Culture is bigger, stronger and faster than strategy Micro-blog series
- How long does it take you and your team around a board table with how many flipcharts to come up with one REALLY GOOD idea and then plan out how to make it work?
- And how long does it take to screw the plan up and get way off course? One-tenth of the amount of time? One-hundredth? One-thousandth?
That’s because your culture is the equivalent of your organizational reflexes. Gut feel. Muscle memory. Catch whatever is thrown.
So what if you used that to your advantage. What if you figured out the very first step of the plan, and ONLY the first step, and then tested it to see how it interacts with your ingrained cultural responses. And then you could expand and accelerate all the parts of that which work, and pour all the saved-up brain power into figuring out Step 2 after you had tested Step 1.
- So what if you used that to your advantage?
- What if you stopped spending so much time perfecting the entire plan, which if snagged on the first step puts the rest of the dominoes in your plan at risk?
- What if you just figured out the very first few steps of the plan, and ONLY the first steps, and then tested it to see how it interacts with your ingrained cultural?
And then you could expand and accelerate all the parts of that which work, and pour all the saved-up brain power into figuring out Step 2 after you had tested Step 1.
And if it fails, then you just save yourself a whole lot of time and can begin to address the real issue anyway, the culture, not the strategy.
Of course, that means you wouldn’t have a clever master plan to show the boss, the team, the stakeholders to prove how smart you are. And you might just live in a culture where showing how smart you are is the reflex over and above a quick string of failures to just figure out what works and get it done.
Of course, that means you wouldn’t have a clever master plan to show the boss, the team, the stakeholders to prove how smart you are. And you might just live in a culture where showing how smart you are is the reflex over and above a quick string of failures to just figure out what works and get it done.
Try, fail, recalibrate works a lot better than making logical steps… in a logical sequence, that will then be implemented on human beings, who are not rational during change.
