This week I was on the website ‘TED Ideas Worth Sharing’ (Technology, Entertainment and Design). This website hosts the world’s most brilliant minds sharing some of the world’s most brilliant ideas and research. While on the site I watched a video of Ursus Wehrli who shares his vision for a cleaner, more organized, tidier form of art — by deconstructing the paintings of modern masters into their component pieces, sorted by color and size. It is a brilliant piece and if you have time to watch it, please do so.
This artistic virtuoso in comedic tidiness brought my thoughts back to many of the world’s latest and greatest corporate techniques for creating efficiency and order. Being a bit linear at times, I tend to like order and have investigated a few of them while in corporate to see if they are adaptable to my work and certainly have pulled some fantastic pieces from them to use myself. Thankfully, however, I have a good balance of right-brain/left-brain and am also very good at creative solutions and seeing the big picture at the same time admiring the existing talent and efficiencies already working well in the workplace.
The tendency in corporate is to search for that silver bullet in a perfect process, the best system or the most reasonable answer to increase productivity while reducing hours and resources in order to obtain the highest functioning teams possible and ride that profit horse to success!
Here is the stickler, investments are made, people are trained and many thousands of dollars are spent in the adoption of a new process. (I’ll pick two as recent examples; Six-Sigma and ITIL.) Both of these are exceptional methodologies for working-efficiency processes and both of them offer years of research, development and a great deal of hard work in order to provide the tools necessary for creating that efficiency and improved process design. For those of you who’ve adopted these in your organization, how are they working for you?
In their book, Execution the Discipline of Getting Things Done, Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan discuss the main reasons companies fall short of their promises. It is not because of the lack of talent, knowledge or inspiring visions, especially since companies will typically bring in the brightest consultants and the most talented and knowledgeable leaders onto a project such as the examples above. Bossidy and Charan say strategies most often fail because they aren’t executed well.
When you hear Strategic Sense talk about action, the words we use are “Plans of Action” – Action being the focus here! We made the switch from using the expression “action planning” to “Plans of Action.” This was done at the advice of a very wise friend who clearly understood the difference between what we do and a typical action plan. The focus needs to be in the Action, if the focus sits in planning and the execution of the plan has received little or no play, you might just as well pack it in, fold up your Six-Sigma and go home.
Not unlike Ursus Wehrli who likes to put order to art, things are missing when you adopt process or make significant changes without understanding how to execute them. According to Bossidy and Charan, the job begins at the top! The Leader (usually CEO, CFO or President) is responsible for making it all happen. They need to put the right behaviours into play, they need to be the ones who build the framework for cultural change and they must be responsible for having the right people in the right place. Only after this can the core processes of execution begin.
I like how these authors lay it out, because they suggest working diligently at the plan, but also suggest you ensure a good plan is followed up with action, they set the stage, framework and processes necessary to learn how to execute. If this seems fuzzy to you, imagine it this way:
- You are planning a trip to hike the West Coast or Appalachian trails. You know the terrain is rugged, there are many dangers and there are no amenities. You hire a consultant who is an expert in this kind of trekking. The consultant gets you excited, offers you lists and reading materials and helps you obtain all the right supplies. The consultant describes the weather to you, helps with the terrain mapping and even gives you hints and tips that you could not find anywhere but from someone who has been there before. You have spent your life’s fortune planning this adventure. You are organized! Everything is stacked and ready to go and so you take off on your greatest adventure yet.
- After day 5 you are air-lifted out by helicopter when another hiker has found you laying half naked in the snow. So what went wrong?
- Your planning was amazing, however, you left out a whole load of steps necessary for the execution of that plan. You did not train or exercise prior to the hike. You did not prepare for the emotional mind-set necessary for days alone in the woods where everything is unfamiliar, scary and many things can go wrong. You did not train for the weight of the supplies on your back and the physical strain it would cause for such a grueling hike. You were in no way prepared for the altitude sickness that takes over your brain making you do crazy things once you reached the top of the highest climb, and so you began to feel hot and sweaty and warm and began taking off the layers of clothing you’d put on at the base. You suffer from hyperthermia, your trip is ended, it was costly, and you went home without success.
Just like Ursus Wehrli you had order, you were prepared in your tidy plan, so you thought, but you could not see the overall picture, you could not see the beauty of what lay ahead in un-ordered chaos that is the real world, and you had not prepared your mind, your behaviors and the execution process to reach your target. You fell short!
Think carefully about what you are adopting when you decide to spend a fortune on the latest and greatest, for the potential to improve your company does indeed lie within the tool. However, if you are not able to understand the necessary requirements for execution of those tools, you may have wasted a great deal of money, training, employee time and missed the truly beautiful picture of what your company is capable.
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