Culture is bigger, stronger and faster than strategy Micro-blog series
Here’s the thing about whiteboards and flipcharts. They don’t talk.
They also don’t resist, complain, gossip, defend, justify, work around, pout, argue, debate, or vote with their feet. Which is why whiteboards are a great place for strategy to be laid out.
But when you look at strategy on the whiteboard, it pretends like there aren’t people involved in the process. It pretends that pre-existing relationships won’t alter the flow, and that pre-existing conflict won’t create bottlenecks. All that great strategy up on the whiteboard also assumes that all the conversations involved in the implementation will be rational, considered, and forthright. It assumes that people behave logically.
Real people, the ones you come into contact with very quickly when you try to implement the strategy, are not rational beings. We’d like to pretend that they are rational (after all, we pretend that WE ARE) and that they will listen sensibly and do sensible things.
You can test the likelihood of that happening with a simple test:
Talk to 10 people today and ask them a simple yes or no question. Now, see how many of them just answer the actual question first time around.
You’ll be lucky if it’s one person.
For even more fun, listen to all the questions you hear throughout the day in the workplace, and keep score of how many times people just answer the actual question and how many times they respond to something that was never said.
Any strategy designed without the full engagement of the unspoken culture, and the well hidden hopes, concerns, and needs of everyone involved...well, it won’t make it past first contact.
