“Most interesting was the horse. Since the eyes are mounted on the side of a horse’s head, the sharpness in the video screens was exactly opposite that of a human being. Humans see peripheral objects, at the corners of our eyes, as blurred and distorted; but we see the centre in sharp focus. Horses, at least according to this Japanese representation, see the peripheral as sharp. When they look, at the centre, the place where their eyes meet, the image is distorted and elongated”

Gary Neilson wrote a good article recently on the Secrets to Successful Strategy Execution. He argues that a lot of things get in the way of organisations turning ideas into action.  I think he has some very useful insights.

• Structural change is very tempting at times but it often ignores the root causes of an organisation’s weaknesses. 
• Poor decision making clogs up the organisational arteries. Do your decision making processes help to get things done, or do they slow them down?
  Is everyone clear about the decisions and actions they are accountable for, or are the guidelines unclear?
• Can key up-to-date information – market changes, customer concerns, finance worries – get through to the decision makers quickly bearing in mind that often decision makers are on the ‘front line’?
• Are decisions second guessed with people further up the hierarchy changing things? Where too many people vet decisions, accountability and commitment to get it right declines. When managers interfere with decisions they are in danger of undermining local experts and managing their own time unproductively.
• Does information flow freely or have you got silos? Do managers have enough information to make joined-up decisions?
• Do front-line managers have the information they need to understand the bottom line impact of their decisions?

I see some of these errors repeated in most of the organisations I work with, and I make some of them myself. In today’s climate, however, we need to be looking at unproductive behaviour, and some of these can be really expensive!

Senior Managers did not get to be Senior Managers by being stupid… okay, there are a few exceptions to the rule but they really are exceptions. Senior Managers are technically competent, they bring a lot of expertise and awareness to their roles. All things being equal, however, technical competence does not separate the good from the great - or the quick from the dead!

Relationships are key. Great Senior Managers are differentiated not by what they know, but by how they act. They do not constrain their capable people, take them for granted, or expect the impossible.

But they do challenge, release, enable. At times like these we need clarity of thinking, great decisions and excellent implementation. Great Managers realise the onus is not on them to provide these themselves, but to release them in others.

I remember an excellent Sales Director I worked with. We worked hard to produce a proposal for him that we really thought was the best way forward. He made us go back and trim something off it and we thought we were doing the impossible! But, as we worked at it we found ways to address his concerns. He had got us thinking ’til our brains hurt - and he was right to do so.

What is the value of sharp thinking to your organisation right now? What impact will it have if you can have some “breakthrough” ideas? How can you enable innovation? Your ability to enable your team “to bring their brains to work”, to fully engage the challenges and opportunities facing you, will have far more impact than your personal expertise alone. Peter Drucker once said, however:

“Half the leaders I have met don’t need to learn what to do. They need to learn what to stop”.

We often have behaviours that get in the way - we may be very competitive and hold others back, we may need to add our ideas and imprint to things and stifle objectivity, we may undermine others by our remarks, we may come across as negative - the list goes on. Do you understand the flaws that you have that can hold others back?

At Caret we see sharp thinking, new radical ideas, issues linking together, problems solved every day in our privileged role as organisational consultants. We also see many barriers to effectiveness, but we are convinced the talent, the ideas, and the need to succeed are there - go out and tap into it!

A few years ago, my good friend David Stanley died. Prior to his death, David had been a Director at Caret and it was a real joy (if challenging!) to work with him.  One of his favourite pastimes was to identify and challenge orthodoxies in a team, business, or industry.

Recently, I thought of David as I read Mark Stevens’ book Your Management Sucks. In it he says:

 “The overriding message of this chapter is to challenge conventional wisdom. Look closely, and you’ll see that what is often deemed to be the smart thing is actually stale thinking masquerading as the truth. It is a set of assumptions that have gone unchallenged by creative minds for years and gather a presumption of absolute/time-tested/unassailable truth; precisely because they have worked their way into so many minds they are deemed to be fact.  But all they really demonstrated is staying power”

So, what is it in your organisation or in your individual ways of working that could benefit from the David Stanley Treatment?

Studies have found that less than 10 percent  of effectively formulated strategies carry through to successful implementation.  Some 90 percent of companies consistently fail to execute strategies effectively.  One key to effective strategy execution is the fact that it results from executing the right set of strategic projects/work streams in the right way.  These numbers seem to chime with the experience and research of change expert John Kotter.

Referring to his work for the book Leading Change, Kotter explains:

“That book was based on the analysis of about one hundred efforts in organisations to produce large scale change: implementing new growth strategies, putting in new IT systems, reorganising to reduce expenses.  Incredibly, we found that in over 70 percent of the situations where substantial changes were clearly needed, either they:

• were not fully launched, or
• the change efforts failed, or
• changes were achieved but over budget, late, and with great frustration

We also found that in about 10 percent of the cases, people achieved more than would have been thought possible.  Surprisingly, at least to us, in those 10 percent a similar formula was used in virtually all instances”

Sound familiar?  What has been your experience?

Simon Barnes writing in the Times about the financial crisis described how change in leadership in the sports arena had led to better performance. He cited Fabio Capello and the turnaround in English football, and Kevin Pieterson and his impact on the cricket team. I am reminded of that giant of football management the Birmingham City boss Trevor Francis who tried to reassure fans that the many years of trying unsuccessfully to get into the Premier league would eventually pay off because “if we carry on doing what we have been doing eventually our luck will change and we will go up.”  The Blues owners were not convinced by this strategy and in due time Trevor was invited to seek his fortune elsewhere.

So is this a time for new brooms in your organisation – do things need to be done in a different way? Does the thought of a new broom worry you because you may be placed on the “loyal but old” broom pile?

I like the story of Andy Grove at Intel: one day he and his senior colleagues walked out of the office and agreed to walk back in as if they were new owners of the business. They then asked themselves “what would we change if we were the new owners? What is sloppy and inefficient? What is no longer fit for purpose? How would we improve the organisation and the brand?” They found lots of issues and started to reinvent themselves.

Is it time to reinvent yourself? If a new broom came into your role what difference would they make? What would they make of your people? Your focus and priorities? Your processes and standards? Where are you vulnerable given the changes that are happening around you in the economy etc?

Could you be that new broom?

If you want people on side and working together, less is always more.

Tom Steinberg knows that. He runs MySociety, the very successful charity which punches above it weight using the internet to help people collaborate to improve civil society. Among tips on how to build websites for social good he includes this one:

Take whatever your first website plan is and remove 90% of the features you want. Then build it and launch it and your users will tell you which features they actually wanted instead. Build them and bask in the warm glow of appreciation.

It is easier for people to add than take away. Provide a solid platform and others can innovate on it. Not only that, they all have a clear sense of shared aims. Offer endless choice or demands and we get confused and wonder off to pastures more edifying.

Bob Sutton also knows this. Here he describes in some detail how a small charity again used clarity and simplicity to achieve far beyond what we might expect of them. I’ll quote at length.

We analyze an astounding effort by a small non-profit in Boston called The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) to lead a campaign to reduce medical errors in U.S. hospitals. Their goal was to stop over 100,000 preventable deaths in hospitals over a one year period. And, although there is some controversy about the campaign’s effects, it appears that they ultimately involved hospitals that included over 75% of the beds in the U.S. and exceed their goal by about 20,000 lives.

You can get the article here at the McKinsey website (it is free, you just have to register) or here is the pdf:

Download the_ergonomics_of_innovation.pdf

Even if you get the pdf here, I suggest poking around the McKinsey site as they have lots of great free stuff.

We call this article “the ergonomics of innovation” because the IHI staff did such a brilliant job of designing the campaign so that it reduced the cognitive and emotional load on their tiny staff (about 100 people) and, especially, on the thousands of hospital staff members who participated in the campaign. For example, IHI focused everyone’s efforts on six relatively simple behaviors that had been shown to be big causes of preventable deaths in prior research. They developed very concrete guidelines that hospitals could use to stop these causes — which reduced load on everyone because, although the list could have contained hundreds of evidence-based practices, instead, it helped people focus their efforts and also made it more efficient for hospitals to share what they had learned because they were working on a limited numbers of problems.

Complexity is a reality of life, which is why clarity is a pre-requisite for good leadership.  Put in effort early to make good decisions about what is needed. The rest is a combination of clear communication and, naturally enough, stripping.

Image courtesy of Dr Craig. Hat Tip for thoughts on MySociety and also the wonderful neologism of decrementalism Public Strategy.

Imagine the scene. An overweight Sales Executive is standing outside the back door of his office building – fag in hand of course! Normally, this is where he congregates with fellow smokers but today he is on his own and he is in panic mode. He is worrying about this month’s sales numbers. 

No. He is not worrying about his health because he knows he will have plenty of time to do that when he is admitted to hospital. This man has not learned to panic strategically because, if he had, he would have been panicking about this month’s sales figures three to six months’ ago. Today, he should be panicking about his health and seeking to get and keep fit.

The specifics will be different for different people but how good are you at making sure whenever you panic or worry, you are doing so strategically?

As you will be well aware, execution of strategy is one of the rarest of successes in business.  Indeed, it is a well established idea that only about twenty percent of all change projects/initiatives fulfil their promise. 

Enter Gyan Papi.  It is a Bangla word which literally means “Knowledge Sinner” and refers to the idea of a person having knowledge but not acting according to that knowledge.  As David Maister puts it so well in his book ‘Strategy and the Fat Smoker’:

 “We often know what we should be doing and why – just as fat smokers know they should stop smoking and lose weight. Real strategy lies not in deciding what to do, but in devising ways to ensure we do more of what we know we should do”. 

What a timely reminder to us Gyan Papis of the world!!

The Governments Power of Information Taskforce has created a £20,000 prize fund for people who want to develop new ways to use publicly owned data for public benefit. You submit ideas through the website boldly called showusabetterway. They’ve also made a series of government data sets available for people to work with. This website though is important because its how the government is thinking in fresh ways about collaboration and its relationship with us:

We’re confident that you’ll have more and better ideas than we ever will. You don’t have to have any technical knowledge, nor any money, just a good idea, and 5 minutes spare to enter the competition.Go on, Show Us A Better Way.

The same task force has already looked for ways to make it easier or safer for civil servants to share in the ideas fest which often happens online. Openness generates better ideas. It helps people to innovate faster and work better. Yes it also means people can nick those ideas - but that doesn’t put the thieves ahead of those who habitually collaborate to progress.

(Thanks to Bill Thompson)