How do you build the thing NOW that needs to run the show in the future, when the future, by definition, isn’t here yet?
Strategy is a glorified gap analysis.
They have that hill.
We want that hill.
Go get that hill.
Once we’ve got that hill, we’ll take the next one, in a series of specific and tangible results that are easy to measure in time and dollars. So far so good. If you are running an actual military operation, which you are probably not.
Your challenge is a softer one. Design and build the kind of team that already has the attributes you need, the flexibility, the innovation, the responsiveness, for conditions that you can only guess at. It’s an impossible task for most organizations to shift their culture first, and then have that new culture implement the change.
And, there is good news! Your culture doesn’t have to take a quantum leap into the future. It can actually evolve, and it can do so over time, embedding the skills of change, innovation, and transformation into it’s DNA, at each step in the process.
You’ll need 3 things first.
Noble Cause: something big enough, bold enough, and inclusive enough to capture both your current team and those who have not yet joined.
If someone asks you why your organization exists, and your answer doesn’t make them respond with genuine surprise and enthusiasm, then it is not yet a Noble Cause.
Clearly articulated and meaningful Values: based in real life stories that demonstrate it is a lived value as opposed to a conceptual one.
Everyone on the team should be able to relate a time in the company, or in life, where they made a tough choice or paid a price to uphold that value or one like it they can readily identify with. If you don’t have a story about when your value was tested, win or lose, then it isn’t a core value and you are not actually using it to make real life decisions.
A tangible way to articulate your Current Culture: this takes the form of surprising things that work about your culture, where the ingrained and unconscious responses under pressure produce great results.
And, equally, it contains the surprising and unpleasant things about the ingrained and unconscious behaviours that produce disastrous results when the heat is on. It’s the common elements, that almost no organization can name, which results in the “coulda, shoulda, woulda” elements of the debrief when performance lags or things go off the rails.
Culture is the reality, the good and the bad, of right now. And you can’t design the culture of the future until you articulate what is the existing culture of the present.
