I Wouldn’t Start From Here

There’s an old story in Ireland about a couple who stop to ask for directions down in the country. The old man in the flat cap hears them out, sucks the air through his teeth and says “Jaysus, I wouldn’t start from here if I was you.”

When we are facing the problems, challenges or big opportunities in our organisations, it’s tempting to feel the same. But we always have to start from where we are.

But do we always know where we are? Without the friendly, helpful farmer, the first thing we would need to do to find our way is to locate ourselves on the map. For organisations — for leaders inside organisations — this is easier said than done.

You might speak to any number of experts, who will then reframe the problem and play it back to you in the frameworks and terms through which they see the world. That might be communications advice. It might be strategic principles. It might be recommendations on the operating model. It might be focused on leadership, culture, and the trust that needs to exist for successful change. All of these different advisers, academics or practitioners will, legitimately, say: nothing can happen unless we get this right.

As the leader who needs to integrate all of that, however, that doesn’t necessarily help. In reality, any significant, ambitious programme of change is going to involve all of these dimensions. Leaders need to integrate, prioritise, sequence and orchestrate actions across all these domains.

The challenge, of course, is that organisational self-awareness — just like personal self-awareness — is not always 100%. And this can lead to recurring problems. There may be collective blind spots in what is collectively understood, and there are also collective biases in how problems are diagnosed. This is not necessarily a reflection on the intelligence or understanding of the individual leaders. But it is expressed in how the organisation, as an organisation, responds to challenges and pressures.

This is an important point to underline. Any given individual may be operating within different organisational systems that have very different biases and blind spots — and the individual might often feel frustration that the company they work for can’t quite do the very simple, basic things that the volunteer sports organisation they’re involved with can, or vice versa. These are collective patterns. They evolved through time, and they persist even when the individual actors are switched in and out.

The result is organisation-level biases or blind spots. When faced with change — whether through rapid growth, international expansion or new external opportunities and threats — they may be habitually over-reliant on a limited set of levers to prepare for and drive change. If they think they might need external support, they might repeatedly prefer one type of support.

For example, a couple of the more common patterns, slightly exaggerated for effect (but not much in some cases):

The market has shifted, new entrants and new value pools are impacting core market dynamics. It often seems obvious: we need a new strategy. They call in the strategy consultants. But sometimes when you’re going through that process, you start to doubt whether a new strategy is going to cut it (and privately, the consultants too). There have been several new strategies over the last several years, and none of them stuck. Why is that? In many cases, it wasn’t because the strategies were bad. It was because people didn’t buy into them. They weren’t included as part of the strategy development — or not in a way they believed. There’s a fundamental disconnect between the words of leadership and its actions, and as a result people go through the motions, say the right words, write the right reports… but things don’t change.

Another example. An organisation is experiencing culture challenges or leadership challenges, so they call in the organisational development or leadership development practices. But when you break down the root of the problem, it’s not ill-intentioned people, or people lacking capability, or even people lacking management or leadership skills. In many cases, what you see is a lack of basic operational hygiene: no definition of what good looks like, no agreement on what constitutes done at the end of a project, or the end of a shift.

This is not just an implementation gap. This fragmented approach is also reflected in academic literature, where these are treated as significantly different areas of study — each their own research domain with their own conceptual heritage, frameworks and evidence base.

Many professional services leaders I have spoken to recognise this: it happens all the time. Called in for one problem, what gradually reveals itself is that it is just part of a bigger challenge.

Operational leaders within organisations know this to be true as well. It’s part of the reason why externally supported initiatives must be cross-functional — operational leaders and practitioners know that there is no silver bullet. Anything the strategy team, or the people and culture team, or the COO is driving will have limited impact by itself.

When organisations seek external help, in many cases — not being aware of this — the type of help they seek may be driven by the very biases or blind spots that are causing the issues in the first place. The organisation keeps trying to create a new strategy, or keeps wanting to push on operational clarity, or keeps pushing on leadership development. Or the organisation lurches from one to another over successive years: we tried that — let’s give Johnny’s idea a go. And it still doesn’t work.

Over the years as I have sat in meeting rooms and board rooms listening to plans, objectives and recommendations for achieving big, hairy goals, I have often been reminded of the friendly farmer with a twinkle in his eye.

I hear lots of questions and statements about what we should do, where we should go, what it should look like, what success looks like… Identify the destination, pull your favourite lever. Time for a new strategy.

So these questions are now pretty much lodged in my head. The last time your organisation took on major change, did it reach for the right levers? How do you know?