Making sense of the strategy

It is one thing to get the leadership team, board and executive together to plan and identify and prepare a strategy.

Then comes the work of trying to embed the strategy - or in other words... make people follow it.

Getting people to buy in to new directions, new ideas and changes in strategy requires sense making. We can’t just pump out some ‘comms and marketing’ in an effort to ‘sell’ the message, create the urgency and ‘cascade it’ down throughout the organisation. These too often vanilla flavored communications have motherhood statements, cliches and corny ‘Ra Ra’ slogans. (I know; I used to write them in my previous roles in leadership communications!)

But they're tired and dated in our world of clever internet memes that burst forth every day!

As you plan for next year and decide when and how your senior leaders are getting together to do the all-important strategic work, be sure to include in that planning how you’ll make sense of it for people.

Sensemaking Your Strategy is a thing. Don’t leave it to cliched comms and marketing.

Put a sensemaking filter over the strategy so it makes sense to the people you expect to bring it to life.

How many revisions are enough?

Reworking, editing, checking, changing. How long do we spend working on the next version?

Documents, reports and presentations travel up and down a company's hierarchy to be changed, edited, revised, and approved. Changes are made but it’s still not sent out or shared. It’s time for another round of changes.

And another round.

Up and down it goes.

The heart of the message gets lost and in its place, a wordy banal message like every other. All in the pursuit of accuracy, control, correctness, getting it ‘right’, perhaps to counter the the fear of it being ‘wrong’ or imperfect.

But it can never be perfect because things change. And we are human.

The tinkering is a cover, it’s stalling and fear. Hours working and reworking, writing and editing, tinkering. And the waiting ... the waiting in between every revision.

It’s not productive.

Want a gain in productivity? Check how many versions that report or document has been through; how many hands have been on it, eyes that have seen it, how many times it's been checked, revised and re-checked. What’s really going on here? How many revisions will be enough before it goes live?

Explore the depths

I'm posting on thinking and sensemaking skills - so far, we've

✅Clarified the context

✅Traversed the breadth and now...

⬇️ Explore the depths.

With big picture knowledge of 'why' a topic, and an idea of the breadth of the topic, you can go on in and dive dive dive!

Where would you dive in? If you're on a train from say, London to Paris, would you get off at one of the stations along the track, or continue to the end of the line?

We can dilute our sensemaking efforts by time-wasting non-sense making! It's when we dart from here to there, back to that, up to there and then back again! It's hard work when we don't know the context and haven't seen the breadth of a topic. It overwhelms us because it takes brain-processing energy to keep making sense of where we are again and again. It's like how a GPS freaks out when you don't follow the suggested route. It displays the 'recalculating route' message.

We repeatedly have to do this when things don't make sense.

Context. Then breadth. Now depth.

Q: Do you like diving into the details?

What a relief! A leader who make sense

In this crazy cray-cray world, it's relieving to hear a leader explain what’s going on, talk about what we need to do about it, how it will be ok, even if there’s a challenge up ahead.

A leader who’s not sugar-coating it, bluffing, boasting or waffling on. They're not making it about them. They're frank and practical about what’s going on.

And there’s an empathy and an understanding there too.

It’s a subtle mix yet a powerful practice. And it’s relieving because it is honest, helpful. It reduces our uncertainty, relieves some anxiety and helps gain our buy-in for a new future.

✋ No more Me Monsters

✋ No more Chaos Conveyers

✋ No more Status Seekers

✋ No more Blah Blasters.

Workplaces of today - and the humans in them, creating value for the customers and clients they serve - need leaders who make sense.

Bid farewell to these four pesky characters. They’re no longer required as part of your contemporary, engaging, inspiring leadership.

Q: Who did I miss? What other bad movers are there, leaders who DON'T make sense? 

"You probably can’t read this slide but ..."

How often do we hear this from a leader at a conference or meeting. It’s blah blah ... non-sense.

After the wall of data comes clichéd statements, oh and those quotes from Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs and Henry Ford!

When leaders are speaking it soon becomes clear whether or not they’re making sense.

The ‘Blah Blaster’ - here with 3 mouths! - is the leader who waffles on and on, losing you along the way.

Baffling with data and details or sharing screens of spreadsheets you can’t see, these leaders, speakers and presenters don’t make sense and in turn, don’t help us make sense.

Too much detail.

Missing the point.

Or the point is buried.

Making sense isn’t just about doing presentation skills training. You’ve got to help people work out

🌕 what’s going on, and

🌕 what we need to do about it.

More words don’t make more sense.