Be Different or be dead

March 21, 2016

Why amazing strategies result from making bold and courageous ‘tries’

Source: Pexels

Why amazing strategies result from making bold and courageous ‘tries’.

Making tries is about all you can do in a complicated environment where making progress is exceedingly difficult.
There are no silver bullets in the business toolbox that produce a high probability that any given action you take will succeed and that you will see your plans progress.

The world simply won’t let that happen. There are too many competitors, too many regulations, too many fickle customers, too many unpredictable events and too many advancing technologies all happening at once to allow a single tactic, strategy or project to work the way you want it to.

I think COVID-19 illustrates the point that surviving in the face of this disastrous pandemic was impossible for some and plausible for others. Some organizations made it; others did not.

What is clear, however, is that those that did make it had to try and try and try different approaches to keep their business afloat; they didn’t get it right the first time.

Here’s the thing. Because we live in a world of constant and unpredictable change with so many factors affecting an organization, it’s virtually impossible to create a strategy that addresses and accommodates each and every variable perfectly — we will never ‘figure it all out’.

Innovation today is not a single one-shot event; it’s the end result of a number of successive small nano-wins.

The assumptions that are made to develop any strategy are always flawed — we assume no regulatory intervention and then it happens, or that current technologies will remain stable for the next 12 months and suddenly a new one appears in our markets and completely disrupts our business model, or that demand for our products will increase 8% but it comes in at 4%.

No sooner have we put our business plan to bed, some assumption we made changes, and we are forced back to the drawing board to shift our strategy.

This is permanent; it’s not a temporary phenomenon that will go away. This is organizational life from now on that will only intensify in terms of the number of random forces that will impact us and the weight that each will impose on our success.

Traditional business planning can’t successfully play out in this scenario.

The application of the standard analytical tool set won’t help thwart the unexpected missiles that will strike us; hours of debate over strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats won’t decrease the probability that we will likely have to take a random punch at some point.

And the quest for a perfect plan is time consuming, costly and is doomed to fail — there’s no such thing as a perfect anything.

Survival and success depends on the willingness to try new things constantly; if you’re feet aren’t moving you’re dead

So what’s the answer? How do we prepare our organization to succeed in the face of pandemic market forces?
If the original strategy can’t be depended on to deliver intended results, we need to loosen up on the process employed to create it, focus our efforts on plan execution and on trying new things imposed by the chaos that engulfs it.

Source: Pexels

Progress is a function of the number of tries we make.

The more tries, the more successes and the more progress; the fewer the tries — relying on one approach and not changing it in the face of crazy market forces — the less successes and the less likely the organization will survive.

How do you create a ‘tries’ culture? — First of all, ‘trying’ must be included in the organization’s set of values that describes the way that work is done.

Making more tries than the other guy is the way to achieve competitive advantage and to grow your business

For example the ‘tries’ modus operandi is focussed on skinny business cases — back of a napkin in many instances — and then quickly having a go to discover if something will work. And if changes are required because something doesn’t work, it’s changed on the run.

Contrast this with the traditional approach to undertaking something new: a robust 100-page business case is developed and is circulated to all 10 stakeholders for comment; it’s then modified to incorporate stakeholder input; it’s then re-circulated for final approval; an implementation committee is struck which prepares an action plan to implement the final proposal; the action plan is passed to the stakeholder group for comment and approval; and when approval is given action begins. Whew!

Clearly the ‘try’ culture is necessary to survive the times we’re in now and will be in going forward.

And a critical element of creating a ‘try’ culture is to incorporate the concept into the performance planning system of the organization (as an aside, this holds true regardless of the size of the organization.
A 10-person small business and a 10,000 employee company should have a ‘tries’ value guide it’s performance planning).

Set 30-day ‘tries’ targets throughout the organization. For example, you might want marketing to execute 5 tries for a new product launch process and sales to try 10 times to build a more effective training program. The point is to hold people accountable for the trying activity with the belief that the more activity, the more progress.

Track and monitor the trying results to ensure the trend is growing. Keep a funnel to make sure there is sufficient ‘tries’ activity going on to ensure there is a high likelihood that progress will be eventually made.

And make sure that something is learned from every try; you never want to repeat a try the same way if it didn’t produce the desired results. Each try must be different in some way so that a new possibility can be explored with every try.

In the new normal, progressive organizations will create a ‘try’ culture where progress is measured in baby steps not giant leaps

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 3.21.16 at 05:53 am by Roy Osing
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