Strategy-Towards Hypotheses, Experiments, Involvement & Learning
Filed under: Leadership, Leading Change, Organizational Transformation, Project Management, Strategy
Few would argue that a nimble, quick-to-learn and quick-to-adapt organization is a bad thing. Given the rate of change in our world, those characteristics are increasingly table-stakes for survival and success.
Why then has the approach to strategy and the notion of “strategic planning” in so many organizations remained mired in a 1960’s kind of static, top-down event-focused model?
Many firms practice a style of strategic planning that might have worked in a different time and place, but today, fast-to-try, fast-to- fail and fast-to-learn are essential for survival and success.
Give Me an Epiphany, Darn-It!
Rarely does just the act of thinking through circumstances, opportunities and strategies yield the epiphany that allows a firm to carve out a competitive advantage.
In my experience, the management teams who have pursued the “strategy as event’ approach with the annual or semi-annual meeting(s) serving as the time to talk strategy and decide, are often frustrated with the time investment and disappointing outcomes. Few epiphanies…a lot of time…a lot of bickering and ambiguous outcomes with no clear next steps. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?
Hypotheses and Informed Experiments, Please!
The best outcome of the front end of any strategy process is one or more (a limited number, please) of ideas…hypotheses, that can quickly be turned into and managed as experiments.
True value in the form of learning accrues to the organization from working through the strategic experiment, assessing outcomes and refining the ideas. Because these workplace and marketplace experiments require people to implement, manage, and assess them, the act of engaging the employee population creates understanding, involvement, excitement and importantly idea sharing.
It Feels So Good When We Stop!
I’ve worked with teams who were accustomed to and frustrated by the “event” orientation of planning. When refocused on assessment, analysis and importantly, hypothesis generation, the unreasonable expectation of finding the magical answer was replaced by high quality dialogue around generating ideas for better serving customers and beating competitors. After a series of these discussions over time, and with some focused facilitation, the teams were able to zero in on one or two strategic hypotheses to invest in and learn from.
The Project Management Art of Building out Strategic Experiments:
While I frequently reference this phase as the Execution phase, I prefer Experiment…both because it doesn’t sound so fatal…and it implies Doing, Measuring, Learning and Refining (DMLR). In my estimation, its in the DMLR cycle where the real work…and the real “Ah Ha” moments of strategy occur.
Six Ideas for Implementing an Effective Doing, Learning, Measuring, Refining Program:
1. Treat each strategic experiment like a project. Assign a Project Manager and use Best Practices PM to charter, scope, engage stakeholders, define the work, assess the risks, plan and estimate the work, implement the work, monitor and communicate. Yeah, that’s a mouthful. Your Project Manager in this case is priceless.
2. Ensure that there’s a strong sponsor in place for every experiment. Yes, best practices project management again. If this is important enough to be betting your strategic future on, it’s important enough to provide a Supportive Sponsor with heft and teeth.
3. Explain, Engage and Listen! People work in compliance under orders, they work with their hearts and minds when they are part of something big. Getting them involved is good. Arming them with context on why, and what and importance is critical. Listening to their feedback is priceless. Since many strategic initiatives involve doing new things or doing things differently, this holistic approach to engagement is essential.
4. Create Learning and Sharing Forums with Teeth. It’s good to pre and post-mortems…it’s better to create ample opportunities for idea sharing, lessons learned and adjustments to experiments on the move. Hey, I’m probably violating several tenets of The Scientific Method with the adjustment statement, but timeliness is critical and your Project Manager will help you manage changes in the plan.
By the way, by this time, you may want to give your PM a big fat raise!
5. The Truth is Always in the Field…Sometimes You Just Have to Look Carefully. The best strategic experiments involve customers and partners. Invite them in…make them part of the process and of course observe and listen carefully. And then act.
6. Do Something with the Outcomes-Plan to Change or Move Forward. After a period of time and armed with the insights and feedback of employees, customers and partners, there’s a vetting and decision-making process that those in charge have to prosecute. From kill to change to go to what’s next, you and your team are on the hook for returning to the process and assessing and deciding.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
There are at least two “dirty little secrets” in what I’ve described above. It’s a nefarious plan for involving the broader organization in strategy and execution, and it not so secretly “operationalizes” the work of strategy. While there’s no magic and I would be misleading if I didn’t highlight that the process is filled with bumps, hiccups and debates it’s darned powerful if and when managed properly.
Art’s Weekly Leadership Message: Get Engaged to Help Your Project Teams Succeed
I hear from hundreds of professionals every year in workshops, via coaching assignments or in classrooms, about the challenges they have working in and on project teams. From almost every student’s worst nightmare, the classroom group project, to major strategic initiatives with high-level sponsorship, the complaints are consistent: we as leaders don’t do enough to support team development and performance.
While the list of things that can go horribly wrong on project teams is long, these 5 consistently rise to the top of the lament list.
5 of the Most Frequently Heard Project Team Laments:
1. The importance of the initiative is not clear. How does this connect to strategy?
2. The Executive Sponsor’s role is vague and he/she is often only involved at a cursory level. Aren’t you supposed to help us knock down some walls to get this done?
3. Team members are priority conflicted based on their involvement in multiple initiatives. Which one takes precedence?
4. The Team Leader doesn’t actively support the development of standards for performance, accountability and collaboration. If we don’t know what’s expected of us and how we’re supposed to work together, you’ll get whatever we give you.
5. The scope is vague and the customer is invisible. Hey, we’re not clear on who the customer is here and what’s in or out of scope.
No Rocket Science-The Answers are in the Problem Statements:
There’s little more than the basics of good leadership involved in fixing these items on your team.
- Always connect initiatives to strategies, otherwise, they are just more work.
- Check-in and don’t check-out until the team succeeds. If you’re the Executive Sponsor, you are responsible for the initiative’s success (or failure). Get involved to support, help knock-down walls and reinforce accountability. Never micro-manage, but do get involved!
- Promote the establishment of team values and standards. Performance is a function of the team dynamics. Ensure that you or the team leader works hard to support the development of a team culture around expectations for performance.
- Recognize and help manage priority conflicts. As the sponsor or team leader, know that these conflicts leave people….well, they leave them conflicted. Your job is to help sort out conflicts and negotiate priorites with team members and other teams and bosses.
- Call a Time-Out if the team is drowning in ambiguity. If the customer isn’t clear and therefore the scope vague, hit the “Stop” button immediately.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
If an initiative was important enough to organize a group of people and ask them to put their gray matter and to invest their time in dealing with it, we as leaders owe them crystal clear guidance on the 5 issues above and much more. Walk in the door today and everyday and look for opportunities to help your project teams succeed. Your firm will thank you, your employees and team members will thank you and your competitors will hate you. That’s a formula for success that balances nicely.
–
Want More? Check out Art Petty’s latest book, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development. Created for fast-moving and highly motivated professionals and leaders, Leadership Caffeine offers more than 80 short, idea-packed essays for the critical leadership and professional development situations in your life. (All royalties on purchases through 12/2 will see the royalties donated to a local food pantry. See original promo note for specifics.)
Join the many groups and management teams and meeting/conference organizers who have adopted Leadership Caffeine as a discussion and development tool. The collection makes a great gift for the newly promoted leader or for your team during the holidays.
- Single and Kindle copies on Amazon.
- Group and Volume orders, visit Marathon Books for the best service.
About Art Petty:
Art Petty is a Leadership & Career Coach and Strategy Consultant, helping motivated professionals of all levels achieve their potential. In addition to working with highly motivated professionals, Art frequently works with project teams in pursuit of high performance. Contact Art via e-mail to discuss a coaching, workshop or speaking engagement or to inquire about being a guest on The Leadership Caffeine podcast.
Leadership Caffeine: Speed Kills-10 Situations to Call a Timeout
Filed under: Leadership Caffeine, Performance, Project Management, Strategy
Note from Art: after a brief hiatus from the weekly Leadership Caffeine columns to launch my book/collection: Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development, they’re back. The Weekly Leadership message posts will now publish every Sunday.
–
We’re so focused on speed in our organization, that we’ve become remarkably competent at creating problems faster.
Somewhere on the way to this world we now live and work in, “speed” became a proxy for success. Speed is undoubtedly important, but beware relying on it as the sole indicator of effectiveness. It’s a cruel tyrant, demanding fealty from followers, while discouraging critical and deep thinking and focusing solely on time-to-response as a metric of success.
The pressure to move fast here is tremendous. Everyone’s running in circles as fast as they can.
Speed, unchecked increases sloppiness. The leader who demands speed at the expense of thought and thoroughness is teaching his team members to act now and worry about cleaning up later. This works in triage and firefighting and other activities where instincts and actions are essential for survival, but it doesn’t play well for most teams and organizations in the business world.
Instead of taking the time to diagnose our situation, our strategy session focused on creating a huge laundry list of things to do. The leaders felt like it was a success because we had identified the work and assigned names and dates to it. No one knows what the strategy is though.
Don’t misread my intent here. Speed is critically important in many of our corporate endeavors. The world we live in demands attention to the clock. However, speed without thought breeds activity without vector and that is chaos.
During coaching sessions or workshops where people get a few moments to slow down and think, the number one excuse for not doing the things everyone knows are right is…you guessed it…no time.
At Least 10 Situations When it is Essential to Defy the Need for Speed and Call Timeout:
1. Any situation that involves the development of a team member. Few of us take enough time to support development, provide feedback and determine and act on developmental plans. Call regular time-outs for everyone on your team to deal with this.
2. When someone looks at you and says, “This is important.” A peer was famous for offering, “That’s an important topic and we should talk about it at the right time.” It was never the right time.
3. When you’re making lists of things to do. When you’ve just completed creating a laundry list of new “strategic” initiatives or projects, and no one has talked about what you’re NOT going to do, it’s time say, “time-out.”
4. When the prescription shows up before the diagnosis. Whenever you are talking about strategic plans, new directions and new investments, and the team hasn’t taken the time to properly diagnose and understand the situation, it’s time to pause. Speed loves a rush to judgement…a ready, shoot, aim approach, but nothing is a substitute for a proper situation diagnosis prior to acting. If this is abstract, simply ask and work with your team to answer, “What’s going on here?”
5. When you’re the Executive Sponsor on a project and you don’t know how things are going.
6. When the sky falls regularly. You’re overdue for a time out when you find yourself and your team members caught in an endless loop of responding to the latest competitive announcement by dropping everything to prop up the sky that’s about to fall. This is indicative of a lack of strategy, a lack of spine or some great manipulation by others in the firm. Regardless, fix it.
7. When a situation has been framed either as a positive or a negative, it’s time to call time and look at through a neutral filter.
8. As soon as someone says, “With a little more time and money, we can do this.” That’s code for the Sunk Cost effect decision trap..aka Escalation of Commitment. Sunk costs should stay sunk!
9. Any time you hear words like, “this can’t fail.”
10. Anytime you see a revenue projection that looks oddly like a hockey stick.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Blind pursuit of speed is part of the formula for disaster. Focus on creating healthy speed by minimizing the daily issue churn and resultant rework. Take the time to think through your diagnoses and prescriptions for the big issues. Flag potential decision-making traps and recognize that for some issues (people), speed is typically note part of the right answer.
Work hard, run fast and strive to win, but take the blindfold off first.
–
JUST RELEASED! Check Out Art’s New Book: Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development
Want More: Sign up for the new, Leadership Caffeine e-Newsletter. (publishing in October) I’ll guard your e-mail address with ferocity, while sharing ideas to energize and inspire.
About Art Petty:
Art Petty is a Leadership & Career Coach and Strategy Consultant, helping motivated professionals of all levels achieve their potential. In addition to working with highly motivated professionals, Art frequently works with project teams in pursuit of high performance. Art’s second book (an edited, annotated collection of the most popular leadership essays), Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development, was released at the end of September in 2011.
Contact Art via e-mail to discuss a coaching, workshop or speaking engagement.
Next! Call for Interviews: Product & Project Managers & Organizational Integrators
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Product Management, Professional Growth, Project Management
When chatting with leadership author and expert, John Baldoni, on the Leadership Caffeine Podcast (published on itunes last week), I asked him which of his books was his favorite. I loved his response…“The one I’m working on now.”
I’m just a few weeks away from the publication of book #2 for me, a collection of essays organized into helpful…self-help sections for professionals striving to survive and succeed (Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development), and try as I might to resist the urge to do this again (right away), I have to have a book in process in my life.
Next! Bring on the Organizational Integrators and Informal Leaders!
(This means you, Product Managers and Project Managers.)
I’ve been hanging around professionals who function as organizational integrators for most of my career. These people are more commonly identified as product managers, project managers, team leaders and any of a number of additional titles and roles where there is heavy responsibility for outcome from cross-boundary activities with little formal authority. I’ve referenced these people as “informal leaders,” and am good with that label regardless of the occasional jibe that comes my way on this particular use of both informal and leader in the same breath.
Regardless of label, these individuals who build coalitions, navigate the stormy seas of crafting successful team environments and think about (and act on) issues from both the big and little picture perspective, are the people making things happen in organizations large and small. Yes, I have a distinctly positive bias on the value, and a distinctly negative view on how organizations are leveraging and cultivating these professionals.
For many of these integrators, the work is hard, the pay mediocre and the grief nearly endless. Oh, and then there’s the respect issue from senior management.
Interestingly, the skills required to lead complex projects and drive change across organizational boundaries are increasingly the skills required to compete in this distributed, always-on world, where complexity is the norm and time compression seemingly inevitable.
The skills employed by the best integrators are increasingly valuable…and those who have them and who work on developing them, represent outstanding pools of talent for bigger, bolder and broader leadership roles over time.
A Big Idea Here Somewhere…and It’s Time to Talk:
Whether I’ve articulated it or not, there’s a big idea here somewhere, and I intend on finding and sharing it. The focus is on the art of leading without authority…in pursuit of driving results across boundaries.
The line of questioning for product managers, project managers and other integrators will focus on the challenges that you face in navigating your role and in developing your career. Consider these three as a great starting point:
1. What’s working?
2. What’s not?
3. What needs to change to better enable you and your colleagues to succeed?
Yes, these are open ended by design. It’s early. And no, the focus is not on project process nor on product management steps or frameworks, but rather on organizational, cultural and leadership issues that either support or hinder the efforts of integrators like you. Along the way, we’ll explore the personal professional development issues for individuals in these roles as well.
Want to Talk?
I have a well-developed network of contacts in these communities and will be reaching out to these professionals. However, I’m curious to hear from people who I don’t know in industries and groups I’ve not encountered.
If you or someone you know might like to participate in a non-invasive, anonymity guaranteed discussion on the challenges and opportunities you see in your work as a product manager, project manager or organizational integrator of any type, I’m all ears.
Drop me a note and we will find a way to connect. For those who prefer a survey approach, I plan on releasing one after the first round of interviews.
Management Excellence Toolkit: Better Design for Workplace Discussions
Filed under: Making Decisions, Management Education, Performance, Professional Growth, Project Management
Getting to a good decision on big issues is challenging. Getting through the discussions leading up to a decision however, often resembles something on the difficulty of slogging through the Amazonian jungles in search of a mythical lost city made of gold. If you survive the process, you are bound to come out a very different person.
It doesn’t have to be so hard.
Some background: last winter, I authored a multi-part series on the challenges and pitfalls individuals and groups encounter on their way to making more effective decisions (see: The Management Excellence Toolkit for Effective Decision-Making.) And while many of the suggestions for strengthening DM effectiveness involved improving discussion elements, I didn’t tackle the important and separate topic of managing overall discussion quality as a core part of the process.
It’s time to introduce a new tool that will help us separate facts from emotions from opinions, in pursuit of designing our discussions and our way forward, instead of battling our way forward as is commonly the case.
A Powerful Discussion Management Tool: Six Thinking Hats by Edward De Bono
De Bono developed Six Thinking Hats as a tool to take the complexity out of discussions and to engage the full power of groups by ensuring their common focus on a particular element of a discussion. He offers that “arguing our way forward” has its roots in the foundations of western thinking, yet often, what is required to simplify complexity and reduce overall discussion duration, is a method for designing our way forward.
The Six Thinking Hats technique uses colored hats where each one represents a distinct topic theme, including: emotions, negatives/risks, positives, creative ideas, process issues and facts (known and needed).
The facilitator manages the discussion flow by choosing a colored hat and ensuring that everyone turns their attention exclusively to contributing to the topic defined by the hat. A scribe takes notes for all to see and someone else might serve as a judge, calling out “hat violations” as they occur.
While there is no substitute for a great facilitator, Six Thinking Hats is something that you can put to work with your team after few hours of reading time and some live-fire practice. I include a practice scenario below that will help you and your team uncover the power of this guided discussion process. Of course, spend some time reading De Bono’s book before trying it on for size.
Practice Vignette-Let’s Make it Personal:
When introducing groups to the technique for the first time, I provide a practice round on a non-business topic. A favorite practice scenario involves learning from your significant other that he/she has suddenly (out of the blue) decided to quit work tomorrow and pursue opening the Bistro you two have always dreamed about. The only fact that I supply involves the existence of your combined savings, which might tide you over for one year, assuming you don’t use it to start the Bistro. Just about everyone can imagine their own reaction to being on the receiving end of this type of pronouncement from a significant other, and it doesn’t take long to get the discussion started.
In This Case, Emotions Followed by Risks and Negatives Before Turning Sunny:
When facilitating the discussion around any case, it’s important for the discussion leader to apply the hats in an order that works for the situation. The order will vary from case to case. In this situation, the shock and risk of the announcement are likely to breed early, strong emotional reactions. Venting may be required for moving forward. As such, I instruct the group to put on their Red Hats and let the emotions fly.
After some creative expressions of shock, outrage and anger, it’s important to shift away from emotions and start building a productive conversation. In this case, I’m interested in the group continuing their venting, albeit, in a slightly more constructive manner than the Red Hat provided. I ask the group to put on their Black Hats and identify everything that might go wrong with suddenly quitting a job and opening a restaurant. We run a real-time risk brainstorming session.
As the list generation on negatives runs out of steam, I often will guide people to the positive side of the street. At this time, the Yellow Hats go on and the focus is on generating all of the sunny ideas on why this might just be OK. We’re looking for “what can go right” with the idea, and talk of dreams fulfilled, financial independence, freedom from a corporate job and so forth begin to emerge.
Process Notes:
It’s interesting to work with a group after the emotions have been vented and the negatives listed, on viewing the situation positively. It sometimes takes a bit of facilitation effort to move off of Red and Black Hat thinking, but once the positives start flying, the stage is now set for the next phases.
Another important facilitation note. The group can request to move back towards a particular hat at any point in time. The key is that the entire group must go there…not just one person. This technique does not work if everyone has on a different color hat. The goal is parallel thinking…focusing everyone on the same destination at the same time. A good facilitator manages both the group focus and return trips to the various hats as needed.
We’ve Vented, Listed Risks and Allowed Ourselves to Go Positive. Now, We Need Ideas!
In my practice example, I might invoke the Green Hat (creativity/brainstorming) next and follow-it up with a White Hat to ascertain facts…what we know and importantly, what we need to know. The brainstorming process (green hat) is not dissimilar to traditional brainstorming endeavors, and as a facilitator, you can encourage building and jumping and you can even introduce other creativity tools. Remember, the hat doesn’t tell the group how to run the discussion, it simply signals direction.
White Hat discussions must focus on clearly establishing what we know…and importantly, what we need to know. A good discussion on the facts can help minimize data errors and other anchoring, estimating and data-related biases.
Venting Again and then Deciding How to Decide (or at least, Deciding What to Do Next):
After brainstorming on creativity and fact related issues, I typically return to red (emotions) and black (negatives) one more time for some additional venting. Often, there isn’t any. I then have everyone put on my hat (Blue) and discuss and define the process for moving forward.
While You Might Not Face the Bistro Decision…
My silly little vignette has all of the elements of common workplace dilemmas, including: emotions, risk, unknowns, the potential for success and the need for a reasonable way to work forward. It’s not hard to imagine the Bistro discussion in reality and just about everyone acknowledges the potential for the issue to be a relationship killer.
Your strategic decisions are filled with the same issues…and then some, including politics, silo views, conflicting agendas and different views on the best way forward or even the best direction for the business.
If you are facing some tough discussions and decisions, try enlisting the help of an experienced Six Thinking Hats facilitator and watch and listen as the quality of the discussions improve and the complexity and duration of discussions reduce in scale and scope.
If you simply want to find a way to improve discussion quality on your team or in your home, pick up the book, check out the web resources and then start applying the technique. Your groups will enjoy the change, you will develop valuable facilitation experience and everyone will benefit by a bit of parallel thinking!
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Just like the best woodworking tools in the world won’t make me a skilled cabinetmaker, the Six Thinking Hats approach won’t guarantee decision-making success. However, with study, practice and regular application, DeBono’s cute little colored hats can help to transform discussion quality over time. Improving discussion quality is step one on the road to making better decisions.
-
Chosen by Guy Kawasaki's Alltop.com as a top site in the Leadership category.
Podcast
Available Now!
Practical Lessons
e-book
e-book-Leadership and the Project Manager - Developing the Skills that Fuel High Performance
