The Snack BOxD: September Digest - Why Strategies Fail
This is the Snack BOxD, a highly digestible digest from me, Nenuca, CEO at Better Organizations by Design (BOxD). Every month I send a round-up of ideas and insights on how to create healthy, high-performing organizations. If you like this kind of thing or found me by accident, get your snack on and subscribe.
On the menu this month: Why strategies fail… setting priorities that will pay off… how to learn from your quiet quitters… a plunger that dreamed of becoming a vase… and more!
This month I want to talk about why meticulously planned strategies fall apart... and how you can avoid it.
You did it! You survived weeks-long planning meetings and have all your research, insights and plans beautifully captured in a 150 slide deck. Hooray! This thing is so good. Surely your team(s) will start implementing it right away. Right?
Sadly, no.
Imagine you’ve decided to go for a weekend drive to the countryside. To get to your destination, you’ll need to know what’s in and what’s out for your drive (scope), have some kind of idea of how you’re going to get there (a roadmap), who’s joining you, who’s driving, and most importantly, who’s bringing snacks (resources). You also have work on Monday and don’t get paid until the following Friday, so you’ll need a decent estimate of time and cost before you leave home. It also helps if you have some ideas about what will happen if roadblocks or other delays impede your course (contingency plan).
The sad news is, most businesses are still doing strategic planning like a bad road trip. No map, no plans, no group text to coordinate on the fly. Is it a surprise then that 60-90% of strategic plans never get fully implemented?*
Strategies cannot be pushed ONTO people. They have to be pulled (understood, accepted, promoted) BY people. Sure, you can tell your team to “go do these things” and cross your fingers that everyone falls in line to execute the new strategy perfectly. Don’t be surprised if all you hear is crickets!
Unveiling your grand strategic plan in an all-hands meeting or an email from the CEO isn’t enough. The biggest failure we’ve seen in our consulting work is assuming employees will just snap to a new plan once they hear it. That’s not how humans are wired. We are inherently skeptical and need to not only hear new information multiple times, but be convinced that it’s correct, and in our interest, in order to start changing our behavior.
When it comes to big market transitions (think: gas powered to electric vehicles, clunky enterprise software to software as a service), your job is not just to know what new direction to take. Thinking 5-+years ahead is a basic prerequisite of being a good executive. The thing that makes good executives great? Helping people understand the vision - where we are going and the purpose -why the company should change, and then getting people excited about going on the journey with you.
A good sign that your strategy is taking off is when strategic discussions start growing on their own. People start exploring ideas to support the new direction, they start talking about it with each other when you’re not around. That’s a clear indication that your people have not only understood the new direction but are fully bought in and are using their own creativity and expertise to get there. When you’re doing most of the explaining and convincing, assume you’re in trouble.
Want your strategy to succeed? Here are some things to keep in mind:
Co-create solutions to achieve the coveted “Ikea Effect”
People tend to become more attached to what they help create. That’s why people want to post their lovingly assembled 7-year-old MALM bed frame on Craigslist for close to its original retail value. How does this translate to strategic planning? Make sure key executives, influences, and dissenters have been involved in the strategy creation process. If not, your plans won't survive first contact.
Communicate early and often
An effective communication plan creates multiple touch points so that you can move employees from hearing the new direction, to believing it's sound, and eventually living it and shifting their behaviors.
Make it human
People may talk a lot about “loving fast pace” and “getting bored too easily,” but at the end of the day… we as humans are hardwired to resist change. When you're asking an employee who's been successfully doing their job the same way for years to suddenly show up differently, make sure you're addressing their deeply human and predictable concerns:
What’s in it for me?
Why is this better than the way I've always done it?
What things do I still have control over?
What kind of support am I going to get along the way?
Don't let day-to-day activities become secondary
A new strategy will fail if it’s not linked to your existing core processes in a meaningful way.* Your company has ongoing operational activities that keep things running smoothly. Now you’re asking people to carve out time for strategy planning and implementation. AND they still need to do everything else that was already on their plate. A strategy designed without considering your operating context and the resources needed to keep the trains running on time is doomed to fail. Your strategy is not a new wheel, reinvented; it’s more like the central axle that allows business to continue humming down the road uninterrupted.
Gather feedback, aim for full participation
You need to keep your ear to the ground to measure whether the strategy is right, or whether communications are effective. Utilize feedback to refine the strategy. Lose your ego and ditch the “sunk cost” mentality. Be ready to pivot and respond to what you’re learning from your employees.
These all sound simple enough, but it gets pretty tangly once you introduce cognitive bias and human behavior.
In next month’s digest, I’ll be talking more about how to tackle specific forms of cognitive bias to cultivate alignment. If you haven’t already subscribed to the Snack BOxD, make sure you sign up so that you don’t miss it!
And if you need help getting your people aligned to your strategy (most leaders do), give us a call.
Making tough tradeoffs in service of big wins
Are you secretly hoping you’ll be able to do 100% of all the things, despite having paid lip service to the importance of prioritizing strategic activities?
You’re not alone. As ambitious, highly capable, well-meaning leaders, we tend to overestimate our personal (and organizational) capacity.
But there’s a reason juggling is considered clown behavior!
When everything is urgent, nothing is. If you bite off more than you can chew, you’re going to make your people feel some combination of overwhelmed, inadequate, and disillusioned.
Here’s a tool for your next strategic meeting that will help you set priorities that will pay off big.
It’s called the Value / Feasibility Matrix.
The x-axis represents the overall value – how much impact and relative market potential does this have?
The y-axis represents feasibility – how difficult is it to implement, or how much will it cost to execute?
In theory, I think everyone reading this digest already knows this on an intuitive level. But the magic of getting this exercise right is… wait for it… in the quality of the facilitation.😊
Keeping people on track, drawing out strategic information, redirecting the group to make tough decisions when they start overcommitting… this is a lot harder than it looks!
Want to become an expert at setting strategic priorities? Download our Value / Feasibility Matrix facilitator guide. And don’t be shy to ask for help with your next meeting… my team is pretty good at this stuff.
How to get valuable intel from your quiet quitters
“Quiet quitting” is the new trendy way of describing a workplace phenomenon where people set boundaries around their roles and stop doing the “extra” citizenship stuff around the office. Put simply, people are burnt out, disengaged, and tired of going the extra mile.
So what’s a leader to do?
In case you missed it...
Last month I had a wonderful conversation with Marlon Guillaume about different sources of power and how to get more of it. Catch the highlights here if you missed it:
And if you want to dig deeper into the topic of power, be sure to download our Power Mapping Guide to see why it’s the most popular resource on the BOxD website right now.
[WEBINAR] Inclusive and Equitable by Design: How to embed DEI into your organization's DNA
Save the date! On November 3, I’ll be teaming up with Mastery Training Services for a webinar on how to design organizations for inclusion.
We know that creating more equitable and inclusive organizations powered by a diverse workforce is a priority for most companies. We establish development and training programs, stand up councils and resource groups, and lay out roadmaps for change.
BUT what if we could also fold DEI into our organization’s design to accelerate results? In this session, you’ll learn a new way for considering both DEI and how organizations can be set up for success.
By the end of this session, you will be able to:
Identify the elements of organization design
Understand how to fold DEI into your organization's design to accelerate results
Examine your organization and its efforts at inclusion through a systemic lens
What we're reading...
I Want To Be A Vase by Julio Torres
I love the way a good children’s book can spur profound thinking in a sweet and succinct way. This book is, on its face, about a plunger that wants to be a vase. The plunger is met with various opinions and commentary from other household appliances. I loved this book and it got me thinking about the workplace roles we tend to “pigeon hole” people into. How can we reimagine who gets called to do what kind of work? How can we support a permission structure that shifts agency back to individuals in their career development? What is the role we can all play in supporting others to step into roles that don’t make sense to us? This book is a funny, poignant, and super quick read. Bonus if you have small ones at home to read it to!
Patagonia’s $3 billion gift is a convenient way to avoid taxes — Quartz
Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard has given away the company to fight climate change. The title of this article is a little woke-clickbait, but I actually really appreciate the way NYU law professor Daniel Hemel breaks down the win-win qualities of the Chouinard family’s decision. The family is using Patagonia to make the world a better place. They are also doing it in a tax-advantaged way. This mindset reminds me of the clients we work with at BOxD, who know that a “win-win solution” can be as profitable as it is pragmatic.
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