Why Strategy Alone Won't Save Your Organization – The Innovation Trap

So very often we got good strategy documents, but we confuse our planning with actually being prepared. We confuse our communication with actual alignment between our departments or between the different groups of people we're working with. We confuse what has been called innovation theater, doing something novel for the sake of looking innovative, but we haven't actually adapted and actually responded with the innovation that is required. So we can keep ourselves quite entertained in a leadership position without actually delivering anything of real value. And I'm not going to get into politics, but just choose a country, have a look, consider what leaders are up to these days and what is the real value of that leadership that we're seeing or not seeing. Now, I'm sure you know this, this particular poem. It's quite long, but it's been summarized into this. And when I was preparing, I thought, this is the exact right example for this. There are capacities that are missing in our leadership range of tools. And whose responsibility is it to have those capacities or to make sure that somebody in the leadership team has those capacities? Well, there was an important job to be done, and everybody was sure that somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that because it was everybody's job, but everybody thought anybody could do it, but nobody realized that everybody wouldn't do it. And it ended up that everybody blamed somebody when nobody did what anybody could have done. And that, that really is what we're dealing with in terms of futures capacity.