6 Reasons Your Strategy Isn’t Working
by Michael Beer
https://hbr.org/2020/06/6-reasons-your-strategy-isnt-working
I’m Busy, Why Do I Care? Change is coming at us fast, but common behaviors we don’t stop to consider most of the time may be undermining our efforts to adapt.
Main section: 975 words (4-5min read)
Change is in the air. As we enter mid-2020, organizations and populations everywhere are grappling with a series of powerful social, economic and political shocks. There has never been safety in clinging to the status quo, but it is even less of an option now.
Individuals and organizations respond by planning change and making strategies to help them adapt. Big or small, public or private, research shows all organizations that try this have one thing in common when it comes to change:
Almost all of them will fail to accomplish what they want.
This post will look at a recent article written by Harvard Business School emeritus professor Michael Beer on what he calls “hidden barriers” to change and transformation, which provides some insights into why this is.
Although couched in terms of strategy, Beer’s real target is the silent assumptions and blind spots behind many of the problems organizations encounter trying to pivot in new directions.
Hidden Barriers
Beers offers six “barriers” which degrade organizations’ ability to respond to change:
· Unclear values and conflicting priorities
· Ineffective senior teams
· Ineffective leadership styles
· Poor coordination
· Inadequate leadership development
· Inadequate vertical communication
We’ll set aside the fifth barrier, inadequate leadership development. This is a long-term structural problem which requires a heavy dose of good process to fix.
The others, although they may be be long-standing and baked into organizational culture, are more amenable to short-term solutions and leadership intervention.
Why call these “hidden”? Many of them spring from routine, accepted parts of a team or organization’s culture. They’re the sort of things which are fine in a status quo environment, where they tend to blend into the background. They are the way our systems function and interact--and largely, they work well enough to not be noticed.
When an organization is under stress and needs to move fast, though, these habits and assumptions go from being “just what we do here” to actual obstacles--often without anyone really noticing they’re there until they’re a problem.
Many of these barriers persist not because they’re unsolvable but because leaders haven’t asked the right questions, so they either don’t realize they’re there or don’t understand them.
I Have Questions
The right questions are a powerful tool for boosting organizations or teams’ performance.
For example, if your team is having trouble getting aligned and actually delivering what’s needed to move forward with a new strategy or vision for change (as with the first and fourth barriers), we can start diagnosing with a few questions:
--How well has the leadership explained the strategy and the values that drive it?
--To what extent do people at lower levels actually understand what leadership wants? To what extent do they feel empowered to actually do the needful?
--When was the last time the team was explicitly asked to change its behavior to reflect the new priorities?
--What are the incentives here? How well do they support the plan or strategy?
--What provisions are there for coordinating or in DoD-speak, synchronizing, resources and actions across the organization? How sure are you that key people know who everyone involved in the change is, where they are, what they’re supposed to do, and how to reach them?
None of the questions are framed as “yes/no” choices. This is deliberate.
It’s Questions All The Way Down
In fact, none of the questions stand alone. For each one there is a series of natural follow-up questions. The first and best is very simple: How do we know this? This can be taken literally, as in “Where did we get this data?” It also can have a less direct but very powerful meaning of “How sure are we that our views/assumptions/information are actually correct?”
Consider one of the examples Beers gives of ineffective senior team behavior: excessive focus on short-term, tactical issues rather than tougher high-level strategic stuff. As shorthand, Beers notes this is the ritual of “death by PowerPoint” which is so familiar to anyone in a medium or large organization.
One of my favorite questions, adapted from a rowing team is Will this make the boat go faster? The idea being that there are tons of things one can do on, in or around a crew shell. How many of them help you win races, though?
Meetings and process are the same. There is an opportunity cost, for example, to “just following the routine.” Figuring out what it is and if it’s worthwhile, though, means closely looking not just at what we do, but why. This means layers of questions.
Challenge Your Assumptions
Netflix has a famous “culture deck” laying out the company’s basic cultural norms. One slide is particularly applicable to the types of problems Beer describes:
“Managers: when one of your talented people does something dumb, don’t blame them. Instead, ask yourself what context you failed to set.”
No one should think Netflix is an accountability-free zone. Far from it, it sounds like an incredibly demanding place to work. But part of that is the emphasis, seen here, on making sure that its leaders regularly challenge their own--and others’--assumptions about what’s going on.
The slide after the one above goes on to suggest that when tempted to control employees, Netflix leaders stop and reflect on what context they can provide instead. I’m sure change there is not frictionless or easy, but a culture like that will be much less likely to fall into Beers’ six hidden traps.
Conclusion
It can be very difficult to be the one asking the hard questions, especially if the organization or team isn’t used to this. The payoff, though, can be the difference between your strategy or change initiative working, or like most effort, failing. The cost of failure is simply too high to pass up relatively simple ways of increasing our understanding of ourselves and our environment.