Category Archives: Operations

Manage to Lead, Operations

IVOA Is Now Available as a ChatGPT Plugin

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An on-demand thinking partner that brings proven operating experience and Manage to Lead methods directly into ChatGPT.

OpenAI has approved IntelliVen Operations Advisor (IVOA) for public availability as a ChatGPT plugin. Leaders, teams, coaches, and consultants can now access and apply IntelliVen’s Manage to Lead (MtL) knowledge, methods, templates, tutorials, and rubrics directly in their ordinary ChatGPT conversations.

Leaders regularly face consequential decisions, challenging problems, and opportunities when designing, building, running, growing, governing, or changing a business. Having an experienced operating partner who can challenge assumptions, test ideas, ask questions that might otherwise go unasked, and help turn good thinking into effective action can make a big difference.

IVOA is like having a senior operating partner at your side, available whenever you need a thinking partner. It draws on IntelliVen’s Manage to Lead system, developed by codifying the practices and lessons learned from more than a dozen highly successful operating executives. IVOA makes accumulated operations knowledge, experience, and discipline accessible through ChatGPT to help leaders, coaches, and those who support them work through difficult issues, improve plans and work products, make better decisions, and determine what to do next.

IVOA is even more useful when working with others. It helps team members develop their thinking independently, compare perspectives, identify and resolve consequential differences, and agree on direction and plans. It also helps teams establish the practices needed to guide, support, and govern performance.

Whether working alone or with others, IVOA helps leaders get clear about what they aim to accomplish, align on where they stand now, and put in place the plans and practices needed to drive performance.

Install IVOA in your ChatGPT

When to Use IVOA Instead of ChatGPT Alone

ChatGPT provides broad general intelligence and is useful for a wide range of management and leadership work.

IVOA adds IntelliVen’s integrated Manage to Lead knowledge, methods, logic, and discipline. It brings together the templates, tutorials, and rubrics developed and refined through years of experience leading organizations and working with executive teams.

IVOA applies these methods to help users:

  • Make assumptions explicit and distinguish evidence from inference.
  • Evaluate work against established criteria and identify how to improve it.
  • Compare independent points of view without losing consequential differences.
  • Translate intended outcomes into plans, initiatives, and measures.
  • Prepare for the reviews and conversations through which leaders guide, support, and govern performance.

The aim is to help leaders develop better thinking, produce better work, and make better decisions, together.

Use ChatGPT for general intelligence. Invoke IVOA when you want that intelligence disciplined by Manage to Lead.

Five Ways to Put IVOA to Work

IVOA explains its methods and helps you apply them to real situations as you work. Here are five practical examples.

Get Clear About Purpose

IVOA can help articulate an organization’s purpose by clarifying what it provides, who it serves, and the problem or need its offering addresses for those people.

Give IVOA a website, management presentation, or other source material and ask it to infer a draft WHAT-WHO-WHY. Compare that with the team’s own versions to surface agreement, gaps, and important differences. Then ask IVOA to suggest a consolidated version that reflects the strongest shared thinking while preserving consequential differences for the team to resolve.

Try asking:

@IVOA Infer our WHAT-WHO-WHY from our website. Explain your reasoning, identify your assumptions, and suggest what we should clarify or improve.

You can also give IVOA a draft Mandate and ask it to assess the organization’s intended direction and performance expectations against the Manage to Lead rubric.

Improve Leadership Work with MtL Rubrics

IVOA can assess WHAT-WHO-WHY statements, Mandates, Change Frameworks, and other leadership work products.

It applies relevant MtL rubrics, explains its assessments, and recommends improvements.

Try asking:

@IVOA Assess this Mandate using the Manage to Lead rubric. Score it, explain your assessment, and suggest the changes that would most improve it [entered mandate].

Revise the work and ask IVOA to assess it again. Repeat until you are ready to share it with others.

This makes IVOA useful as an iterative thinking partner, helping leaders prepare stronger work before bringing it to their teams.

Compare Perspectives and Build Alignment

One of IVOA’s most useful applications is to compare and synthesize independently prepared input from multiple people.

Suppose six executives each prepare their own description of what the organization should accomplish, or the attributes they want in their next CEO.

Give their submissions to IVOA and ask it to identify agreements, differences, additional considerations, and issues requiring resolution.

Try asking:

@IVOA Compare these six independently prepared descriptions of the attributes we want in our next CEO. Identify where they agree, where they materially differ, and suggest a consolidated version. Preserve consequential disagreements for the team to resolve: [enter descriptions in sequence or in a table or screen shot]

The same approach works with WHAT-WHO-WHY, Mandates, Change Frameworks, Mirror input, team priorities, and other structured leadership work.

Alignment comes from making differences visible and resolving the ones that matter.

IVOA helps teams prepare for those conversations and make better use of the time they spend together.

Plan and Implement Change

IVOA can help leaders determine how to move from their current situation (NOW) to a desired future (NEXT).

Using Manage to Lead Enterprise and Initiative Change Frameworks, IVOA helps identify promising initiatives, intended outcomes, actions, measures, ownership, and checkpoints.

After entering WHAT-WHO-WHY, Mandate, and ECF, try asking:

@IVOA Given our WHAT-WHO-WHY, Mandate, and current situation, suggest initiatives that could help us move from NOW to NEXT. Explain your reasoning and help us evaluate which initiatives offer the greatest value.

Once an initiative is selected, IVOA can help develop its Change Framework, implementation plan, measures, and milestones.

Guide, Support, and Govern Performance

Developing a good plan is only part of the job. Leaders must also help their teams carry it out, learn from experience, address obstacles, and adjust course.

IVOA can help prepare and improve materials for operations reviews, leadership meetings, and initiative checkpoints.

It can also turn meeting transcripts into concise records of decisions, insights, actions, owners, and matters requiring follow-up.

Try asking:

@IVOA Help our executive team establish an ongoing review process for our functions, markets, and strategic initiatives. Recommend who should meet with whom, about what, when, and how progress should be reviewed.

IVOA can help make the practices of ongoing management and governance more systematic and effective.

How to Install and Use IVOA in ChatGPT

OpenAI has approved IVOA for public availability through the ChatGPT Plugin Directory.

To get started:

  1. Open the IVOA plugin page.
  2. Select Install plugin.
  3. Return to an ordinary ChatGPT conversation.

Once installed, ChatGPT automatically uses IVOA when it determines that its specialized knowledge is relevant to your request. You can also invoke IVOA explicitly whenever you want Manage to Lead knowledge, methods, and logic applied to the response.

To invoke it, type @IVOA in the ChatGPT message box, select IntelliVen Operations Advisor from the displayed options, and continue with your request.

For example:

@IVOA Help me improve this strategic plan: [enter or upload strategic plan]

You do not need to invoke IVOA for every follow-up in a continuing conversation when the context is clear. But explicitly calling it removes ambiguity about whether you want Manage to Lead guidance.

IVOA and the Leadership Workspace

The IVOA plugin makes Manage to Lead guidance broadly accessible to individuals working in ChatGPT.

For leadership teams doing substantial work together, IntelliVen also provides the Leadership Workspace.

IVOA helps you think. The Leadership Workspace helps a team codify, compare, refine, communicate, and maintain its shared thinking.

An individual can use IVOA in ChatGPT to work through a leadership challenge, develop ideas, and improve work products.

The Leadership Workspace provides a persistent, shared environment where team members independently prepare their thinking, compare submissions, reconcile differences, and maintain the agreements they reach.

It supports WHAT-WHO-WHY, Mandates, Enterprise and Initiative Change Frameworks, team scoring, measures, and other shared leadership work.

IVOA is also available within the Workspace, where its guidance can be applied to the team’s accumulated organizational context and work products.

Together, they help teams establish and maintain the habits and practices of Manage to Lead.

See How Leadership Teams Build and Maintain Shared Clarity for an introduction to the Workspace and how teams use it.

Try IVOA on Something You Are Working on Now

The easiest way to appreciate what IVOA can do is to use it on something you are working on now.

Start with a Mandate, strategic plan, Change Framework, meeting agenda, or leadership question. Ask IVOA to assess your thinking, identify what deserves attention, and help you make progress.

Install IVOA in ChatGPT

If you would like to learn more about IVOA, Manage to Lead, or how the Leadership Workspace can support your team, please get in touch.

And if you use IVOA, I would very much like to hear what works, what does not, and what you wish it could do. Your experience and suggestions will help guide its continued development.

Peter DiGiammarino
IntelliVen, L.L.C.
Get Clear. Align. Grow. Together.

IVOA Frequently Asked Questions

What is IVOA?
IVOA is IntelliVen Operations Advisor, a ChatGPT plugin that applies Manage to Lead methods, templates, tutorials, and rubrics to leadership, operations, and governance work.

How do I install IVOA?
Follow the public IVOA plugin link and select Install plugin.

How do I use IVOA in ChatGPT?
ChatGPT may invoke IVOA automatically when relevant. To call it explicitly, type @IVOA and then enter your request.

Do I need to use @IVOA for every prompt?
No. ChatGPT can continue using the context of an ongoing conversation, but using @IVOA makes it explicit that you want Manage to Lead guidance applied.

What can IVOA help with?
Among other things, IVOA can help develop and assess WHAT-WHO-WHY, Mandates and Change Frameworks; consolidate team input; apply MtL rubrics; and extract decisions and action items from meeting transcripts.

How can my leadership team use IVOA together?

IVOA can help individual leaders and teams think through issues, assess work, consolidate perspectives, and apply Manage to Lead methods. For teams that want a structured place to develop and maintain shared thinking, the IntelliVen Leadership Workspace provides a collaborative environment for WHAT-WHO-WHY, Mandates, Change Frameworks, initiatives, measures, team input, and related leadership work.

Learn about the Leadership Workspace

Where can I learn how to use Manage to Lead?

IntelliVen offers Manage to Lead training for leaders and leadership teams. Participants learn the habits, practices, tools, and governance methods behind IVOA and apply them to real organizational work.

IVOA can then serve as an ongoing advisor as those methods are put into practice.

Learn about Manage to Lead training

Can IntelliVen help our team apply these methods?

Yes. IntelliVen works with CEOs and leadership teams through coaching, consulting, team alignment, strategy and planning sessions, and ongoing operating and governance support.

IVOA and the Leadership Workspace support the work, but the objective is the same: help leadership teams get clear, align, and grow together.

Explore IntelliVen services

Governance, Manage to Lead, Operations

MtL Alumni: Strategy Offsites Start Before You Go

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Great strategy discussions start before people walk into the room.

As planning season approaches, remember that the best discussions never begin when leadership gathers for an offsite. They begin weeks earlier.

Strong teams clarify and share their thinking before they meet. They compare perspectives, challenge assumptions, sharpen priorities, and work together toward a shared understanding of what they seek to accomplish, where they are now, and what is most important to do next.

Because you’ve participated in a Manage to Lead training program, you already know the methods that support this work.

  • You know how WHAT-WHO-WHY clarifies purpose and Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
  • You know the importance of agreeing on a Mandate.
  • You know how an Enterprise Change Framework helps leaders align around where things are now, why they must change, where they want to be next, and what needs to happen to get there.

A Pleasant Surprise

We’ve recently had the opportunity to watch several teams apply these methods as part of their planning, operations, and governance processes.

What has been encouraging is not just the quality of the outputs:

  • It’s what happens to the conversations.
  • The most important change isn’t in the plans.
  • It’s in how leaders work together.

What surprised us most

We expected teams to produce better plans.

We did not expect people to become more interested in understanding what their colleagues were thinking.

That shift in behavior may be the most important outcome of all.

People became more interested in understanding what their colleagues were thinking. In short, teams improved both what they accomplished and how they worked together. That observation has reinforced something we’ve believed for a long time.

Structured Cohesion in a Distributed World

Manage to Lead is primarily about helping leaders work together effectively. Tools and technology support that work by providing structure and shared language.

Their greatest value, however, comes from helping leadership teams build habits that create clarity, alignment, accountability, and coherence in a distributed world.

In today’s highly distributed organizations, that capability is increasingly important. Teams operate across functions, time zones, competing priorities, and often in different ways. These are all okay and necessary, provided there is an ongoing commitment to bring individual thinking back to the team in a way others can understand, challenge, and build upon.

Success depends less on being in the same room and more on sharing the same understanding. We’ve started referring to this as structured cohesion: creating shared understanding and alignment such that people work independently while moving forward together. When structured cohesion exists, teams require less coordination because they share more understanding.

Introducing the MtL Leadership Workspace

To help leadership teams apply Manage to Lead methods more consistently, we recently introduced the MtL Leadership Workspace, powered by the IntelliVen Operations Advisor (IVOA) GPT.

Built around the same methods and disciplines taught in Manage to Lead, the workspace provides guidance, feedback, and facilitation support as teams clarify priorities, align perspectives, prepare for reviews, refine initiatives, capture decisions, and stay connected to what matters most.

The workspace helps teams continue the conversation between offsites, review meetings, and workshops. It supports both real-time and asynchronous collaboration, helping leadership teams stay aligned even when they are highly dispersed.

The goal is straightforward: Make it easy for teams to work before they convene so they can have better conversations when they come together. At the same time, the workspace improves preparation, documentation, follow-through, and shared understanding of decisions and commitments.

As alumni, you already know the methods. The MtL Leadership Workspace simply provides another way to use them with your team.

Learning Doesn’t End with the Cohort

Past Manage to Lead participants are welcome to enroll in future cohorts at no charge.

Great leadership teams are always learning. Every cohort brings new experiences, new questions, and new insights that strengthen our collective understanding and help us continue to Get Clear. Align. Grow. Together.

As you prepare for your next planning session, strategy discussion, or major initiative, we invite you to explore the MtL Leadership Workspace.

The workspace can help your team clarify priorities, develop and refine WHAT-WHO-WHY, align around Mandate, build Enterprise and Initiative Change Frameworks, prepare for planning discussions, capture insights, and strengthen accountability between meetings. It is particularly useful in supporting the continuous work of getting clear, aligning, and growing, together.

Getting started is simple. Select Workspace from the IntelliVen main menu:

  1. Create an account
  2. Name a workspace
  3. Invite team members
  4. Share your thinking using the Manage to Lead tools

The workspace provides guidance and facilitation support along the way, helping teams make progress wherever they are, in real time or asynchronously.

We want teams to be able to experiment and learn without barriers, so a generous amount of capacity is available at no cost. Organizations that need additional usage, advanced capabilities, or broader deployment can contact IntelliVen to discuss options.

Great strategy discussions start before people walk into the room. The MtL Leadership Workspace gives teams a place to do that work together. We look forward to seeing how you apply these practices to your next challenge and continue building the habits that help teams

Get Clear. Align. Grow. Together.

Suggested Additional Reading

Governance, Manage to Lead, Operations

Your Team’s Leadership Workspace is Now Available

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For years, IntelliVen has helped leaders:

Get Clear. Align. Grow. Together.

Effective leadership requires clear thinking, disciplined execution, and alignment across decisions and actions.

With this post, we announce the availability of the IntelliVen Leadership Workspace, a collaborative environment that brings together the Manage to Lead tools with AI-guided support to help leadership teams draw out and share their thinking, decide what to do, and act together.

The Leadership Workspace gives teams a shared place to develop, refine, communicate, and govern the core elements that drive organization performance and growth.

Work begins with the organization’s Mandate and Purpose through WHAT-WHO-WHY. It continues through Enterprise and Initiative Change Frameworks, strategic initiatives, heat maps, governance, executive reviews, and performance management.

Organizations today operate in a distributed, networked world. Teams span functions, locations, and increasingly, different ways of working. As organizations grow, maintaining alignment and shared understanding becomes a leadership challenge in its own right.

The Leadership Workspace helps teams create and maintain structured coherence across leadership, strategy, initiatives, execution, and governance. Leaders compare thinking, surface differences, refine ideas, and build shared understanding. Over time, teams develop common language, strong decision-making habits, and a more disciplined way of working that manifests as an evolution in leadership culture.

Each Workspace combines the proven Manage to Lead tools with AI-guided assessment, refinement, inference, consolidation, and collaboration support. Teams use it to strengthen their thinking, improve alignment, guide execution, and govern performance.

The result is a practical environment where leadership teams can sustain alignment and coordinated action in a distributed, networked world.

Leadership teams are invited to create and collaborate in their own Workspace to:

• Define and refine their Mandate

• Clarify purpose using WHAT-WHO-WHY

• Develop and communicate Enterprise and Initiative Change Frameworks

• Launch, guide, support, and govern strategic initiatives

• Visualize priorities and tradeoffs with Heat Maps

• Conduct Executive Reviews

• Compare thinking across leaders

• Surface hidden misalignment

• Consolidate toward shared positions

• Assess, challenge, refine, infer, and improve thinking with AI

• Generate recommendations for moving from NOW to NEXT

The Leadership Workspace helps teams get clear, align, and execute through periods of growth, change, and inflection.

Getting started is simple:

• Select WORKSPACE from the IntelliVen menu

• Create an account and an organization code of your choice

• Invite others into your Workspace

• Start working

No setup project.

No implementation effort.

Simply enter your thinking and submit it for assessment, feedback, and suggestions.

Substantial usage capacity is available at no cost. Organizations that require additional capacity may upgrade as needed. Organizations with unique requirements are welcome to contact IntelliVen to discuss tailored arrangements.

For those who want to accelerate adoption, training is available through the Manage to Lead Enterprise Leadership System for Governance and Operations.

We built the Leadership Workspace to help leadership teams develop the clarity, alignment, governance, and execution capability required to thrive in today’s distributed world.

Get Clear. Align. Grow. Together.

We hope you find it useful.

Peter DiGiammarino

Finance Matters, Operations, Sales Matters

Revenue Leads Expenses

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Most leadership teams know the problem.

They set an annual revenue target, build spending around it, and move forward as if the planned revenue inflow is already on its way. If revenue later develops more slowly than hoped, the organization is forced to pull back, delay hires, cut initiatives, and explain why the original plan no longer holds.

That is not disciplined planning. It is front-loading optimism and dealing with the consequences later.

A better approach is to let revenue lead expenses.

This starts with distinctions that are often blurred: the difference between the revenue goal, the revenue forecast, and the currently authorized level of spending.

The revenue goal is the level of performance the organization intends to produce over the course of the year (with ~75% confidence). It sets direction, expresses ambition, and gives management and the team a target to drive toward. It is, by design, an expression of intent rather than a prediction, and it is set once for the performance period (e.g., a year).

The revenue forecast is management’s best current estimate of what is most likely to materialize based on facts known at the time. It is a high-confidence view (90+%), not an aspiration dressed up as a projection. In practice, teams should be able to articulate the confidence level behind the forecast, explain why it is defensible based on current evidence, and state clearly what must occur for it to materialize. It is established at the beginning of the performance period and updated continuously as new information becomes available.

The authorized expense level follows from the forecast. The organization may appropriately communicate an ambitious plan and budget externally, but it should not authorize spending internally at the full goal level from the outset simply because that is where it intends to end the year. Initial spending should be based on the revenue that management has high confidence will materialize. Spending should remain aligned with the forecast from then on.

A common approach is to spend at the goal level and then cut if triggers are missed. A better approach is for management to begin the year with a forecast-based level of spending. As the year unfolds and predefined triggers are met, the forecast may be revised upward. Each higher forecast then authorizes a higher level of spending.

Done well, this creates an effective operating rhythm. The organization expands deliberately as evidence improves. Spending rises as the facts justify it, with each step grounded in current performance and validated progress.

Note that the revenue leading expenses approach requires clarity about what counts as a trigger. The trigger might be a revenue milestone, a booking threshold, a conversion rate, a renewal event, a signed commitment, or another concrete indicator that the revenue outlook has strengthened. Management should define as part of its plan what justifies moving to a higher forecast and, therefore, a higher spend path.

The accompanying chart illustrates the logic connecting revenue leads to expenses. While the annual revenue goal remains fixed, the initial forecast establishes the baseline spending posture. As specific triggers are met, management adopts updated forecasts. Each revision builds upon the previously authorized path, supporting a higher level of cumulative spending.

This approach reinforces the discipline of aligning spending with current evidence rather than assumptions, helping leadership make decisions based on what is actually unfolding rather than what was originally planned. The discipline is as follows:

  • Plan to the goal. Decide what the organization is trying to produce and what it would take to operate successfully at that level, even though not all of that spending is authorized on day one.
  • Forecast what is most likely. Establish a higher-confidence view of the revenue expected to materialize based on current facts.
  • Let the forecast in force define the current spend level. Authorize spending based on what management currently has high confidence will come in, not simply on what it hopes to produce.
  • Raise authorized spending only as triggers are met and the forecast improves. Expand spending as evidence strengthens and the revenue outlook becomes more secure.

At any point in time, leadership should be able to answer three separate questions:

  • What is the annual revenue goal?
  • What is the current revenue forecast?
  • What level of spending is now authorized based on that forecast?

Those answers should be connected, but they should not be assumed to be the same.

That is what it means to let revenue lead expenses. It is a way to stay ambitious without getting ahead of the facts.

Get Clear, Operations

Before You Build, Get Clear

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Before You Build, Get Clear

AI makes it easier than ever to build, prototype, and automate. It does not make it any less important to think. When the cost of building drops, the cost of building the wrong thing rises. Remember Peter Drucker’s aphorism that ends wtih “… are you doing the right thing?”

That is why a Business System Concept still matters. It helps a team get clear on how the work happens today, what should change and why, which parts of the current process still deserve to exist, and what future-state model is actually worth building toward.

In the latest IntelliVen Insight, we use a simple construction example to illustrate the difference between NOW and NEXT. A descriptive model shows how the organization works today. A normative model defines how it must work to fulfill the mandate. Without both, initiatives multiply but performance does not improve.

Read the full piece here.

Get Clear. Align. Grow.