This is part 3 of “Teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea”, a series on different ways to align an organisation. You will find the part 1 of the series here and part 2 here
- In the first part we looked at an organization that is drifting without clear direction, led by the customers’ requests.
- In the second part we looked at command and control management style, where the management hires mercenaries to execute their orders.
In this third part we recognize the need for something to pull people in the same direction, a strategy. But what is intended to be a strategy, is not quite there yet.
Open strategy
Situation: Some mission/vision, a strategy that is not exclusive of anything
One of the principal point of the strategy is to give you a mid term direction, by helping the employees realize what NOT to focus on. Like restricting your field of view, but not telling you what to look at.
If the strategy is not doing that, then everything is good to go for, it implements the strategy.
In this strategy, Engineers thrive. After all, what engineers love to do is build things, and now they are given an unlimited credit card to build whatever they want.
Successes:
Employees can justify every wild ideas through the strategy. Bonus points if it’s somewhat related to the mission/vision or values. As an employee, you are having a tremendous boost in your learning career because your pet projects are now your main work!
Employees stay for a while to learn new skills. Happiness levels are very decent. There are great new solutions coming out that no one had ever throught about. They may even change the way the whole company works.
You don’t ever have to measure the success of your strategy. If anyone ever ask, just tell them that you are doing everything you can to reach it.
Difficulties:
Your business is not going anywhere. Everyone is running in different directions, following different callings.
Your customers are unhappy because they don’t see much growth on the product. Every release has a bunch of things that they are not sure what to do with. They end up believing that you don’t care about them.
Once the new employees have learned some skills they will go use them somewhere else, where they feel they can have an impact. Or they will stay to keep working on their pet projects, as long as no one bothers them too much.
For every revolutionary new solutions, there are many random low use ones that add a significant tech debt. And low use is even worse that no use, as now you need to maintain it, meaning that the longer you stay in that mode, the more your employees will do maintenance rather than new ideas.
One last difficulty with this model is that getting anything significant deployed is hard. Unless a leader unites people under the banner of one initiative, the effort a person can provide is limited, thus limiting what can be done.
Possible ways to improve:
Propose refining the strategy to be more specific on what is really needed to be reached in the 3-5 year period. Ensure that the new strategy makes it clear what is NOT to be done. For example, rather than “grow our business”, be more specific and have “Conquer the UK market”. Focusing on a specific market limits possibilities and directs efforts toward finding solutions suitable for that particular environment.
Another mitigation would be to get a group of people to decide what to focus, so building an actual strategy inside the “strategy”. It works for a while but as soon as you need to interact with someone outside that box, people will not agree with what you aim for and might even end up fighting you. At least you’ll have a small safety haven where things are clearer.
Employee experience:
“I don’t know what others are working on; I focus on my stuff.”
Read more
“Many Strategies Fail Because They’re Not Actually Strategies “ by Freek Vermeulen
Surprisingly, this works at Valve
In the next post: We look at Objective and Key Results (OKRs) used instead of a strategy —