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Distillations in this newsletter: Why strategy best practices need practising … and how to do so; Why meetings need a constructive devil’s advocate; The future of work in 2025
STRATEGY DISTILLED:
A monthly concoction of insight, learning and things you might have missed for anyone who works on strategy, works with strategy or just loves strategy.
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This month …
- Why strategy best practices need practising … and how to do so
- Strategy snippets you may have missed: Why Meetings Need a Constructive Devil’s Advocate; The Future of Work in 2025.
If you enjoy reading this newsletter, don’t forget to forward it to friends or colleagues who might also find it of interest.
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Why strategy best practices need practising … and how to do so
Thanks to Tim Casasola for prompting this one. Back in 2018, he wrote a post titled Best Practices Are Killing Your Company: And what the most successful leaders and organizations do instead. Then, earlier this week, he had a dramatic change-of-mind, as he described in I was wrong about best practices killing your company: Best Practices are actually great.
His problem with best practices, back in 2018 were these:
- Best practices are what the best-of-the-best organisations do. By the time most organisations have adopted this as best-practice, the best-of-the-best will have moved on. Adopting best practices is therefore just chasing the latest fad.
- Seeking to understand the principles behind the practice (the why) is a better approach than figuring out how to implement the practice (the how).
His renewed faith in best practices this week was based on this:
- Best practices are great for companies embarking on new ways of working (his example is ‘working cross-functionally, reflectively, and collaboratively’).
- “… with teams who are brand new to working in a different way, it’s best for them to start practicing a practice that’s… good enough.”
- “… later when your team is humming […] examining why it’s a best practice is good work too [but] right now […] just start practicing.”
I remember reading his first post when it came out and recall being puzzled by it. I’ve been a big fan of best practices for over 30 years (my book on Product Design and my Strategy Manual are both unashamedly proposing best practices for their respective disciplines), but it had never crossed my mind that best practices were what the best-of-the-best companies do. To me best practices were always the set of principles that underpinned structured, rigorous, tried-and-tested ways of attaining a defined outcome. Are they fixed and inflexible, as best practices are often criticised for? No, of course not; they are a set of principles that need to be adapted to suit the needs of specific organisations. Could they help tackle complex or even wicked organisational challenges? Of course they could. Best practices should never lead to pre-determined outcomes – they should be adaptive and should, where appropriate, lead to hypothetical outcomes (maybe we should test this) rather than imperative ones (this is the precise destination we should head for).
So, his second post is one I’m much happier with … although it does pose a bit of a conundrum for my way of thinking. Tim advocates best practices because they can be put into practice. This suggests that Tim’s idea of best practice is something that can be implemented in a plug-and-play kind of way (as an illustration he discusses teaching novice climbers a best practice way to belay – the technique used to control your climbing partner’s fall when climbing on a rope). My versions of best-practices aren’t designed to plug-and-play in this way. They are much more ways-of-thinking about an issue than ways-of-doing-it. My best practices are principles that need to be interpreted and applied before they can be put into practice. This may simply be a difference in semantics or possibly in our approaches to consultancy work. I will always operationalise my proposed best practices by weaving them as tightly as possible into existing ways of working. So, for example, I’m a strong advocate of starting all new strategy development projects with a process of ‘strategy scoping’: Why is a new strategy needed? Is there a ‘burning platform’ that needs to be resolved in the new strategy? What work would need to be done to develop this new strategy? Can we devise some success criteria by which we could evaluate the fitness-for-purpose of the new strategy, once drafted? These are all important questions to ask at the beginning of strategy development and, therefore, strategy scoping is an aspect of best practice that I believe all strategists should undertake. But you cannot just start scoping your strategy in a vacuum. The scoping process may need to be approved before commencing (by the Board?). Membership of the group doing the strategy scoping needs to be agreed. The status of its conclusions needs to be agreed (are they binding? who has the authority to change them?). In other words, strategy scoping, even if it is a totally new type of process for the organisation, needs to be woven, as far as possible into established ways of working.
Where I do enthusiastically agree with Tim is in the importance of practising (in the sense of rehearsing) new best practices. New ways of working don’t suddenly magic themselves into perfect existence within organisations. They need to be embedded. This requires new ways of sensing and sense-making, new ways of thinking, new ways of communicating, new ways of decision-making and new ways of adopting and governing those decisions. All of which takes time and all of which needs practice: time, to get everyone involved up to speed and working in new but still mutually compatible ways; practice, so everyone can get it a bit wrong and learn how to refine their approaches.
How, then, should we, as strategy professionals, approach best practices? Firstly, embrace them. Acknowledge that there are better ways and worse ways to devise strategy, to get strategy adopted and to govern strategy. Define clearly which ways your organisation believes are the best. Put in place training and development for new managers and leaders so that they get the benefit of the organisational learnings, so far, on how to do strategy well. The trickiest bit, that organisations often don’t do so well, is to provide explicit opportunities for a wide range of people to practise (do repeatedly and refine as you do so) strategy best practices. The reason this is tricky is that many organisations think they only do strategy once every three or five years, when they develop a new strategy. In fact, they are doing strategy all the time. They are using the over-arching organisational/corporate strategy to inform and guide the development of functional or departmental strategies. They are tracking the progress and impact of strategy and making adjustments to strategic plans. And, every month, people across the organisation are making big important decisions that really ought to derive from strategy.
The key is to find ways to undertake strategy-related processes repeatedly to:
- build strong habits in the individuals involved;
- facilitate the right kind of collaborative processes between individuals;
- build an organisational culture that has best-practice strategy processes embedded within it.
Start by identifying big high-impact, high-complexity decisions that are being taken periodically by the organisation and acknowledge that they are strategic in their scope, even if they are not part of any formal strategy. Then make sure such decisions are always managed using best-practice strategic processes. It was my focus on this type of decisions that set me off writing my new book on AI-augmented decision-making that I announced last month.
The other obvious work that can be done using best-practice strategic processes is reviewing and revising strategic plans (see The Separation Model of Strategy). These reviews ought to happen throughout the lifespan of the strategy and ought to be dealt with using similar best-practice rigour to strategy development.
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Strategy snippets you may have missed
Why Meetings Need a Constructive Devil’s Advocate
Published last week in MIT Sloan Management Review, Ogbonnaya et al present the results of research showing that when one person takes on the role of testing assumptions and evaluating ideas in meetings, it leads to better-considered next steps and fewer follow-up discussions. Sounds like a must-have for every strategy meeting!
The Future of Work in 2025
A new report from Gartner (register to download full report) raises some interesting strategic provocations:
- The expertise shortage. In 2025, the largest-ever proportion of the workforce is reaching retirement age in multiple countries and organisations are simply not developing expertise at replacement levels.
- AI by popular demand. Whilst we are inundated with stories of AI taking over human work and threatening jobs, it might be easy to overlook reasons for employees to want more AI in their working lives. Gartner’s research reveals growing appeal (amongst staff) for being performance managed by a bot (e.g. 57% of employees believe humans are more biased than AI).
- DEI initiatives for performance benefits. Acknowledging the shifting status of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives within some organisations (and nations!), Gartner suggests that DEI achievements may be measured in terms of employee engagement and the impact of diversity on innovation success, rather than simply social good.
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We, at Goal Atlas, work as strategy facilitators.
We help you develop, implement and measure the progress and impact of your strategy in ways that work for you.
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If you enjoyed reading this newsletter, don’t forget to forward it to friends or colleagues who might also find it of interest.
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