Action Twinning - You read it first here, folks!

I've had more personal response to a blog I posted a couple of days - New Year Actions - than to anything else I have written on any business website.

It's got me thinking.....why is this and what are the messages that need to be captured.

The first one is to seize the opportunity presented by what that great U.S. sociologist Robert Merton called "unintended consequences" (Merton, by the way, was a brilliant observer of life and also coined the terms "self-fulfilling prophecy" and "role model".)

Unintended consequences are often the outcome of supposedly rational action - and you need to be alert to act decisively on any unintended possibilities.

In the blog I refer to, I was trying to contrast the ephemeral and insubstantial nature of New Year Resolutions with the need to commit to real, relevant, immediate and sustained actions. Hence I called these decisive steps New Year Actions.

What most people have been asking me is how to they can stay true to these New Year Actions - and how do they remain flexible but committed and how do they review where they are going.

Then it struck me that the personal magic for me in all of this is the personal relationship I have developed with my friend, the performance coach Martin Hall. Martin and I help establish personal targets and have grown into the habit of quite remorsely driving the other to not only match these targets but also to smash right through them.

Standard problems in business building such as inertia, fear, potential embarrassment and the tendency to drift into comfort zones of only tackling the easy stuff are simply blown away.

It rests on two basic psychological levels - the act of working out directions with another which lends realism and relevance and, secondly, the element of reciprocity: we do this for each other - there is a double bind of responsibility which makes letting the other down almost intolerable.

And this is what I suggest business builders do - they seek out an Action Twin and, every day, they engage in Action Twinning, reviewing targets and outputs.

As a corporate culture consultant I am always seeking the transformative and the exceptional at an organisational level. Trust me, Action Twinning is utterly transformative at a personal level within business building scenarios. My productivity - and I never counted myself a slacker - has skyrocketed since Martin and I just clicked into Action Twinning.

It's more accessible and immediate than coaching itself (although I will always engage also with a personal coach regularly for strategic, emotional and third party evaluation purposes) and it is much more visceral than occasional mentoring (which also has great relevance if your mentor can bring highly relevant exeperience).

Get Action Twinning as soon as you read this. See your performance barriers simply vanish.

- Malcolm Evans is a corporate culture and business ethics specialist. He intends to exercise his copyright over Action Twinning but, as with his other work, is eager to share - and hence it will made available on a Creative Commons non-commercial attribution basis (that means feel free to use it for yourself as of now but don't forget to attribute where it came from if you start writing it down or doing internal trainings - and you can't exploit the term commercially). It feels so good that I want to start getting this out - now!