DEMOCRATIZING STRATEGY
In our work with companies of different sizes and across different industries, we see management teams opening up the strategy process for broader organizational input and involvement than ever before. This is a positive trend that alleviates real deficiencies in the old top-down paradigm.
First, you increase the odds of getting insights about customers, competitors and the inner workings of your company that are diluted as they travel through up the organization. Second, being part of the strategy process creates a more meaningful and engaging workplace for employees. Third, the coordination and alignment that arises out of a well-orchestrated process creates a strong foundation for strategy execution.
But of course, democratizing strategy is not the-end-all-be-all solution. Here are three traps you should steer clear of in your next strategy process.
#1: Setting unrealistic expectations
Opening up the strategy process for broader involvement can create an expectation that everyone’s opinions will somehow be reflected in the strategy choices. Reality is that ultimately, good strategy is centrally imposed order upon a system. This is especially important in times of change where existing priorities, capabilities, and structures may get in the way of adapting to your operating environment. Without centralized authority to impose new direction, priorities and resource allocation, you end up optimizing locally and short-term instead of globally and long-term.
#2: Loosing the signal in the noise
Involving more voices in the strategy process should uncover new insights, but will also reduce the signal-to-noise ratio. Opening up the process and tending to the resulting hunger for meetings, workshops, and progress updates can rob management of time to work on the actual strategy issues, and drown out the data points, ideas, and contrarian opinions that may enrich the process.
#3: Turning strategy into theater
If you ignored the first two traps there is a high risk that you’ll end up in the third: strategy theater. What’s strategy theater? A quick definition: a strategy process that is more concerned with creating a good employee experience than with engaging in the difficult work of finding and committing to a way forward. Here are five tell-tale signs of a strategy process turning into theater: (1) A lack of a clear and overriding diagnosis that outlines what we are solving for. (2) Broad but only skin-deep employee involvement through “yellow sticker workshops”. (3) Group harmony and anecdotal evidence taking precedence over critical thinking and somber analysis. (4) Surface level trade-offs symbolizing strategy choices, but are actually avoiding them. (5) Too much time spent crafting seductive narratives or 200 page PowerPoints to numb the critical faculties of the board.