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May 23, 2010

The Seven Ways that People Don't Listen

We know that strategy is essentially a proposal. All strategy says, "Let's try it this way..." -- or it says nothing at all.

But one of the most understated things about strategy is that it is more a response than it is anything else. The value of a strategy is not primarily in the impact that it ultimately has. Instead, a strategy takes its basic value from the problem that it wants to solve. In most instances, if the problem is very important, then the strategy that responds to it will be important.

However, what many people, including practitioners, fail to attend to is that a strategy's being important does not cause the strategy to be a good one, nor does it prevent the strategy from being a bad one.

That fact is why the quality of the strategy must have high priority, and why making strategy must prevail over the culture of execution. In too many cases, practitioners trip over another conceptual stumbling block, which is that execution does not make an important strategy good. Instead, a good strategy enables execution to be effective.

The most prominent dimensions of a good strategy are the following:
- Relevance
- Logic
- Credibility
- Visibility
- Urgency
- Distinction
- Change

What practitioners may discover, to varying degrees of surprise, is that the list above is a good predicter of whether execution is likely to result in effective outcomes. Even more importantly, they may discover the reasons why an existing strategy may be unusable or failing. In general, any point in the list makes sense only if the point preceding it is in good stead.

The overall single reason why a strategy may be structurally predisposed to fail is that the chain of dependencies inherent in the above list can be broken at any point by a failure of stakeholders to "buy in" at that point. What is even more surprising to presenters of strategies is that such "buy in" failures are not due nearly so often to rejection as they are to indifference.

The cult of execution holds that indifference can be pushed out of the equation by performance incentives. This poses the situation that a key participant need not worry about why assignments matter if they are well rewarded for being carried out successfully. These "rewarding" outputs are then advertised as "priorities", and managers are deployed to enforce priorities and to maintain a balance of their alignment amongst the complexity of their concurrent demands. This is exactly why metrics dominate management. Management then tends towards the idea of "best practices" -- the patterns associated with manageable high performance. But this is fundamentally different from strategy.

Let's turn back to the essentials of strategy and look at how indifference first appears. The most important notes to make are about why people decide to not buy in -- which takes place mainly by their choosing to not listen. As opposed to merely hearing, listening requires that the person absorb, interpret and represent the offered idea in their own mind. This is not the same thing as acceptance; instead it is the same as "realization", which for that person allows the idea to become the basis of their follow-on action. Otherwise the strategy remains an external fiction: someone else's story. In noting this, we also have to remember that typically, with strategy, exposure is not a universal experience. Different people need to listen at one or more different points in the chain of dependency:

- Relevance: how do we know that the problem being tackled is the right one? This may start out with identifying what the problem is really pointing at -- namely, a need. The primary needs are innovation (evolution), preservation (growth and health), and recovery (healing).

- Logic: what plausible mechanism is readily apparent to address the need given the most plausible disruptive risks or inhibitors to that mechanism?

- Credibility: who is the source, and presenter, of the case for the need and the logic? What is the agenda of that source?

- Visibility: what modes of validation-on-demand are available for the participants approached with the presumed relevance, logic and credibility?

- Urgency: why is the opportunity for the presumably required effort (not the desired outcome) more available now than it is later?

- Distinction: what is it about doing this with the designated parties that makes the effort as likely to succeed as competing strategies?

- Change: how do I know I will wind up better off than I am now?

Experience shows that strategies are often undermined or aborted due to such things as competing ideas, turf wars, and under-resourcing. That is, that actual design of operations indicated by the strategy cannot be fully completed, communicated, and subscribed. This general picture of resistance or disconnect suggests the scope of challenges to any strategy. But the picture should be much more specific; and again the matter is not so much one of rejection as it is a failure of the strategy's proposition to overcome the inertia of the present.

Given the specific dimensions listed above, here are the associated ways that people are predisposed to not listen. The idea that a strategy has high quality is all about the way that the strategy predictively addresses these issues:

- Relevance: not aware of this need's primacy over other possible or identifiable needs
- Logic: don't understand the mechanism
- Credibility: lack of trust
- Visibility: limitation of information access
- Urgency: risk to current commitments
- Distinction: appearance of being excluded
- Change: fear of loss

Given those issues, it is apparent that the most important things to materialize for substantiating the strategy at the participant level are models, education and proof -- none of which are the domain or responsibility of execution.

Without end-to-end substantiation, the interdependencies within the proposed strategy are not integrated, and this in turn means that the organization available to execute the strategy is either missing, logically misaligned or inherently deficient -- in other words, the engineering of the strategy is suffering from classic flaws of omission, errors or defects.

The pressure on managers and executives to deliver "performance" can often provoke them to "re-organize" somewhat ruthlessly as a way to "enable" a strategy. This is not uncommon as a business practice, and none of the above argument is intended to claim that it should or should not be done. Instead, the takeaway from the above is more importantly an awareness that aggressive management is not a substitute for actual strategy, and that the purpose of strategy is to create a basis for effectiveness, not to to create results.

Strategy designs operations; execution conducts them. As a further caution, it must be pointed out as well, though, that strategy is not static; as it is fundamentally responsive and is a design discipline, strategy must be dynamic and itself must be managed for real-time quality -- an ongoing process, not just a product.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at May 23, 2010 9:20 AM

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