One of my bread and butter is to help organisations develop their strategy, design an implementation roadmap to execute it and run the project until they can carry on by themselves. Along the way, I have accumulated a vast trove of real life experience not found in text books, and with enough time to reflect on them, I have been able to understand the principles and dynamics of what i observed. This series is to share what I have learned in my career about strategy setting with you. This is the first article in the series.
The question of where is the starting point in setting a strategy seems pretty much straightforward for most companies and management consultants. Most strategy setting sessions start with crafting out a vision and mission statement. (Definitions and methodologies for crafting such a statement abound but that is another article. I promise). Some consultants start one step earlier, by identifying corporate values, which I wholeheartedly agree is critical. As with anything that I do, I always start even earlier: with the question why. My starting point is always the objectives; why did the client want the strategy in the first place.
What is intention?
Clients tend to appoint consultants and project managers to execute an idea that they already have in their mind. That could rather different from their requirements or intentions. Often, the client has worked out for themselves what the problem statement is and did their own research on what the most appropriate solution would be. Once they have selected the solution that they preferred, consultants are called in to kick start the implementation.
I will be controversial in saying that that is not the intention: that is just their opinion of what they think will solve their problem. The intention is to solve the underlying problem that was the starting point of their thought process, not the stated solution that was the ending point of the thought process. So, I never just accept the requirements the client articulated. I often ask myself why the client asked for what they articulated. What is their background that led them to their preferred solution? Why did they used certain words and kept returning to particular ideas when articulating their requirements?
Problems with articulation
Were they adept at articulating in the first place? If anything, most entrepreneurs start off as technical people, doing what they know best with very simple business plans and basic management skills: you don't need much more at that stage. As the business develops, they acquire more of the skills but it will be always be difficult to keep up with all the demands of managing operations of ever growing complexity. Many never develop the articulation skills required to reach beyond the professional circles in which they sell and with whom they work.
And there is never enough time to read about the latest management techniques beyond the two or three paragraphs after the headlines. Often, jargon and presumed pre-existing knowledge become barriers to understanding. Occasionally, the hubris of founding a business can lead an otherwise humble person to have difficulty to acknowledge a lack of knowledge that they think a business leader ought to know. Doesn't help when their peers are spouting business buzz-words with seeming lucid understanding. Unfortunately, consultants sometimes take consultants-talk terms they hear from entrepreneurs who have only a passing familiarity with the concepts concerned, at the same understanding all consultants would have. There is many a slip between the clients' intention and the consultants' understanding.
I once had a client who was trying to tell me what he wanted in technical terms - much of which were terms with which he had only a cursory understanding. After a while, I surmised that the business was a matured business which he had built up with a young team, that he was really thinking about his legacy and I also realised that the target date he kept referring to also coincided with a landmark birthday. So, I asked him, "You mean: on your 60th birthday, you would like hand over to your team to run the company, while you sit back as the mentor-director, with a few favourite projects you will choose to get involved in." He looked at me with a broad grin and said "Yes, that is it!" relieved that it is so easy to describe his requirement.
Problems with thought process
It does not follow that just because a person is trained in one professional field, they have the same logic thought process needed to put together a management decision-making process. Somehow schools teach a very narrow range of skills and most of what they teach is not portable across professions - but that's another story.
For starters, most entrepreneurs are not well versed in crafting problem statements. And some consultants too, for that matter. The problem identified sometimes deal with only part of the problem - the part shouted by an affected staff with the loudest voice, often drowning out more critical problems quietly endured by less vocal staff elsewhere.
Also, the problem articulated often only deals with the symptoms and not the broader and deeper issues that gave rise to the symptoms in the first place. In one instance I came across, the solution to a lack of operational direction is not just to write an SOP for everyone to follow, but is to tackle a culture of non-team players working in silos. Writing the SOP solve one problem for now, until procedures needed to be redefined a few months after being rolled out because everyone interprets it in a way that suit them. But not tackling the more difficult and more fundamental culture issues, mean that many other fires are not identified or had to be dealt with individually in a never-ending cycle of problems emerging from the culture birthed them.
Armed with a simplistic problem statement, many entrepreneurs then call up vendors for solutions, or more accurately, call up one vendor for a proposal. Vendor selection processes often do not include identification of options, evaluation of approaches, working out selection criteria up front to minimise decision bias or allocation of different parts of the evaluation to different persons to limit personal bias. On more than one occasion, I dissuaded clients from upgrading to a more expensive (often, already selected) software, well beyond their needs, simply by calling in the existing vendor to provide additional training on an unfamiliar function that has been ignored and consequently forgotten.
That is why I often ask clients with regards to a software selected: did you buy or were you sold? One is an active role in pursuit of solving your problem, the other means you are just a consequence of a sales person chasing targets.
The emotional context
I guess it is important to describe the requirements in very personal terms and not in technical terms, because at that level, people seek self-esteem and self-actualisation needs, as long as the dollars and cents are taken care of. There is normally an emotional reason for whatever we do and we do good to know and understand the emotional aspects of decision-making. At one point, entrepreneurs seek to do things, at least in part, to fulfil an internal need and contentment that only attainment of long-pursued dreams or deep-seated values can bring.
That reminds me of a young man who was described to me at our first meeting how he wanted to put his company on a professional footing to ensure governance and risk management, etc were all in place. It seems he was a young fella who built up a business in a narrow business niche in quite a short time. He seems very sure of what he wants until I reminded him that the company existed before his his first child was born and so the company is his first-born. He was rather taken aback and at the end of the conversation he said to me pensively, "Yes, the company is my first-born." I gave him a different perspective that is alive with a beating heart and not just cold numbers on a spreadsheets, grids or charts.
I need to clarify that we do not necessarily to base decisions on emotions but understanding the emotions involved is primarily to understand the context within which the decision was made. Knowing what drives a person helps us throw light on the priorities that shape decisions of that person: where a decision-maker finds fulfilment sometimes dictates how I present factors for the decision. Sometimes it also tell me how a decision-maker's risk adversity has influenced their decisions: what fears born of prior experience distorted risk calculations and informs the way I present factors for decision-making.
So, what does a consultant do?
If you are someone satisfied to get paid for laying bricks rather than seeing the building of a cathedral as a way to point people to God, then fine, you do not need to look beyond the scope of work that the client signed. But if you are, like me, who is seeking to fulfil someone's deep personal aspiration, then you may have to dig deep into the person to see their intention. (For those who are not familiar with the story, let me retell it in a more relevant context. A visitor came by the building site and asked the workmen what they were doing. "Laying bricks" was the first answer; "Building a cathedral" was the second; "Pointing the way to God" was the third. The first workman knew the how; the second knew the what; the third knew the why: which one are you?)
My most fulfilling assignment was really a small supermarket, which was built up over a decade by a husband-and-wife team. It was very successful enterprise but the cost was that they had no life: no holiday, no me/us time, always tied to having to go into the supermarket every day. It was driven home once when they had to send their son off to a holiday with his auntie because they couldn't take time to go away. I set up a computer system for them that could supply them with the records remotely, enabling them to leave the supermarket in the care of a general manager and monitor it from wherever. They then took their first holiday in ten years. I pop by the little supermarket every time I visit the town and take great pride in hearing from the staff that their bosses don't come in anymore.
Ultimately, the question will be whether we are satisfied to deliver what the client signed off on paper and reassured ourselves that if the client misarticulated their requirements, we are protected. Or do we want to deliver what the client's heart is valiantly trying to scream out over the babble of management consulting jargon and buzzwords. I hope to always choose the heart over the contract.
The next article in this series deals with values and the group.
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