GUEST POST from Matthew E May

On a recent visit to a former client’s workplace I noticed a poster entitled “I’m Not Changing!” I’d seen it elsewhere, and I’m sure you’ve seen it as well, or something like it. This time it gave me pause, perhaps because we’re now starting the second half of the year, and calendar milestones tend to trigger the “fresh start” effect. We stop, take a breath, reflect, and start anew.

So this time, I started thinking about change, and how change at any level, be it personal or professional, is always difficult. It’s the subject of countless books and articles, including my own, including this one.

I’ve been in the change business now for well over 25 years. Every year I seem to collect yet another reason, however nuanced, for why we, and our businesses, have such a tough time changing. Resistance and pushback come in many different flavors, but I have heard enough now to be able to catalogue them.

So…

Here are top twenty reasons you and/or your company won’t change.

1. Fear

We have an innate fear of the unknown. “I’m afraid of what will happen.”

2. Myopia

We can’t see that change is in our broader self-interest. “This won’t help us.”

3. Selfishness

Unless change immediately pays off for us, we’ll resist it. “What’s in it for me?”

4. Homeostasis

Equilibrium is more comfortable, change is uncomfortable. “I’ll feel better when things are normal.”

5. Ego

Those with power have to admit they’ve been wrong. “I feel I’ve positioned us well for the future.”

6. Sleepwalking

Too many people live unexamined lives. “I just don’t get it.”

7. Lack of confidence

Change threatens our self-worth. “This will reveal the true me.”

8. Timing

Certain preconditions have to be met for change to occur. “I’ll change when the time is right.”

9. Human nature

We are naturally self-centered, and change requires some selflessness. “Others will benefit more than me.”

10. Inertia

A body in motion takes considerable force to alter course. “We’re already down another path.”

11. Short-term thinking

People have difficulty seeing and supporting long term visions. “I can’t see that happening.”

12. Perversity

People perceive only the opposite or downside outcomes of the change goal. “That’ll make things worse.”

13. Complacency

We like the path of least resistance, we’re not natural maximizers or optimizers. “I’m satisfied with the ways things are.”

14. No constituency

The power base of the status quo is greater than that of those trying to bring about change. “There’s no critical mass behind us.”

15. Groupthink

Social conformity limits our thinking. “What does the group want to do?”

16. Short selling

Perceived lack of knowledge, skills, tools and experience. “We’ve never done this; we don’t know how to do this.”

17. Exceptionalism

People can’t see the situation objectively. “That may work elsewhere, but we’re different.”

18. Futility

Change is seen as superficial, not worth the effort. “Why go through so much pain for so little gain?”

19. Cynicism

People distrust the intentions, motivations, or track record of change. “Here we go again.”

20. Future shock

Grand scale change makes people hunker down, sensing they may not be able to adapt. “I smell disaster.”

Conclusion

Have you or your company fallen prey to one or more of these in some respect? I know I have. And that’s good news, because simply recognizing self-censoring or self-defeating responses like those above is a great first step.

If like me you view July as a chance to re-evaluate, reboot and rethink goals and directions for yourself and your company, you might want to keep an eye out for when (because they will!) resistance and pushback disguised as one or more of these twenty reasons show themselves.

And when that happens, perish the thought.

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

For many people, weekends present a chance to take a break from the rigors of work, relax and rejuvenate. A recent study suggests that spending that break in a specific way may result in a few positive side effects that will boost your performance when you resume your daily routine; namely, better creativity, insight, and problem solving.

Researchers at the University of Kansas and the University of Utah have discovered that getting out in nature disconnected from electronic devices can lead to a 50 percent improvement on a creativity test. The study involved nearly 60 people taking multi-day wilderness hiking trips in four different states. No electronic devices were allowed on the trips.

One group took a 10-item creativity test the morning before they began their backpacking trip, and another group took the test a few days later, at the end of the hike. The results: people who had been backpacking several days got an average of 6.08 of the 10 questions correct, compared with an average score of 4.14 for people who had not yet begun a backpacking trip.

The researchers decided on a decades-old test known as the Remote Associates Test, which is a standard measuring tool for creative thinking and problem-solving. These abilities are believed to arise in the same prefrontal cortex area of the brain that is overtaxed buy constant demands on our attention in our technological environment.

Here’s how it works. Participants get 10 sets of three words. For each set they must come up with a fourth word that is tied to the other three. For example, an answer to same, tennis, and head might be match (because a match is the same, tennis match and match head). Unlike other studies, where subjects were tested in labs after brief periods outdoors, “the current study is unique in that participants were exposed to nature over a sustained period and they were still in that natural setting during testing,” the researchers write.

“We show that four days of immersion in nature, and the corresponding disconnection from multimedia and technology, increases performance on a creativity, problem-solving task by a full 50 percent,” the researchers conclude. However, they note that their study was not designed to “determine if the effects are due to an increased exposure to nature, a decreased exposure to technology or the combined influence of these two factors.”

The researchers cited earlier studies indicating that children today spend only 15 to 25 minutes daily in outdoor play and sports, that nature-based recreation has declined for 30 years, and that the average 8- to 18-year-old spends more than 7.5 hours a day using media such as TV, cell phones and computers.

Our modern society is filled with sudden events — sirens, horns, ringing phones, alarms, television — that hijack attention. A natural environment, though, is associated with gentle, soft fascination, allowing your attention system to replenish.

Do you need to spend your entire long weekend in the wilderness without your smart phone? Probably not.

Jonathan Schooler, a researcher at University of California, Santa Barbara, pioneered the study of daydreaming and mind wandering. He’s shown that people who take short daydreaming walks score higher on creativity tests. Schooler himself takes a dedicated daydreaming walk every day on a beautiful bluff along the Pacific, just north of Santa Barbara.

Albert Einstein once wrote that, “creativity is the residue of time wasted.” But it’s how you waste your time that really matters.

So the one thing to do this weekend to boost your creative powers is simply this: get outdoors and talk a walk in nature, unplugged.

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

Making difficult changes is easier when you follow four simple steps

Change is something everyone grapples with — whether it’s kicking a bad habit, coming up with new and original ideas, shifting a business focus, changing behaviors, changing company culture, or trying to change the world. Certainly the ability to create or manage change is a key issue for every business, because if you can’t get out in front of it, and even lead it, it may not be long before you’re at the back of the pack.

The question, of course, is how?

The answer begins with recognizing that change at any level requires at least some dose of refreshing and resetting the brain. The good news is that neuroscience now confirms that you can effectively and sustainably do just that with a few proven steps that center on thinking, because when you change the way you think, you actually (chemically) change the connections in your brain.

Pointing the way is a successful non-drug behavior therapy developed by neuropsychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz working with the UCLA School of Medicine for patients suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), which is perhaps the most locked up form of behavior.

The method centers on a mindful thinking approach and entails four basic steps that result in a reset brain and changed behavior.

1. Relabel

The first step is to relabel a given thought, feeling, or behavior as something else. An unwanted thought could be relabeled “false message” or “brain glitch.” This amounts to training yourself to clearly recognize and identify what is real and what isn’t, refusing to be tricked by your own thoughts. You step back and say, “This is just my brain playing games on me.”

2. Reattribute

The second step answers the question, “Why do these thoughts coming back?” The answer is that the brain is misfiring, stuck in gear, creating mental noise, and sending false messages. In other words, if you understand why you’re getting those old thoughts, eventually you’ll be able to say, “Oh, that’s just a brain glitch.”
That raises the natural next question: What can you do about it?

Oh, that’s just a brain glitch.

3. Refocus

The third step is where the toughest work is, because it’s where behavior actually changes. You have to do another behavior instead of the old one.

Having recognized the problem for what it is and why it’s occurring, you now have to replace the old behavior with new things to do–positive, desirable things, things you enjoy doing and can do consistently every time. This is where the change in brain chemistry occurs, because you are creating new patterns, new mindsets. By refusing to be misled by the old messages, by understanding they aren’t what they tell you they are, your mind is now the one in charge of your brain.

This is basically like shifting the gears of your car manually–your automatic transmission isn’t working, so you have to manually override it. The more you do it, the smoother the shifting becomes, eventually refurbishing the entire gearbox.

Like most other things, the more you practice, the more easy and natural it becomes.

4. Revalue

It all comes together in the fourth step, which is the natural outcome of the first three. With a consistent way to replace the old behavior with the new, you begin to see old patterns as simple distractions. You devalue them as being completely worthless. Eventually the old thoughts begin to fade in intensity, the brain works better, and you no longer feel the tug of that pesky habit.

If these four steps are effective in rewiring and resetting the brain of an OCD sufferer, think what they can do to help you lead whatever change or win whatever challenge you may be facing.

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

Process improvers the world over rally around root cause analysis as if it were the Holy Grail of all things organizational. But is it?

Understanding the root cause of a problem certainly makes sense in the context of a present day situation carrying the potential for a correct answer or solution. In the process improvement world, problems center on reducing some form of excess, which comes in several traditional flavors…all of which center on something not working as well as it should be in a perfect world.

But the one critical place in business where root cause analysis has no real place is in strategy formulation.

I’m sure I’ll be taken to task on this by the lean/kaizen/six sigma crowd, but bear with me, because I’ve witnessed repeated attempts to apply root cause analysis to strategy, only to be met with derailment and eventual failure.

The difference between a fix for an existing process or pain point and a set of choices about the future is night and day. Process problems are generally focused inward on activities you presently control. Strategic problems are generally focused outward on the future, and forces you cannot control. In process improvement, you’re pursuing perfection. In strategy formulation, there’s no such thing as a perfect strategy, so you couldn’t pursue one even if you wanted to.

If I own a traditional taxi or limo company, for example, I don’t need to know specifically why Uber entered my market, only that they did, and that my market share is dwindling and my growth and profitability is eroding.

Looked at another way, all strategic problems boil down to a single root cause: customers are finding superior value elsewhere, from a competing offer.

This may seem blazingly obvious. But that doesn’t seem to deter organizations (and their consultants) from applying traditional problem solving to strategy development, spiraling ever downward in an endless series of “why?” questions. The result is an emphasis on drafting a perfect plan and a futile attempt to craft a detailed articulation of the perfect future for the company.

It’s unnecessary, mostly irrelevant, and doesn’t work.

DON’T SOLVE, REFRAME

Let’s remember what strategy is: a set of choices that enable an organization to win with its customers and against its competition. Those choices uniquely position the company to deliver a superior value equation relative to the other players in the space, and set the stage for effective action.

In strategy, there are no correct or absolute answers, because you’re dealing with the future. There’s simply no possible way to eliminate the myriad uncertainties around market forces, competitive reaction and customer response, no matter how much detailed planning and in-depth analysis you do.

Formulating a winning strategy is all about increasing your odds of success by making intelligent bets, in the form of integrated choices.

The most effective way to go about doing that is not to “root cause” the problem, but reframe it as a few mutually independent, high-level options that would make the problem go away. You then use those as the springboard to generate multiple possibilities for more specifically where you could play and how you could win. You select the most compelling possibilities, and develop them into robust set of choices supported by capabilities and systems.

Finally, you determine the conditions under which those choices would be good ones, teasing out the assumptions that could be barriers to success, crafting experiments to test the them, and analyzing the results. All in an effort to raise your level of confidence in your choices. (I’ve detailed this process here.)

In other words, analysis comes at the end, not the beginning. So, when it comes to strategy, right along with swatting your SWOT, you can boot your root (cause).

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

I regularly engage in hansei (reflection) after each of my facilitation engagements. It’s a simple learning mechanism, essentially an after-action process of asking: what I expected to happen (my hypothesis if you will), what actually happened, and what explains the gap, if there is one. And there invariably is. The gap is where learning and insight live. It creates new knowledge. It’s how I improve. I know no other more effective way.

I do what I call a “rollup” of those individual after-action reflections a few times each year, to identify important patterns. Peter Drucker called this the “Feedback Analysis.” I do what he suggested, which is to layer my reflections with input from others…clients, session participants, etc. I’ve experienced exactly what Drucker did when he wrote, “I have been doing this for some fifteen to twenty years now. And every time I do it, I am surprised. And so is everyone who has ever done this.”

My most recent insight runs along the lines of:

• What appears to be the problem, isn’t. 
• What appears to be the solution, isn’t.
• And what appears to be strategy, isn’t.

The first two are constants, and hold true nearly 100% of the time in my innovation coaching and lean training engagements. The third is the real surprise, showing up with alarming frequency in my strategy facilitation engagements.

What so many people refer to as their strategy is in reality something else entirely. It’s usually some flavor, or combination of flavors, of the following:

1. Best Practices

“Follow the leader” is by definition a losing proposition. It immediately and forever relegates you to also-ran status. Yet it never ceases to amaze me how enticed senior managers become with the breakthrough practices of others, and how eager they are to adopt those ideas willy-nilly, without regard to why a given practice is so powerful, or how it came about and why. They neglect context entirely. They forego thinking in favor of the silver bullet. (Read my articles on “The Myth of the Best Practice here and here, or better yet, pick up my friend Steve Shapiro’s great book, Best Practices Are Stupid.) But thinking is the main event of strategy…thinking about how to be unique, not be the same. Even if you fool yourself into believing that you can adopt a best practice and do it better, you’ll never hold a winning position that way. A same-but-better approach will result in long-term mediocrity, in which case you’ll be easily comprised by another fast follower.

2. Organizational Effectiveness

Certainly the optimization of a firm’s resources and processes is important, and a critical component of long-term success. But it’s just that…a component. No firm I know of ever created a sustainable leadership position or competitive advantage solely on the basis of a method like lean or six sigma. The recent economic meltdown, from which we are still emerging, made it frightfully easy to become inward-focused on the current situation to the point of business myopia. Corporate efficiency has ruled many a firm in the last decade. But that’s not strategy, because it neglects a real danger: resource exhaustion at the hands of over-optimization of the wrong capabilities and activities.

3. Plans

Nice, dense, long documents or decks that spell out a detailed, tactical to-do list, complete with resource allocations, timelines, budgets, and even balance sheets. What’s missing, almost every time, is the clear thinking on how all these wonderful and ambitious actions will add up to a winning position, much less a sustainable one. (For more on this, read Snuff Out SWOT – Forever.)

Denial

“Strategy doesn’t work in a fast-changing world.” Those aren’t the exact words I hear, but they reveal the sentiment. It’s a debilitating and defensive mindset which ignores the fact that the pace of change is being set by players with new and creative strategies. It’s a mindset that almost automatically puts a firm in an entirely reactive and defensive mode, ever vigilant for possible disruption. The old cliche of “the best offense is a good defense” simply doesn’t work over the long haul. I cannot think of a single dynasty in either business or sport that has sustained dominance with “the defender” stance. You cannot win without scoring more points than your opponent, so don’t try. When you embrace this kind of wrong-headedness, you become the hunted, not the hunter. In strategy, that’s playing to play, not playing to win. If you love getting beat up and bruised daily, deny that strategy works in times of great change.

None of these approaches are true strategy, which is always focused outwardly on the future, and all about making the difficult choices required to win with customers and against competitors.

The genesis of these approaches is something I’ve written about for nearly a decade: the dangers of acting and adding. If I know anything, it’s that always favoring acting over thinking, and/or adding over subtracting, will prevent you from crafting a winning way. Place more emphasis on thinking…thinking about what to not do, what to ignore, and what to remove.

My bet is that if you do, you’ll sooner rather than later find yourself in a leadership position.

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

I am nothing if not a consumerist. Meaning, I am constantly impressing upon companies I work with to make sure they have a deep and empathic understanding of their customers…past, present, and future, especially if they are contemplating a strategic shift that entails repositioning or refocusing their efforts to target new and different segments.

Generally speaking, most companies are pretty good at getting out and rubbing elbows with customers to conduct the kind of ethnographic research that involves watching customers in their user habitat. The challenge that all of them have is turning their observations into insights that produce a new strategy and competitive advantage. Some are better than others at it, of course, and some are masters at it, but it is always a challenge.

One of things that has helped my perspective on this challenge is my fascination with all things neuroscientific. In the last half decade, neuroscience has really come to the fore as a discipline that can help address this challenge.

For example, we’ve known for a long time that consumers cannot express what they really want in ways that are particularly useful to those searching for value-producing insights, particularly if they are being asked the specific question of what they want. (We’ve all heard the old Henry Ford quote about “a faster horse” had he asked people what they wanted.)
When it comes to the kind of research that feeds strategic choices, be it of consumers, the industry, competitors, is to do it in the context of a hypothesis, or set of hypotheses, in much the same way a scientist does.

Our world is far too complicated to simply go out and try to observe it with a tabula rasa mindset. There’s simply too much data out there to sally forth with a blank slate, hoping and praying for some miracle of serendipity to appear and point us in the right direction.

But I’m consistently running up against that very mindset, ala “we’re just going out to observe our users, and we’ll figure it out from there.” It’s a fool’s errand, and in over a quarter decade of working with a wide variety of organizations, I’ve never seen it produce anything truly valuable or useful to crafting a unique strategy of any kind (product, service, etc).

To illustrate, suppose I asked you to take a nice long look around you, close your eyes, and describe everything within view. To do a truly thorough job, even if you could remember everything, would probably take you weeks, there’s that much stuff around you. At the end of that effort, you’d be left with a big “so what?” having learned nothing new or insightful.
Now, you might produce some sort of shorthand description that made sense of it all. But in so doing, you would consciously and subjectively select and filter the things you’re including in your summary. You would add subtle qualitative conclusions: “It’s a nice large open floor plan with modular seating, lots of natural lighting, brightly colored walls, modern furniture, and state-of-the-art technology, inhabited by energetic professionals all fully engaged in their work.”

Neuroscience tells us that we are naturally hard-wired to do just this, to focus on some things, and not others. And for this reason, I firmly believe that we should be explicit about what we’re looking for, before we actually begin looking.

You must have a hypothesis about what the targets of your investigation will behave before you go into the field, because it will frame what you should pay attention to and what you can ignore.

If you aren’t explicit and don’t have a hypothesis, your hardwiring will take over, causing you to pay attention to certain things without ever knowing why certain things drew your attention and others didn’t. You will fool yourself into thinking that you were paying attention to everything, but the reality is that you were only paying attention to a small part of the whole.

And if you do that, as a result you will never know, or be able to figure out, what you might have missed that carried with it the kind of insight that might actually be useful.
In terms of strategy, it’s far better to craft up what my friend Roger Martin would call a “happy story” — essentially a guess turned into a formal hypothesis — then go out and see whether that scenario has any merit.

This is why, in my last post, I recommended swatting your SWOT.

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

The more strategy development work I do with organizations, the more I’m becoming aware of a prevalent pattern, a pattern which I find counterproductive, even detrimental. It concerns the starting point for their strategy work: in nearly every case, they begin with convergent thinking, the polar opposite of divergent thinking, which I believe is the kind of thinking true strategy demands.

To show just how embedded this pattern is in the corporate mind, take a moment to mentally fill in the blanks:

Strategic ______________
SWOT _________________

Invariably, the answers I get when I do this short exercise in workshops are “planning” and “analysis.”

Here’s the rub: planning and analysis are convergent modes of thinking. But if strategy is about considering many possibilities and making critical choices, this kind of thinking doesn’t work. Perhaps that’s why so many people struggle with strategy.

In fact, it’s probably the very reason the starting point for most is the SWOT (Strengths, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat) Analysis. SWOT is the most dominant way to begin strategy efforts. Sounds cool, right? “We’ve done a SWOT.” Woo hoo! It’s a great acronym…sounds like SWAT (special weapons and tactics). So it’s a brilliant marketing gimmick. No one actually knows who came up with SWOT, which is a bit curious…maybe whoever did wanted to remain anonymous for a reason.

Be that as it may, let’s think about SWOT for a moment. Generally, some poor young MBA gets sent out to do a SWOT analysis, which will then be turned into a “strategic plan,” complete with who, what, when, how, and how much ($).

But let’s back up and parse the SWOT, starting with the “S,” for strength. What is a strength? When we say “strength,” we are loading the concept with a silent context. Context is what gives the word meaning in the first place. There is no such thing as a universal strength in business life. I cannot think of a single strength that is a strength in all contexts. A strength in one context can be a weakness in another context.

In fact, this is the very point Malcolm Gladwell was trying desperately to make in his 2013 book, David and Goliath. (Sidenote: Now, he failed to make his point in the telling of his story, because he got caught up in trying to convince us that people succeed because of their weaknesses, rather than because they overcome them, but that’s irrelevant to the argument at hand.)

This one line was my main takeaway from the book: “The powerful and the strong are not always what they seem.” Gladwell was talking about the power of context, which ironically he introduced us to in his first and best book, The Tipping Point. David beat Goliath because he changed the context within which the battle was fought, not because he was weaker than Goliath.

A strength is only a strength in the context of the strategic choices at the heart of strategy: where you’ve chosen to play and how you’ve chosen to win in that specific space. For that matter, a weakness is only a weakness in the context of a where-to-play/how-to-win choice. The same holds for opportunities and threats.

My point: if you start your strategy efforts with a SWOT, without having an explicit, and explicitly different, strategic choice, the poor schmo who’s actually doing that SWOT has to decide what to pay attention to and what to ignore. The reason being, it’s impossible to do a SWOT analysis of everything. That’s a century-long assignment of a million or so pages in length, and our young MBA only has six weeks and 250 pages to do his SWOT.

And the easiest thing for the SWOTer to do? Assume the current strategy. “Given our current plan, our SWOT looks like this.”

Which is why most “new” strategies end up looking a lot like the “old” strategy.

I used to be agnostic on SWOT. No longer. I’m violently against it as the starting point for strategy.

I now think it’s far better to think through various strategic choices, ask what would have to be true for those choices to be good ones, and explore those hypotheses through valid experiments, before ever locking and loading on a strategy. It’s creative and divergent thinking, which is the polar opposite of the convergent thinking that fuels planning and analysis.

The difference between divergent and convergent thinking is the difference between chess and checkers. Both games are played on the same board, both games have the same number of players. With checkers, though, you really don’t have much to think about, the players are all the same, and the moves are single, linear steps. Chess has far more kinds of players, far more possibilities and options to consider, including the competitive response to a single move. That’s why when you watch the chess masters play (not sure why you’d want to do that), the “action” is mostly invisible…they’re thinking about their choices and and the possible reactions to those choices.

If you want and need a new strategy, swat your SWOT. Forever.

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

Over at HBR blogs, there is a wonderful debate on the subject of strategy between Roger Martin, who authored the post Stop Distinguishing Between Strategy and Execution, and Don Sull, an MIT scholar who believes there’s a meaningful distinction between strategy and execution.

Normally, I don’t bother looking at comments to blogs because in today’s social media-driven world they generally add little if any valuable insight. At their best vanity metrics for the hosts (thumbs-up, likes, etc), and at worst they are simply a means for commenters to plug themselves (take a gander at how many commenters on HBR say something like, “I’ve posted my own thoughts on xyz-look-at-me-at-some-silly-url-dot-com.”)

But in this case, there’s great fun in watching people try to hang with Roger Martin’s thinking. Basically, they can’t, and don’t, but keep doing the HBR equivalent of Einstein’s insanity definition: saying the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Even Don Sull can’t hang with him. Let’s face it, there’s a reason Roger Martin is #3 on the Thinkers50 list, while Don Sull is, well, not on it.

Most people know I subscribe to the Martin school of thought. So I’m obviously biased. Still, given the fact that my day job for over 25 years has been facilitating teams through strategy, innovation, and lean sessions, I can attest to the meaninglessness of making a distinction between strategy and execution.

One commenter, arguing against Roger’s main point: “I think of strategy as plotting the course, execution as steering the ship.”

A nice soundbite, but let’s think about it for moment.

You’ve plotted your course, mapped it all out. You’ve chosen a path that will get you from A to B in what you think is the best possible course, given your ship and crew and supplies. But your course assumes certain weather and water conditions. You won’t know until you’re on your way if those conditions will come true or not. So you hit the water, and begin “executing” your “strategy.” Then the wind shifts unexpectedly, violently, and now you have to rethink your “strategy.” Are you now executing or strategizing as you make new choices and pick a new course?

It’s one and the same. It’s a meaningless distinction to separate strategy and execution, because you simply can’t arrive at a real world definition that separates the two in anything but a completely abstract and academic way that allows folks like Ram Charan and Larry Bossidy to write books entitled Execution.

Now, there is, as Roger points out in his rebuttal to Don Sull’s comment, a distinction between strategy and detailed strategic planning, the latter being the observable act of producing thick volumes of specific actions, timelines, and budgets. “I have no appetite for strategic planning,” writes Roger. “But I love strategy.”

Amen. Great stuff. Take a look!

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

I’ve taken up a new habit of asking successful people I know: What is your career strategy? I ask it casually, and in person, because I want to see their body language and get a sense of just how front-of-mind their answer might be.

My discovery: when it comes to careers, most folks don’t have a true strategy. I’ve gotten a knitted brow as the immediate response, accompanied by something along the lines of, “Whatd’ya mean?” (Some keep it even simpler: “Huh?”)

The reason I’ve been asking the question is simple: I believe that if you want to increase the odds of professional success, you need a strategy. And that requires you to have a useful way of thinking about strategy.

What Is Strategy?

Strategy means different things to different people. Some define strategy as a vision or a plan. Others define it as optimizing the status quo, or perhaps following “best practices.” Still others deny that strategy is even possible, especially in times of great and rapid change.

I subscribe to the definition of strategy given by Roger Martin, one of the foremost thinkers on strategy and coauthor (with Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley) of the best-seller Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works: “Strategy is an integrated cascade of choices that uniquely positions a player in its market to create sustainable advantage and superior value relative to the competition.” (Disclosure: I have worked with Roger helping a shared client for the past two years, and consider him a mentor.)

Before I delve into just what that “integrated cascade” is and how it can apply in the context of a career, it makes sense to unwrap the definition of strategy just a bit in terms non-business school graduates use. A few key points:

1. Career strategy matters for one simple reason: it allows you to focus your resources. The reality is that we do not have unlimited time, attention, energy, and capabilities. Few of us have the luxury of leaving our potential on the table, which will surely be the result of action absent focus.

2. Notice that the concept of planning (a to-do list of actions to be executed and timelines to be met) plays no part in this definition of strategy. We hear the phrase “strategic planning” so often that it has become synonymous with true strategy. It shouldn’t. Strategy is about choices, and choosing. In this view, strategy is not about guaranteeing success, and there is no such thing as a perfect strategy. Reason? Strategy is future-oriented, and if we know anything, it’s that the future is uncertain and we are horrible at predicting it. The best we can do is make thoughtful choices.

The future is uncertain and we are horrible at predicting it. The best we can do is make thoughtful choices.

It’s an important distinction. Making and acting on difficult choices may appear limiting, but in truth frees you to focus your resources on what matters most: winning. With a career strategy, you stop spending energy waffling and deciding and instead can spend more energy advancing your goals. What is true of companies is true of careers: you cannot become great by choosing to simply play. You must choose to win. If you are not constantly angling to win, it’s fairly certain you won’t.

This is by no means a new idea. Michael Porter told us thirty years ago in his definitive book Competitive Strategy that in order to win, you must consciously choose to do some things and not do others. We all like to keep our options open, but attempting to be the jack-of-all-trades yet master of none will limit your ability to create something of remarkable value.

3. The third idea derives from the second: like a business, a career should have a competitive dimension to it. All too often we get career advice that is one-dimensional, and that dimension is internal, e.g. “be the best you can be,” or “follow your passion.” Focusing only inwardly sounds good, but the reality is that we are the CEO of Me, Inc., and there are always others playing in our domain and competing for the same resources we need to advance. We know what happens to a company that chooses to ignore the competition…it is no different for a career.

4. Strategy should be creative and scientific. It involves generating and testing hypotheses. The set of future-oriented choices you draft are really nothing more than a set of best guesses, assumptions, tailor-made to be tested quickly in the wild and adjusted based on results, before you ever lock and load on a new path.

5 Questions for a Career Strategy

In the Roger Martin view, strategy is a thoughtful framework consisting of answers to five questions that are inseparable if you want a true strategy. We’ll use them for the purposes of our careers:

What is my winning aspiration?

A winning aspiration sets the frame for the other questions, and is a future-oriented statement that clearly spells out what winning is for you—concretely, specifically, and ambitiously. It describes the choice you make about what you exist to do and what business you’re really in. It’s not a modest statement, and it doesn’t describe playing to simply play.

Take the renowned illustrator Yuko Shimizu, whose work of which I’m a big fan. One of her illustrations, for the Sunday New York Times Business section, is above. As she revealed in an interview with Dave Benton at 99U, her winning aspiration while toiling away it her previous 11-year career in PR was to be among the most highly respected illustrators in the world. “I really wanted to make it and my name to be known.”

Where will I play?

This question teases out your playing field–specific spaces where you will and will not compete: industries, verticals, specific companies, customer segments, distribution channels, product/service, geography, stage of production…you get the picture. The heart of the five questions is the “where-to-play/how-to-win” combination, which is where I’d recommend anyone contemplating a career shift to focus their attention.

Yuko’s choice was “commercial illustration for hire,” not “fine art illustration.” She targeted advertising agencies and design firms. “[My work] is kind of specific,” she said.”So if the job doesn’t fit in the specific criteria they will call someone who does something a little more general. So it’s a decision you have to make.”

How will I win?

This is your competitive advantage, the unique value you create and deliver. You must support your where-to-play choice with a strong how-to-win choice, which will determine what you will do on your chosen playing field. The two reinforce each other to create a distinctive combination, and are especially helpful for anyone considering a career transition.
In Yuko’s case, she realized that imitating winners in her field was not a winning strategy, and that she must set her self apart with a unique and original style. As she said, “You really have to stand out to get work…I had to stop looking at other illustrators, because if you want to be like them at that point, the best you can be is second best.”

What capabilities do I need?

The choices you make in answering this question bring your where-to-play and how-to-win choices to life. Capabilities are not simply you competencies or strong suit. Competencies are ante to the game, capabilities are the specific current and future activities that, when performed well, help you win in the way you’ve chosen.

There’s a dangerous tendency to simply list your strengths as the capabilities you need. There are two problems with that approach. First, your strengths may or may not give rise to a competitive advantage. Second, they may not be relevant to those to whom you deliver value…your clients, partners, employers, etc.

For example, Yuko would not list “drawing” or “illustrating” as a capability, because, as she said in her interview, “There are a gazillion people who can draw and illustrate.” She might, however, list “self representation.” Her years as a publicist gave her winning capabilities: marketing and promoting, reaching decision-makers, and negotiating. In her words: “I tell people that I would probably make a good illustration agent, as I have the PR background.”

What management systems must I have?

Like any business, running a winning Me, Inc. requires effective systems to build, manage, and maintain your capabilities. Career management is a process, you need a reliable way to reinforce your strategic choices.

Yuko Shimizu has at least one system that does many of these things: teaching at New York’s School of Visual Arts. It’s how she stays current and relevant in the real world, and allows her to consistently generate fresh ideas. “It’s good to go to school and talk to 19-year olds and see what they have to say.”

Strategy’s Magic Question

Your new career strategy seems airtight on paper. You’ve arrived at a winning aspiration. You’ve honed in on an open and attractive segment in which to play. You’ve identified the competitive advantages that will enable you to win in your chosen spaces. You’ve got the capabilities and systems to support your choices.

But as George Patton said, no strategy survives first contact with the enemy. (Or, as Mike Tyson once quipped, “Everyone has a plan until they are punched in the face.”) Generally, that’s because multiple assumptions have been folded in to your strategy—unconscious leaps of faith you’ve made in your natural enthusiasm and optimistic outlook. Who is to say you will even live in the same city? Or maybe an unforeseen technology will be invented in the near future that renders your competitive advantage a commodity.

If not attended to, teased out, made transparent, and tested in the real world, these leaps may indeed become the very blind spots that will render your strategy a fun but ultimately academic thought exercise.

Here’s the thing: your strategy is just a collection of guesses until they’re tested. There is real power in making bold assumptions, because you can turn them into clear hypotheses, and then scientifically test them in a rapid, iterative way.

Done right, your eventual strategy will indeed survive first contact. The key lies in the approach. In my experience, simply making a list of your assumptions doesn’t work, for the simple reason that our assumptions are part of our mental models and biases—they’re so ingrained in our thinking and thus so hard to identify that it takes a tool to lend a bit of objectivity.

We naturally tend to list “known” things for sake of ease and to avoid the risk of looking uncertain. But an assumption by definition is something unknown. And that’s scary. We fear the unknown, and we are reticent to bring it up.

The best technique I’ve found to alchemically turn assumptions into gold amounts to a single but powerful question: What must be true? This, Roger Martin says, is “the most important question in strategy.”

Take a look back at your answers, and ask what must be true for those to be winning choices? You can do a bit of mad-libbing here: “For my where-to-play choice to be winning one, it must be true that______.”

By doing this, you’ll soon have a handful of “best guesses,” each of which is in reality a hypothesis, which you can now test out by getting into learning mode and experimenting.
How about you?

Got a winning strategy for your own career?

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(Note: a version of this article first appeared at 99U.)

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

My friend Roger Martin (#3 on Thinkers50 list) penned a terrific article in The European Business Review on how the Canadian professional tennis association rose from oblivion to now boasting two young players ranked well inside the top 10 on the professional tennis circuit…in less than ten years. As of this writing, Eugenie Bouchard is ranked #7, and Milos Raonic is ranked #6.

Roger and I share a love of the game, and we trade more emails on tennis than anything else. I used The Australian Open final as an example of how Roger’s “Play to Win” strategic cascade can be applied not just to business, but sport (see here). And the transformation of Tennis Canada is a comprehensive case study of how five key strategic questions, properly and creatively addressed, can change the world.

What Is Your Winning Aspiration?

Playing to play wasn’t an option. Only playing to win was. “We set out with the goal of becoming a leading tennis nation,” writes Roger, who is not only a director, but strategic advisor for Tennis Canada. “Leading” meant measurable results, like having players ranked in the top 50 men’s and women’s singles world rankings. Given current rankings, “top 50” seems pedestrian, but at the time, it had been over 20 years since Canada had had a player inside the top 50.

Where Will You Play?

In tennis, there are five basic “spaces” in which to play: singles (men’s and women’s), doubles (men’s and women’s), and “mixed” (one man, one woman) doubles. Tennis Canada chose men’s singles, and women’s singles. “We focused on the very hardest game – singles,” Roger writes. They also focused on early childhood development, kids under 10, whereas in the past they had focused on teenage potentials.

How Will You Win?

Tennis Canada needed a true competitive advantage. It was one they did not possess: in a word, coaching. Roger writes: “We realised that we needed to go outside Canada to hire a seasoned professional who had coached Top 10 players before. So we hired Louis Borfiga, who headed the junior national centre in France.”

What Capabilities Must Be in Place?

A capability is what produces the competitive advantage. Tennis Canada, in order to produce a true coaching competitive advantage, filled its development bench with world class coaches, along with a new national tennis development center. “We opened a national tennis center for full-time residential coaching of our promising juniors,” writes Roger. “We needed a formal training centre to simply be in the game.”

What Management Systems Are Needed?

Tennis Canada took a unique approach that blended the U.S. and French player development systems. “We supervised and funded the development of our high performance players. But we didn’t control the process or keep it within Canada. When Raonic was 16 Tennis Canada organised and funded coaching and training with a former Top 50 player at his Spanish tennis academy, where he could further develop his game. A similar approach was taken with Eugenie Bouchard, who did much of her development in Florida, funded and coordinated by Tennis Canada. Their foreign coaches and Tennis Canada managed both players collaboratively. In doing so, we took the best of the ‘free market’ US system and the ‘totalitarian’ French system.”

According to Roger, (who coincidentally I spent the day with yesterday), the pipeline of Canadian tennis talent is flush with potential, and we may not have yet seen the best.

He concludes: “Despite a budget one-tenth the size of key competitors, Tennis Canada has built a sustainable platform for success and, like any organisation that effectively competes for success, continues to play to win.”

You can follow Roger on Twitter here, and read the full article online here.

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