City Slickers Meets the World of Strategic Planning – Part 1, the JUST ONE THING Challenge

After a presentation I recently made at a strategic planning conference a sr vp from a high tech manufacturing firm came to me and shared a story about change at his organization.  It was a sad story.  He lamented to me that his senior management team had been very astute in the early detection of the last two direction shifts in their market niche, which was a great accomplishment.  And they put these new directions into their formal strategic plan.  

 

But he said because the company’s new strategy couldn’t be translated quickly enough to the desk top and shop floor levels, they missed out in the marketplace.  Big time.  He’s in a very competitive industry where his top two competitors beat them in both cases, causing his company to play a very expensive game of catch-up as they scrambled to capture what used to be their market share, and then try capture even more.

He said he’d talked with numerous consultants who were all too happy to give him 50 things to do to avoid this scenario from repeating itself in the future – and, he added, with a pretty hefty price tag.  So he wanted to ask me at this conference, what is the ONE thing that I thought could provide the highest leverage translating strategy to execution.  When I started to answer he anticipated my response and cut me off, saying, “ Yeah, yeah, I know you’re going to say there’s more than just on thing to do, but I’m asking you to dig back into all your experiences… with successes and with failures… and give me what you think is the highest leverage approach that will apply in most cases.”

I had to admit it was a great question that made me think.  After clearing my mind of the image in the movie City Slickers where ornery trail boss Jack Palance (Curly) challenges Billy Crystal to come up with the ONE THING that’s most important to him, I knocked the trail dust off my PowerPoint clicker and said to the vp, “Okay, here it is.  Once we get past the obvious fundamentals like having a tight strategy-to-structure connection, over-communicating the strategy, tying it into the company’s formal performance appraisal process, etc. here’s that One Thing for phenomenal leverage.  And I’ve found this has great portability from industry to industry, and from organization to organization…

photocredit: youtube.com

City Slickers Meets the World of Strategic Planning – Part 2, the Response

It’s actively engaging employees in the cascading of goals from the top of the organization to the front-lines. 

City Slickers Meets the World of Strategic Planning – Part 3, a Reprieve of the Just ONE THING Limitation

The sr vp nodded, seemed to like the answer, and then said, “Okay, you’ve told me what needs to be done, now what’s the ONE THING that will maximize my likelihood of success for this engagement-based cascading approach?”

I silently thought, Great!  Here’s my chance to add at least one more Thing to that previously lonely item of one advice tidbit for strategy roll-out.

I replied, You’ll greatly increase the likelihood of your success if you set up one or more teams to plan to roll-out the cascade, support its implementation, and follow-up on its effectiveness.  Teams can provide an ongoing energy, consistency of purpose, and mutual accountability for moving forward that it’s hard to duplicate with just a single, or handful of  talented individual operating independently.  Having a team involved from the start also sets the stage, and helps introduce and model the expected behaviors that this roll-out will be a group activity, that it involves more than just the current inner circle of execs.

Tips

Don’t just assemble a group of people and call them a team.  Set up conditions for the team to grow together, and capitalize on their diverse perspectives.  Actually carve out some time for the team to get acquainted, do some planning, set some goals, and go through some team-building efforts.  You’ll get a higher quality product in the end than if you just periodically gather the same bunch of people in a room to “work on that strategy cascading thing.”

Even though it’s a top-down driven strategy roll-out, on the team consider having a few people from lower levels in the organization.  They’ll be able to provide some practical perspectives, on “what will play in Peoria” or whatever parts of the organization they live and work in.  And the groups they represent will really appreciate that they were included, and this can pay substantial dividends in the strategy execution phase.

From Day 1, help the team create a feedback-rich environment.  From personal experience, and from Carl Larsen’s research with over 6,000 team members, one of the toughest things teams have to deal with is providing and being open to feedback, so the team can grow and perform at its highest potential.  But luckily it’s also one of the most easily addressed -- if it’s addressed early.

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Pretty cool questions from that vp, thought I’d share them with everybody in the last three posts.  Would love to hear your thoughts on what’s worked for you in cascading strategy throughout your organization.  What’s been your experience?

 Photo credit: istockphoto

What Do We Do with Change Readiness Information?

As discussed in an earlier blog, it’s very important to consider the specifics of an organization’s change readiness for a specific proposed change.  We presented specific things we’d like to find out.  And in another blog we talked about various cost-effective ways to collect valuable change readiness information.   The survey is but one common approach, and there are other cost-effective ones.  

 

But now what, after we've collected that information?  What do we do with that information?

 

One high leverage activity is to get people in a room and process the information together, discussing it from their own different viewpoints, and then agreeing upon a plan forward.  Who might do this?  The core change team, along with invited “extended” members (special invitees, like a director who may have critical technical knowledge of the proposed change, who may only attend a few meetings with the core team), would be excellent candidates to review this information and then develop action items to include in the overall work plan for the change.  Specifically, here are some questions to prime these conversations for the core and extended team:

 

• Which groups, and which specific people might be the biggest resistors, how powerful are they, and how can we best get their cooperation in the change effort?
• Which groups, and which specific people might be our biggest supporters, how powerful are they, and how can we best get them to actively support the change?
• If the organization’s leaders operate as an interconnected leadership system, what is the best way to influence the system’s energy to actively support the planned change?
• If the organization’s leaders operate as independent heads of their respective fiefdoms, where should we start first, and how do we best get the leaders involved in collective inquiry, collective meaning making, and collective action planning on a cross-functional basis for this particular change?
• In the context of answers to the four previous questions what are the best strategies to satisfy the resistors and energize the supporters? (Examples include communications, training, workshops where people collaboratively put out ideas, prioritize them, and develop plans for moving forward, and role modeling and other actions by key leaders to demonstrate active support.)
• Does any part of the initial proposed change need to be modified or re-sequenced to accelerate its implementation and acceptance?

 

By thinking specifically about the issue of change readiness we can be better prepared to develop high leverage action items to get the change implemented.  Since I’m a big fan of visual presentation of data, in these analysis groups we’ll often color in boxes on the organization’s org chart (red for hot resistance, yellow for neutral, and green for accepting) and see what the patterns suggest we should do.  This is particularly helpful if a head of an organizational unit, for example, a VP or Director, holds a totally different view of whether or not the change should be supported.

 

And finally, here’s an interesting variation hosting a typical meeting to have the group address the above issues.  Try using a proven template (“group method”) to spur creativity in the group.  One method I’ve used to do this effectively with a group is Open Space.

 

For ideas on HOW to collect this all-important change readiness information, you can check out the blog Three Paths to Assess Change Readiness.

Three Paths to Assess Change Readiness

In an earlier blog The Importance of Assessing Change Readiness we talked about the importance of collecting change readiness information, and some specific things we want to find out.  So how do we get this important information?  

 

Here are three ways that I’ve found to be effective.  In some cases it’s helpful to use two of these.  Quite often you’ll find it helpful to confirm, and dig deeper into issues in a second pass for whichever path you select.

 

1. Interviews.  These could be done in one-on-one interviews, or in small groups, like a focus group of 7-10 people.  You’ll want to make sure you get information from representative levels of the organization, and representative groups would be affected by the proposed change.  

 

Advantages of this method are that it can be done fairly quickly, and you have an opportunity to quickly dig deeper into a response if you’d like to learn more about it.  A disadvantage is that if you don’t select truly representative groups, you may base your action plan on information that is not true for a larger percentage of the targeted change population.

 

2. Surveys.    Over the years I’ve moved from canned surveys to custom-developed surveys because the latter tend to be shorter, and more quickly get at the heart of the specifics of the change proposed.  Usually I’ll do a few one-on-one interviews or focus groups to get some ideas about common responses people might have.  Then I’ll load those into possible responses for a question, into an automated survey tool like Survey Monkey.  I’ve found it’s also helpful to allow for write-in answers, just in case my representative group did not provide all the possible popular responses.  

 

Advantages of this method include easy data collection, and automated summarization of data.  Another advantage is that you can collect information quickly from more people than you can in interviews.  One disadvantage is that often only a very small percentage of people respond to survey.  So, I like to emphasize the survey will only take about 8 minutes, and that participation is extremely important as it will shape how the upcoming proposed change will be implemented.  Another disadvantage is that people sometimes worry they’ll be punished for telling some ugly truth about what’s happening in the organization, so it’s helpful to set these surveys up to be anonymous, or posted to an outside third party’s collection website, so that formal company leaders won’t see responses associated with individuals.

 

3. Workshops.  One workshop, or a series of workshops can provide extremely valuable information that can be immediately acted upon.  Here’s an example.  In a global pharmaceutical company that recently implemented a matrix organization, we hosted two rounds of workshops.  In the first round we collected hopes, concerns, and key technical issues that would likely be encountered when the matrix was fully implemented.  We did this as independent observers/coaches for each of the organizational units that were to be combined.  We summarized the outputs of these workshops, and then had a combined workshop where we presented the collected data to all organization units who would need to work together in the combined organization.  Collectively they discussed the issues, prioritized the work to be done, and developed action plans to move forward that they all agreed upon.

 

One major advantage of this method is that you can rapidly, and simultaneously surface key readiness concerns and also address them on the spot, or in the subsequent “everybody-together” workshop.  This can obviate the need to do further change readiness analysis and planning in a later change agent meeting, which is typically done for the Interview and Survey methods paths of data collection.  

 

One disadvantage is that because the outcomes are not totally predictable when groups with diverse perspectives get together to plan, this option may not be for “faint of heart” facilitators.  Overall, I’ve found the benefits of this approach far outweigh the concerns.  The key is for the facilitator to keep his or her eye on the final desired “big picture” outcomes – which would be outcomes like increased technical capabilities and standardization across the company’s newly matrixed 12 manufacturing sites in the pharmaceutical company’s case mentioned above -- and help the group collectively work their way to designing mutually acceptable solutions and action plans for those.

 

Once the critical change readiness information has been collected, here are some tips at What We Do with Change Readiness Information? on how to analyze it.