Strategy is Doing – Making Strategy Fun Again (Part 5)

 

Is Strategy the domain of the specialist, consultant and technocrat? Are general managers primarily receptors and vehicles of execution?  That seems to be the case in many organizations wherein highly trained & credentialed experts develop objectives and key results and hand them down to general managers to ‘execute’. Indeed, the last step in the corporate strategy flowchart is often ‘Execute’ – which I call ‘And Now Miracles Will Happen’.

The downsides are palpable:

·       Strategies tend to be shallow, brittle, and impractical.

·       Reflection & Action are disconnected; the PDCA cycle is shattered.

·       We lose the invaluable practical learning, and tacti knowledge which Aristotle called ‘Phronesis.’

·       General managers fail to deepen their strategy & problem-solving skills.

·       Front line morale suffers. (“Why are they asking us to do dumb things?”)

This is a core weaknesses of the popular OKR process, which often resembles1950’s style Management by Objectives.

Strategy is the Continual Interplay Between Reflection and Action

In fact, Strategy is the domain of the practitioner, line leader, and general manager. Highfalutin degrees are not a prerequisite and can be a liability. Strategy entails Phronesis, an ancient Greek concept which has been defined as ‘practical wisdom’, ‘prudence’, or ‘common sense’. Aristotle described Phronesis as the happy balance between knowing what to do – and knowing how to do it.

Strategy is the domain of the general manager who continually cycles between reflection and action, sees the concrete results of a given hypothesis, how well it was executed, and why is produced the observed results. Such a person knows how to act effectively in concrete, real-life situations, how to motivate a team, and how to harvest and apply hard-won knowledge.

The ‘W’ Model

We owe the ‘W’ model to the great Shoji Shiba (still going strong at 93) and it remains an elegant expression of Strategy deployment - and Phronesis. The W model animates effective strategy deployment systems and builds strong practitioners. ‘W thinking’ is difficult to establish and even harder to sustain. My practice entails teaching senior leaders the supporting mindsets and skillsets.

My practice entails teaching senior leaders the supporting mindsets and skillsets - through doing. We develop & deploy hypotheses together and observe the results together. Then we keep asking why something worked, or not, till we've distilled something real & true.

The continuous interplay between Reflection & Action is most dramatic when we’re trying to ignite new Growth by creating new offerings, new markets and hopefully new businesses. Here, speed and accelerated learning are of the essence. My background in OpEx/Lean has proven enormously useful in grounding our Sprints in fundamentals like visual management, standardized work and level loading. A key enabler is insisting that team members ‘toss the ball’ back so that we connect Reflection & Action and can harvest the associated learning.

That, and building the required ‘nudges’ into our management system.

 Best wishes,

Pascal Dennis         E: pascal.dennis@leansystems.org