When I was actively involved in multiple strategic planning cycles with a variety of different companies each year, I would regularly remind them that the current state of affairs within the company, which got them to this point and that gave them permission and the ability to plan for the future, reflected the decisions made by people in leadership positions and the staff who were willing to execute those decisions when they were translated into a plan, five to seven years ago. In short, where we are today reflects the courage of those who came before us.
However, with the rise of organizational amnesia, we stumble into the land of planning, thinking that we are the only ones who have ever encountered problems of this magnitude and scope. We think we are the first to struggle and have to make hard choices. The impact of this line of thinking is that we create weak and non-authentic relationships, and ultimately weak and non-authentic teams. Because when we engage in strategic reflection, which will deeply influence future strategic planning, we come to understand that relationships based on trust also have the capacity to take certain strategic risks in order to improve performance. Strategic planning, and later strategic execution, is always based on the ability of all involved to find creative responses to the extraordinary and complex challenges before them.
Ron Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky in their book, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World (Harvard Business Press, 2009) write that adaptive leadership and adaptive planning involves four key activities. First, a leader must observe events and patterns around them, plus collect data and translate it into useful information. Second, they need to interpret what they are observing with the assistance of others. Third, they need to design interventions based on observations and interpretations to address the adaptive challenges they have identified. Fourth, they need to implement what they have designed. All four of these activities are very important.
However, there are two things missing from my vantage point and experience.
Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie in their article called “Making Dumb Groups Smarter” in the December 2014 issue of the Harvard Business Review writes “Many groups end up thinking that their ultimate convergence on a shared view was inevitable. Beware of that thought.” I would add that many leaders believe that they have the future all figured out before strategic planning has even begun.
Second, referencing back to the work of Heifetz, Grashow and Linsky on adaptive leadership, they write, “In the realm of adaptive leadership, you have to believe that your intervention is absolutely the right thing to do at the moment you commit to it. But at the same time, you need to remain open to the possibility that you are dead wrong.” This key point is often missed by so many leaders and so many leadership teams, and yet it is so important to their success.
When we take the time to reflect deeply on the three important questions I wrote about yesterday, we have the potential to understand that those who came before us made the best decisions they could with the tools and information they had. They tried to be creative, adaptive, and courageous in the face of complicated problems and complex environmental conditions. In essence, they did their best with what they had and where they were. And as a result, some days it was great, and other days they were “dead wrong.”
With this understanding, we must recognize that we will do likewise. We will be great, and we might completely miss the mark. Therefore, we need to humbly consider the aforementioned, three questions and seek honest and thoughtful responses to each one of them. And hopefully, with time and grace, we fall into the category of being great rather than be dead wrong.
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