Category: Strategy

Have you ever been presented with a strategy document that appears to be nothing more than a list of projects? If so, the good news is that you aren’t crazy if you thought that something was missing. A sound plan is more than a grab bag – it should bring an intangible hypothesis to life in words and images that staff members can use in their daily activities.

On an assignment recently, I was asked to look at a strategic plan put together by a public sector organization. Fortunately, it had all the boxes ticked. Every single item was cross-referenced with Vision 2030 Jamaica, United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals plus a number of other guidelines set by esteemed international bodies.

However, there was a gaping hole. The plan lacked any connection between detailed project plans and the reasons they were created in the first place. Apparently, the consultants who assembled these projects left out an important activity, such that employees were forced to take empty steps. With little emotional or logical guidance to the original ideas, they were going through the motions, but missing the point. How can you ensure this never happens to your team?

1. Stick to Breakthrough Goals

If your strategic planning team isn’t intent on crafting breakthroughs, then cancel the retreat. Save your North Coast hotel money and just follow business as usual. If the idea of producing breakthroughs sounds daunting, it should. By definition, these stretch targets don’t produce themselves, yet they are the reason leaders are appointed. Even with little explicit training in how to do so, executives are expected to realize the unimaginable and unforeseen.

One method I use to move leadership teams into this zone is logical: I request that they step into and create a specific 15-30 year future. I ask: “What are you willing to create?” and “How does it translate into numbers?”

As they follow the process to sketch out these results by the chosen year, they naturally produce stretch targets which cannot occur by accident.
To find an example of a breakthrough commitment, look no further than Vision 2030 Jamaica: “…the place of choice to live, work, raise families and do business”. We can probably all agree that this extraordinary outcome has no chance of being realized by routine actions.

2. Fire-Test and Adjust Breakthrough Commitments

The big problem leaders have when sharing such lofty targets is that the first reaction is one of disbelief. People hear the words and immediately dismiss them as fantastical; to be ignored.

A good way to alleviate this pressure is to build a logical bridge between the future to the present. This can be done by back-casting – working one’s way back to the present using the current day facts and future targets as anchors on opposite ends. Unfortunately, teams sometimes discover that such a connection is impossible to build. It could be that the goals, when taken together as a whole, are infeasible.

In this case, they must be readjusted in order to remain credible, a task leaders must undertake to retain their followership. This simple act restores trust: it’s the opposite of the nonsensical “I Don’t Care, Do It Anyway” pressure that some managers try to apply.

3. Preserve the Emotional Connection

Perhaps the hardest challenge is to help project teams who are executing each day to retain their link to the original intent of the Breakthrough Goal.
For example, I have met few at the lowest or even mid-levels of the public sector who are inspired by Vision 2030. Even though it articulates our citizens’ deepest commitments, it has gotten lost in mundane business-as-usual execution.

One approach to retain the link is to explain executive reasoning in words, images, videos and interactives. Together, they show how the Breakthrough Goals of the organization were derived in tones which are both logical and emotional, making them easy to understand.

Another way is to give staff the means to translate Breakthrough Goals into personal objectives. This exercise helps them retain the underlying intent, but own the outcome for themselves.

If your organization is looking at a list of projects which don’t add up to more than an empty bunch of activities, consider that your leaders skipped a task along the way. Instead, take actions to restore them. Trust that staff who appear to be merely going through the motions can be inspired. Shift to seeing them as people who are waiting for you and your fellow managers to step up and lead.

Like many solutions of this nature, the best examples are wrought from the very top of the organization. Leaders must tell the truth about their own lack of inspiration if they are to forge the kind of commitment which leads to sacrifices and risk-taking. These are a few of the essential ingredients needed to see a breakthrough goal become a reality.

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/business/20191103/francis-wade-separating-breakthrough-strategic-plans-herd

Why is it that strategic plans often languish on the shelf? Some would say it’s a matter of lazy executives but experience shows that it has more to do with creating the right context from the start.

A client I work with has an idea: “let’s put up our own website.” At first blush, it makes sense. Every organisation has one. It’s an easy, inexpensive way to let the world know you exist.

However, a brief survey of websites of similar organisations reveals an inconvenient truth: they are all embarrassingly stale.  The layouts look tired. Not a single site is current, or has been updated in ages. Whoever had the original vision has long gone, leaving behind an obsolete artefact.
But it’s likely that when the idea was first pursued, people were excited. They invested personal energy in the project and when it was done, felt satisfied that their vision had come to life.

Unfortunately, they also made a deadly mistake. In their minds, the purpose of the activity was to produce an object (a website) versus to launch a process (a way to keep staff in touch with the public.) In other words, the context they created for the project was limited.

This particular error happens every day. Imagine the typical family. The kids want to adopt a dog, but their parents refuse. The fact is, the older, wiser heads know that owning a pet is more than possessing an animal object. It also means engaging in a process of feeding, exercising and cleaning that takes time and money. They understand that this job is likely to fall into their laps when their children lose interest.

As adults, they see the real cost.

This also happens in strategic planning retreats when companies try to compress the activity into a single day. It’s possible to create a report in this time-frame if the team focuses solely on producing unlimited visions of the future. They walk away feeling inspired, as if they have just adopted a dog or launched a website.

However, the typical second day is usually focused on adding in real-life constraints – the true cost. Once they are included in the plan, tradeoffs must be considered which lead to the team making difficult decisions. Among them is a choice to kill certain initiatives.

The sad reality? There just isn’t enough time, manpower, money or energy to accomplish all the goals set on day one. That initial mood of boundless creativity must be balanced.

Apart from spending two days on this activity, what else is required to be strategic versus just producing a plan?

1. A Context of “Being Strategic”
Paradoxically, the main output of each planning exercise may not be the plan. Perhaps, it’s better understood as the start of a process which engages everyone.

In this process, a new paradigm is introduced which reshapes everyday work. Now, instead of simply doing their job, an employee is doing so for a greater purpose which inspires them.

This means that the plan should be changed as often as necessary in order to play its role as a guide for daily actions. These updates keep it fresh and relevant.

Some companies unwittingly rob employees of learning how to “be strategic.” First, they  hire outsiders to write their strategy. When the final document (the object) is handed over, the company finds itself unable to execute because no-one possesses the requisite way of being to be successful. It disappeared out the door with the consultants.

2. Make Concrete Commitments
In prior columns I accused executives of failing to treat their time with the same level of rigour as they do their budgets. Consequently, their strategic plans are unrealistic and are treated as if they can all drop their overfull schedules at a moment’s notice.

One antidote is to book the same time in each executive’s calendar for implementation: e.g. Monday morning from 9-12 am. Doing so means cancelling or delegating existing commitments. It’s a way to ensure that the new projects and processes in the plan have a chance of survival in the real, post-retreat world.

3. Make Behaviour and Process Changes
Pay attention to those strategic initiatives which are as painful to implement as the challenge of learning to write cursive with your non-dominant hand. At both the individual and corporate levels, old habits and processes will assert themselves, resisting the planned changes.

Instead, put in place new systems for performance management, rewards, recognition, training and automation. Hardwire these improvements to reduce the possibility of failure.

Part of being strategic is acknowledging all these obstacles and finding ways to work around them. Admittedly, they are harder than simply producing a document but they will ensure that your plan is realistic and provide a unique pathway to future success.

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/business/20190714/francis-wade-art-being-strategic

Does the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities  and Threats (SWOT) technique deserve it‘s accepted place in your next strategic planning retreat? Maybe not. There are more precise ways to understand the current state of the business that take less time and use more facts.

My recommendation: If you are leading your organization‘s next planning exercise, lift things up a notch by omitting the SWOT activity from the agenda. There are three reasons why this list-making activity needs to be transformed.

1. It’s just an opinion survey

When people cough up strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats they are merely offering opinions. While there are facts sitting in the background somewhere, the truth is that the exercise is based on opposable points of view, even allowing items to show up in multiple lists. For example, a reality such as “We have five employees” could fit into any of the four categories, construing it as either a “pro” or a “con”.

Given the fact that anyone can have an opinion about anything, merely accumulating these arbitrary points of view is a low-quality exercise. Discussing and debating them at length only reduces your meeting to a talk-shop.

2. It anchors the team in old thinking

The purpose of a well-designed retreat is to establish a clean break from the past. By contrast, the SWOT activity does the very opposite. Why? It merely asks people to rehash old, familiar lines of thinking. This reinforces the emotional link to whatever former strategy happened to be in place, which in turn, makes it harder to create a fresh one.

For example, imagine what happens when the team lists the fact that having five employees is a weakness. Now, it’s difficult to see it as a strength, which it may be in the context of a fast-changing industry. Stating the old concept as the solid truth only stands in the way of realizing a new paradigm.

3. It takes too much time

As the designer of the retreat, you are probably painfully aware that time is a scarce commodity. A SWOT survey gets people talking, but it requires several hours of precious space to collect the group’s point of view, collate and present it. This time could be better spent doing deeper dives into hard data.

Given these three shortcomings (which many executives already quietly realize) why does the exercise continue to be so popular? As a retreat organizer, you may have the answer: because it‘s easy.

Not only is a choice to do the activity never challenged, those who participate are unlikely to challenge each other during the exercise. Unfortunately, this avoidance tactic violates research showing that a group must struggle to produce good, new ideas. Here are some recommendations I make to solve the dilemma of coming to agreement without taking a shortcut.

1. Do the SWOT Survey Online, Before the Retreat

My clients do these surveys before retreats, as part of our data gathering and include all employees. The most salient results are summarized in the meeting within 15 minutes, which saves time and effort.

2. Facilitate a Current Snapshot

Perhaps the original intent of the SWOT was to gain an understanding of the present state of the business. This picture is still needed, but it must be fact-based.

As I have explained in a prior column, your snapshot can be pulled together using different perspectives: financial, customer/competitor, operations and employees. Add in an analysis of the external environment with the PESTER views, (Political, Environmental, Sociological, Technological, Economic and Regulatory), taking special note that technology is emerging as the most critical outside factor.

At first glance, this may seem like a dull recitation of boring data. However, the point is to understand (as a team) the story the facts are telling. Inevitably, this will include a robust discussion of various strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats but there‘s no need to group them. Instead, let the information do the talking, rather than hasty opinions, and weave the four SWOT themes into the narrative. Invariably, the tale the data tells is nuanced, filled with ups and downs, polarities, discrepancies and paradoxes. Only a team of insiders with a deep appreciation of the organization and their individual speciality can fully pull it together. Certainly, an outside consultant can’t.

Of course, there are companies which attempt to skip the snapshot altogether and jump right into planning the future. Unfortunately, doing so yields pipe dreams with no foundation in reality. It reduces the trust needed to make a risky move.

In summary, it takes a concerted effort to have everyone on the team see the company’s current position from a joined-up point of view. However, it’s more than a team-building activity: It’s also an evaluation of the status quo which is the first step to carving out a transformative strategy. Don’t block a big change which needs to happen with a costly SWOT mistake.

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/business/20190519/francis-wade-ban-swot-your-next-retreat

P.S.

Here is some interesting research found a few years after my article was written: SWOT Analysis: It’s Time for a Product Recall

Why do some managers hate to make long-term plans for their business? The hidden secret is their deep fear of failure but there‘s a way to be confident about their team’s quality of visionary thinking.

Vague aspirations to “Become World-Class” will always drive some portion of your employees crazy. Even if it happens on a grand scale, the answer isn’t to abandon visionary thinking.

Fortunately, the Jamaican Government’s Vision 2030 avoids these perils by having both clear measurable targets and a specific end-date. Without these two components, it would be just be wishful a bunch of thoughts…fairy tales with no basis in reality.

However, most managers under-estimate the effort to produce such detailed targets. They struggle, but don’t understand why. One reason relates to a lack of harmony between two opposing camps: Dreamers and Realists. Your team is best served when a drive for inspiration (i.e. Dreaming) is balanced by a need to be practical (i.e. being Realistic). Here are three steps to include in your next planning meeting.

Being Inspirational through the Details

If you have noticed that most of your employees have lost the zest for Dreamer-led Rah-Rah / “Being Number One” chest-beating, you may ask: “Why did it become passe?” In short, it doesn‘t do well in today‘s world where authenticity is the main currency.

They see such lofty goals as inauthentic because they lack specific, measurable characteristics. As a result, it ruins their credibility, reducing them to having no more significance than an idle knock in table tennis, or a meaningless game of solitaire played just to kill time.

Today, your employees expect real engagement which must be linked to clear performance feedback which is objectively measured. Such black and white targets tell them whether they have won or lost, not only individually, but on a corporate scale.

In the case of Jamaica 2030 there was, I imagine, a long hard distance to go from becoming “the place of choice to live, work, raise families and do business” to defining multiple, explicit targets for specific sectors. It’s exactly the tough task many executive teams are unwilling to do. Instead, they try to take lazy shortcuts. For example, it‘s popular to get each department to come up with its own goals, then ask a clerk to pull them together in a final document.

At first blush, this approach may seem logical, or efficient. However, the end-product ends up being little more than a grab-bag of bits and pieces. This Frankenstein plan is exactly what Realists fear the most because the lack of practical coherence dooms it to failure.

Allowing Brutal Reality to Trim Dreams

Some Realists feel so strongly that they block or boycott planning retreats altogether. Instead, they argue that today is the best guide to tomorrow and advocate no more than annual budgeting. Implicit in this approach is the assumption that competitive advantage was decided in the past, and won’t change.

This dangerous idea is usually not spoken out aloud…until it’s too late. Like Cable and Wireless of old, they deny the arrival of an impending Digicel, thereby facilitating their competition’s success.

Unfortunately, most executive teams never resolve the difficult tension between Dreamers and Realists, preferring to allow one side to “win”.

The way out of this zero-sum game is to balance the time devoted to each camp during your next strategic planning retreat. When you create your agenda, build this in: ask everyone to Dream, then stop. Pause, and then provoke participants to trim the vision by making it Real. In other words, allow each approach to run its full course before switching from one to the other. The fact is, both are important, but they are impossible to reconcile simultaneously in a workshop setting.

Time and Discipline to Balance Both Activities

Most executives don’t appreciate this delicate balance. Instead, if you belong to one group, you are likely to point fingers at the other, complaining that time spent in their preferred zone is wasted. As a result, I often find myself in the middle, arguing for a balance. This means pointing out the pitfalls of “short” retreats. I explain why we no longer offer them: they favor one camp over the other, producing a weak strategy which is neither rigorous nor durable.

In other words, trying to focus exclusively on Dreamers or Realists defeats the purpose. The point of such sessions is to make the most difficult decisions regarding the future of the company. Bringing both camps together is just one of the critical end-products.

Teams who realize this fact produce miracles: building inspiring long-term plans based on realistic short-term commitments. While it’s a hard result to generate in a mixed group, this balanced approach is the best way to craft sustainable competitive advantage.

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/business/20190324/francis-wade-hidden-secret-leaders-who-hate-long-term-planning

There’s a certain false comfort which comes from believing that your organization’s profitability will always occur in the same way, year after year. That is, until the magic stops. When a disruption takes place, you must face the facts: your products are stale, your people disengaged and your loyal customers are doing business with someone else altogether.

Now, it’s time to transform your business, except that you are too late. The perfect moment was several years ago while you were enjoying the fruits of your success. Back then, you suspected that you would eventually have to make a shift, but never expected it to come so quickly… so suddenly. You thought you had more time. In retrospect, you should have paid more attention to the disruptions already taking place in other geographies.

If your business is able to survive today’s onslaught, how can you ensure it never happens again?

One way is to plan the kind of strategy that assumes a future combination of new technology, external competition, poor economic performance and government regulations. Put them all together and you imagine a perfect storm in which you are forced to react to monstrous changes.

But is there a way to be proactive?

Start by using the Jobs to Be Done framework introduced by Clay Christiansen. It asks the question “What are my customers trying to do when they purchase my product or service?”

For most industries, a rough answer might be: “To achieve a decent balance between price and value.”

For example, look at the value-price equation for a highly competitive niche like internet access. Over the years, the consumer has been able to enjoy the best of both worlds, as both sides of the equation have improved dramatically. How can you provide such a benefit to your customers that would endear you to them?

1. Change Your Mindset

If your company views customers as scoundrels to be defeated, or as disloyal partners to be scorned, it might be time to shift your mindset. Instead, think Win-Win, in which each transaction is an opportunity to build goodwill on both sides.

Consider that the average transaction delivers a dose of goodwill which “satisfies” both parties. However, that might simply be ordinary.

What if you were to commit to a mindset of providing extraordinary goodwill? What difference would a systematic approach to increasing value and decreasing cost make to your company?

2. How to Increase Value

Imagine if you were to keep your prices constant. Ask yourself, “How can we deliver even more value to customers, while continuing to achieve a Win-Win relationship?”

As tricky as this may sound, it’s a principle embedded in Jamaican history. “Brawta” – the little extra offered by a supplier to sweeten a transaction – has been a part of our island‘s commerce for as long as most remember. The idea is simple: a supplier can improve the buyer’s experience in ways that are asymmetrical.  

For example, imagine visiting the local butcher. She offers some raw dog meat as Brawta – a gift of scraps that were headed to the garbage bin. To her, the cost is nothing. To you, the benefit is substantial.

As a supplier of value, you probably have lots of ways to make your customer’s life easier. You just need to look for them with the right level of creativity. Once found, can they be packaged up and delivered so they add significant value yet cost you relatively little?

3. Cut Prices

Here’s the more difficult part. How could your company deliver the same value, enjoy the same margins while lower prices at the same time?

This is no theoretical exercise. Instead, you are anticipating a time when you won’t have a choice – a future in which you may be forced to cut prices in order to remain competitive. The difference is that if you do so now, you will have higher margins, and retain some powerful flexibility for later.

In effect, you are building a buffer against disruptions.

Plus, you’ll be able to provide customers the kind of price cuts that make them fall (and stay) in love with your business. As foreign as this may sound, look around at companies who consistently offer you the lowest prices. If they are smart, they are being aggressive to find ways to continually cut the amount you must pay.

What you may not know is that there’s a secret benefit to this effort. If your company commits to reducing prices, it will discover the technologies necessary to keep competitive advantage. In other words, you’ll never be surprised by a disruptive technology because you already use them.

Together, these three strategies can launch you into a different world from your competitors: one they’ll find hard to replicate.

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/business/20181202/francis-wade-change-your-business-model