not quite sure what that would be at this point. I'm also a little confused with how an early win would match with a divestment/retrenchment strategy. One of the things I think MCV might decide to do would be to close down its clinic and form a partnership with the clinic down the road. It's hard to think of this as an early win however. Won't people be disappointed to see a long standing program shut down? Perhaps it could be turned into an early win by having some sort of signing ceremony with the partnering organization? As I said, I'm not really sure what the early win would be at this point, but I'm glad I now know to keep this in mind if we go forward with a strategic plan.