This is part 4 of a series of posts on thoughts related to Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan, John King and Halee Fischer-Wright:
Most strategies fail. The research backs this up and most likely your own personal experience too. Not your strategies, of course. You're strategies probably succeed most of the time, at least when the strategy depends only upon your own stage 3 doggedness and persistence to get things done. No, we're talking about the strategies of your organization that require buy in and proper execution by an entire team of people. And because research shows that these strategies fail most of the time, it's essential that systems be in place to help ensure that your team is able to avoid the most common pitfalls that stand in the way of achieving the outcomes that are important within your organization. Can technology help with this process? I think so, but let's find out together.
The Strategy Guide
I'm a technologist, so I like flow charts. To see the original diagrams, of course, you'll have to go to your local books store or favorite site (see link to the left) and purchase a copy of Tribal Leadership. It's worth it.
The strategy begins with identifying the core values and noble cause that are the driving force behind the initiatives undertaken within your organization. Yes, some of this is captured in the mission statement, but the real heart of the core values are the dreams and aspirations of the individual members. As noted in the previous post, it's important to foster a culture in your organization where the community is encouraged to discuss and share these underlying motivations on a regular basis. The Values and the Noble Cause serve as the foundation for a series of questions and decisions that need to be made to help ensure that the teams within your tribe can achieve the final outcomes.
Moving from core values and a noble cause, the outline 3 distinct topics of conversation that need to be addressed in order:
- Outcomes - The authors differentiate outcomes from goals arguing that outcomes are success in the moment while goals lead toward a present sense of failure until the goal is achieved. Honestly, I didn't buy this. To me this was just a semantic game to highlight the fact that the team needs to have the right attitude about achieving specific, measurable goals which can be owned by a person or a team and which flow from the values and noble cause of the organization.
- Assets - This is what you have, in terms of resources, at your disposal to achieve the outcomes.
- Behaviors - This is the proposed course of action, the execution that will get the tribe to realize the outcomes (to achieve their goals).
The tribe is encouraged to start with the definition of the outcomes and the assets. With these two in place, an important, reality check question needs to be asked. Do we have enough assets for our outcomes. If not, then the outcomes of the strategy need to be changed to match the available assets. Physical assets are certainly important in making this decision, but one must also carefully consider less tangible assets, like the commitment level of the team members to the outcomes, or even at a more fundamental level, to the values and noble cause of the organization.
With the appropriate balance of outcomes to assets in place, the strategist must turn their attention to the behaviors that will produce the outcomes. A second question is asked at this point. Do we have enough assets for the behaviors? If the behaviors are time and resource intensive, then more assets may be required. Either that, or the behaviors themselves need to be re-evaluated.
Finally, the strategist must ask the team whether the suggested behaviors will produce the final outcome. If the answer is yes, the team can begin working toward the completion of their outcomes. The final state in the flow chart to the left should actually read, "Work toward completion of the outcomes." The authors recommend revisiting the strategy every 90 days to make sure the behaviors are working as planned. Of course, this is arbitrary and could actually be every week for initiatives which are shorter in scope and duration.
When the strategy is realized through proper execution, it provides a great boost to the members of the organization. The authors say it this way,
"A strong outcome will inspire the best in people and raise the dialogue above tribal politics." (Page 206)
To borrow from the example of the flywheel1 that Jim Collins describes in his book, Good to Great, the tribe has built exciting momentum as they've worked hard to put their giant flywheel in motion and as the wheel begins to move faster and faster, people will and excitement builds; and when this happens all eyes are lifted upwards away from the politics of the lower stages and toward the exciting outcomes that can only be achieved when teams are working at stage 4 or 5.
Strategy Failure
As we noted at the beginning, strong outcomes are rare. Even more rare is the electrifying feeling that accompanies the combination of stage 4 tribal behavior and the strong outcomes of a well executed strategy. So what can be done to ensure that our organizations avoid some of the common causes of failure?
Certainly, the first half of the book provides a great discussion of the social dynamics in tribes operating at stages 1 to 3 which work like acid against our strategies and proposed outcomes. In addition to these dynamics, the authors argue in Chapter 11 that strategies often fail because of a lack of buy in by the tribe.
"Most strategies are based on an understanding of the external environment, not the highest aspirations of the tribe. As a result, even the best plans often fail because people aren't giving it their all." (Page 210)
This can happen for a number of reasons:
- Commitment level of the members of the tribe to the Values and Noble Cause are not what they need to be.
- Existing leadership, which may not be the same as tribal leadership2, may not recognize the delta between the stated goals of the organization and actual goals of the tribe.
- The commitment level of the leaders of the organization, who control the resources, may not match the commitment level of the tribe.
So, there may be a number of reasons why the tribe isn't able to give it their all.
In addition to these internal causes of failure, there are also external causes of strategy failure and ways to mitigate the risks of these types of failure. I started to read an interesting book related to this idea a few months back named the Strategy Paradox by Michael Raynor3.
Technology and Strategy
As organizations become more geographically dispersed, the role of technology is becoming increasingly more important in a couple of areas:
- Facilitating the maintenance of stage 4 community across a variety of geographic distances.
- Facilitating effective collaboration across a wide range of geographical distances.
- Managing the knowledge artifacts generated by the community while executing the tasks of the strategy.
Our goal at IT Crossing has been clarified over the past year as we've studied issues regarding how best to make use of recent changes in technology to help organizations develop engaging communities among their members. We've boiled our focus down to two simple outcomes. We strive to create solutions and develop products that help members of an organization connect and share.
What we've seen as we've studied and written about Tribal Leadership is that fostering a healthy community among tribal members is essential for executing successful strategies within the organization; and advancements in the area of community related technologies have been exciting over the past few years, especially in the area of open-source platforms. More on this to come as we continue to research and develop Member Crossing, our flagship community product that we are currently researching and developing on top of open-source technologies.
What about you and your organization? Are your strategies grounded in a community that is encouraged to actively share ideas related to their values and noble cause? Have you found tools or technologies that help facilitate the process of achieving the desired outcomes at all levels of your organization?
1
Jim Collins describes in Good to Great how important it is for a company or an organization to find their hedgehog principle, which is basically what they're good at, passionate about and which when focused on helps the organization achieve it's goals. To aid in discovery of an organizations hedgehog principle, Jim uses the following diagram to help identify the sweet spot of behaviors that will help to provide focus for members of the organization as they work together to achieve their outcomes.
Collins uses a great word picture to describe how important it is to stay focused on an organization's hedgehog principle. He has you imagine trying to turn a giant flywheel some 6 feet thick and some 30 feet in diameter. It's weight would be measured in the thousands of tons and trying to get this massive wheel turning is a task that many will simply ignore. That is until a small group of dedicated members put their mind and strength behind their efforts and set the wheel into motion. What happens all to often at this point is that other members of the organization may see the wheel turning and decide that it's actually going in the wrong direction. Committees are formed and personalities and politics get in the way and before you know it, the wheel has lost momentum, or even worse, members have to stop the wheel first before reversing direction.
On the other hand, an amazing thing happens when strategies are executed properly and momentum is allowed to build and this is where we tie in to the excitement that builds and the change of focus that occurs in teams operating at stage 4 or 5. Other team members see this momentum and they're attracted to the excitement of being part of something so focused and so noble as a giant wheel of steel moving faster and faster.
2
I found it interesting that the authors recognized that there may be two sets of leaders in your organization. The leaders of the organization which function in their official capacity and the tribal leaders, which may or may not have a title after their name which assigns any official levels of leadership. I've seen this to be problematic in organizations where a strong hierarchy exists and leaders are routinely assigned to leadership positions, especially in cases where the leadership transition takes months rather than days or weeks to complete. This is also becoming more of a concern to associations and non-profit organizations as the dynamics of governance are shifting to accommodate changing expectations. New ways of connecting and organizing and new social media enabled tools are empowering the natural tribal leaders to thrive outside of the normal confines and political structures of the traditional organization. In the social sector, you'll hear a lot about people attending unconferences and about ungovernance and what it means for associations and non-profit organizations.
Organizational leaders need to pay close attention to these shifts. Ignoring these changes will only result in a loss of the real, effective force behind the members of an organization and strategies will begin to fail for seemingly no reason at all.
One cause that I've seen for the large delta between the values of an organization's members and the stated values of the organization is the issue of the gender gap between those in positions of leadership in larger, well established organizations and the younger Millennial or X-Gen members who are seeking to become actively involved. I'm a member of the X-Gen, and even the difference between my generation and the Millennial generation is amazing. I had lunch a few weeks back with a friend who just graduated from college and I asked him about this very issue. His response was enlightening. He described how his generation has grown up using the Internet as a medium to connect and have fun and share. Because of this, there is the assumption that we can publish our thoughts on our blog and the whole world will hear us. And we get immediate feedback from our peers who are also highly connected and who also expect to be heard and respected for what we've contributed.
Technology is never an answer in and of itself to a human problem, but it can help and we'll get to that in a second.
3
The Strategy Paradox: Why committing to success leads to failure (and what to do about it)
, by Michael Raynor. I felt that I identified the gist of Raynor’s book about halfway through and I was running short of time, so I just skimmed the rest of it. I may return to it when I have the time. What I gathered was that because of the pace of change, sticking to a good strategy may actually be bad for your organization. Raynor’s suggestion is basically to hedge your strategies so you have at least some momentum accrued in different areas.