Ep 17 How to Find Time for Strategic Planning

The Task Management and Time Blocking Podcast, Episode 33, and it's also the Jump Leap Long Term Strategy Podcast, Episode 17. You're in charge of implementing your company's new strategic plan. It includes some brilliant new ideas which should shake up your industry and even introduce the world to a brand new category of products and services. But you are a bit wary because prior strategic plans barely made it off the PowerPoint pages. They weren't implemented due to a common complaint: no one had time. You have every reason to be worried, but what should you do about the problem? Tune into this episode to join me in tackling this wicked problem from two perspectives at once: task management and strategic planning. I'm Francis Wade and welcome to the Task Management and Time Blocking Podcast and the Jump Leap Long Term Strategy Podcast. And welcome back. Uh, if this is the first time that you're tuning into either of my podcasts, you may be a bit confused, but let me explain what's happening. So I have two separate podcasts, the Task Management and Time Blocking Podcast and the Jump Leap Long Term Strategy Podcast, as you can tell by looking at the logos on the screen. And this issue or this episode is actually a single area where both of my areas of interest happen to intersect or overlap. So as I mentioned before, the problem of time management in implementing strategy or any complex project of any kind is tremendous. It thwarts many teams and it stops projects from being realized. So in today's show, we're going to take the approach that I usually take in both— both podcasts have a very similar layout in which we tackle the problem and tear it apart. In other words, we undertake a diagnosis to understand its nature. And the reason that we spend maybe 55 minutes out of 60 diagnosing the problem is because I want to give you, the listener, an understanding of where the problem comes from, why it exists, its true nature, why people get misled to thinking it's something that it's not. Sort of the red herrings. I want you to be able to understand these deeper issues and questions and analysis so that you can take the ideas that I share back to your regular life, to your workplace, to the place where, you know, you're interested in productivity or strategy. Um, and you're probably someone who isn't strong in both areas at the same time. You may— so I'm going to address the nuances of both and reasons why when they overlap, companies run into such, such problems. Okay, they have such a difficult time. So to do that, to accomplish that, let me introduce you to Maria. She's a highly accomplished project manager and a certified PMP, Project Management Professional. Once again, she's in charge of implementing and executing the company's latest strategic plan. She's quite proud of the work the leadership team did to put together the plan at their recent retreat, and the fact that they are fully behind it is a big plus. However, she remains anxious. In prior years, strategic plans were casualties of busy schedules and overwhelmed executives with overfull calendars, meetings, email, and a bunch of things that were not productive. And essence, they couldn't manage the extra responsibilities called for by this new project. So the strategic plan simply floundered in the months after the retreat. After a couple of quarters, In each case, little or no progress had been made. And unfortunately, she's at a loss to understand exactly why, because the C-Suitors who are in charge of the plan are some of the most hardworking people she's ever met. She doesn't doubt their sincerity. They're authentic. They have a great culture. But she was starting to think that they simply don't have the task management skills skills necessary, or what most people call time management. Should she be concerned? And if she should be concerned, what can she do to make a difference? So I'm going to invite you, if you're like Maria in any way, shape, or form, to take a look in your life and see where you are a sponsor or a protagonist, someone who's out to implement Any kind of complex project, and by complex I mean that it crosses departments, crosses areas of responsibility, doesn't belong to just a single director or vice president, and it also will take a significant amount of time to implement. Unfortunately, as you look around, you've seen that other projects have fallen apart, and it's not because the project management was weak. So you have a Maria, or you are Maria, in that you know how to manage a project well. Instead, it has something to do with the individuals who are involved and who need to change their behavior, who need to act. The problem is if this issue isn't ultimately resolved that quality plans and projects won't get implemented. And eventually, some companies don't even try to implement complex projects any longer because the history of failure is so prominent. And if you're someone who believes that these projects are needed to move the needle, then you may feel a sense of impatience, even depression because it's— they keep failing so often, annoyance, or just even confusion because the answers just don't seem to come readily. And I'll probably share later on that there are blind spots in the areas in which these two overlap, because you know a lot about one area but not too much about the other. Strategy and task management and time blocking. But let's move— start with the conviction or move from a conviction that there ought to be a way to go from ideation to implementation effectively, that there are issues around creating a brand new kind of strategy or project which starts out being very ephemeral and seeing it move to consistent implementation in sort of the regular lives of regular people who work in your company, that, that, that part just doesn't happen. And today we're going to forge a way to think about this problem. And I should probably tell you, however, that I've never seen podcast on this topic, or I don't think I've even read an article that goes beyond just throwing around some conventional wisdom and dropping a couple quotes and repeating a few memes. So if you're like Maria, solving this problem is the key. It should be the number one job of a CEO. Um, and when companies don't fix the problem and don't implement their biggest and best ideas, their most important strategic plans, they end up sometimes lacking because they lack implementation and they don't know where to put the blame. So they blame all, you know, blame all the wrong people. They, you know, some people would say the executives are lazy. Or they'll, you know, they'll agree and be all happy in the retreat and then they don't follow up, and that's due to some kind of moral failing or some kind of cultural issue, some shortfall, or maybe they just lack integrity, that they're all happy to cheerlead and come up with ideas but they're not willing to do the hard work. In other words, there's some kind of character flaw. So we're going to go way beyond that, that today. But when you think it's a character flaw, you may think that you need a cultural intervention. So you may launch some kind of transformation effort, or the CEO may, you know, sort of weigh in and sort of throw his or her weight around, demanding that people act on the strategy. Um, and as you probably imagine, that doesn't work very well because the more you demand that people act on something like a strategic plan is the less buy-in, um, you experience. Then becomes a matter of extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation, and that essentially kills proper implementation. So doing that doesn't work. Neither does treating this as a matter of a personal characteristic or a matter of willpower, which is often the reason given that, you know, they just lack the requisite faith or belief or, you know, the kind of things that you think that when you have high willpower then you would implement these projects. Let's assume that that's not the case, that they are sufficiently motivated. To borrow from the Maria case, let's take that off the table and say— and argue and say that it's just not that simple. And you may have been in projects where it's exactly that way. People are motivated, but they're not implementing. So let me give you some, some, uh, an, or an idea as to why when you take those approaches they don't work. Um, those tend to be, um, related to character. Today we're going to say that they're related to behavior. And when we say behavior, we mean habits, practices, and rituals— things that people do on a regular basis. And that a new strategy of any kind calls for a particular kind of behavior that we're not taught to engage in. So when we get to solutions, I'll, I'll get more into that, but someone who is effective in their job may be completely ineffective when it comes to implementing the behavior changes required to manage a new strategy. The two are distinct and separate. Add to the problem the fact that implementing a short-term change in which you see an immediate effect is far easier than engaging in projects that don't have a payoff for 5 or 10 years. Ultimately, those might be the ones that save the company from destruction, but it doesn't matter. It's still— they're still harder to implement than the ones that, you know, that are sort of burning and you can't avoid and are causing immediate problems today. So companies don't have the tools to help individuals engage in these behavior changes. And let me throw some, some further statistics at you, mostly taken from a study done by Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria for the Harvard Business Review. Uh, the article was, was, is called How CEOs Manage Their Time, and I'll drop it in the show notes, a link to it. But they, they drop some interesting statistics, and I'll pair them with others that I've used also in, in work that I've done with strategic planning teams. So only 52% of time— 52% of executives said the way they spend their time matches their organization's priorities. Devastating, right? 9 out of 10 times, the main driver of an executive schedule is not strategy but meetings, meeting invites, and email. It's said that executives spend anywhere between 50% and 72% of their time in meetings, and the Porter study showed that they have an average of 37 meetings in any given week. Wow. In a large complex firm, Michael Porter, it's in Oreo, said that CEOs can almost never spend enough time on strategy. They must constantly work to shape it, refine it, communicate it, reinforce it, and help people recognize when they may be drifting from it. And CEOs must also ensure that the strategy is renewed from time to time and based on changes in the environment. However, after all of that, CEOs— the survey that they did said CEOs spend only 21% of the time on strategy. So these facts sort of point to a particular culture in companies that makes the problem difficult to resolve. However, that probably doesn't mean that you you're not interested in solving it. On the contrary, you're very interested in solving it, but I want to have you leave here with kind of an opening for action in the sense that some tangible, credible ways for you to change the way you approach strategy implementation or any kind of project implementation. Any kind of complex project. And that the, the— this is not a matter of willpower or motivation or inspiration, that it's a matter of behavior. And these are trainable, coachable behaviors, but you got to know what to train and to coach people in. So let me mention a couple of things as we sort of move here into solutions that if you're a strategy person, you may not know, and if you're a task management person, you may not know. So this is some of the inner secrets about the other discipline that are necessary for us to move forward. So the first, let's start with that. If you're a task management person, you may not know that what makes a strategy difficult to implement is that It's based on a hypothesis, an unproven idea or notion about, or theory, about what the company needs in order for it to be successful, which makes strategy very ephemeral and very, very new, very difficult to put your arms around. And also very difficult to capture. So, for example, an executive team in a retreat may spend 3, 2, 3 days, 4 days coming up with the most brilliant ideas. But if you ask them 2 years later what were the outcomes of the retreat, they might actually struggle to remember what they are. And it's not that they have faulty memories. It's that strategic hypotheses are extremely ephemeral. They seem very real in the moment in which they're created, but they have very little sticking power because they involve absolutely brand new thinking by a team that doesn't spend much of its time talking about strategy. So when they put the ideas together in a retreat, they really are creating something brand new for the first time. Unfortunately, it's not like they're painting a physical picture. They're doing it in words, mostly. And most of those words are spoken words. So, when I'm facilitating a retreat, I move very quickly to capture the spoken words and fix them in a digital form, as soon as they're spoken, if possible. I even do voice recordings. Portions of these meetings sometimes, because the thing that you're going to be trying to implement in just a few days' time is— has no permanence to it. As I said, it's a strategic hypothesis. This is very different than, for example, from a PMP or a project management point of view, implementing or building the 30th apartment or structure in a massive multi-home dwelling, like a construction project or in a construction scheme. You know, the scheme may have 500 units, and after a while you're just cranking out widgets because you're doing the same thing. Essentially over and over and over again. And that, you know, there's a learning curve, and as you climb the learning curve, you become more effective. And as a PM, you're managing a different kind of activity because it's so repetitive and it's been done before. Strategy is one of the most, again, ephemeral more ephemeral than product, new product introduction even, because really all that we're— all that the team is working with are just ideas, and the ideas don't get turned into a physical product or an observable service or a digital offering. They stay— it stays up in the realm of ideas for a really long time. And as a PM or a task management person, You want to know that the thing that you're implementing, it'll slip through your fingers just like that, as Maria has experienced on past projects. Okay. Okay. Now, if you're in the opposite school of thought and you're a strategy person, a strategy implementation person, let's say, and you don't know anything about task management. So as far as you're concerned, all you do is you give things to people and they're supposed to do them. Right? That's kind of what their job is. And what they do, how they do it after that point is of no concern to you. If you're a task management person, you hear this, you're listening to this and what I just said, and you're hearing it with alarm because that's not how it works. So how does it work? Well, let me give you a little bit of theory. A task And in the task management world, I focus on what are called time demands, which are individual commitments to complete an action in the future. So in other words, there are those moments where you promise yourself to do something later. It's a time demand. And task management is all about manipulating these time demands so that your commitments, the promises that you make to yourself, that these get kept. Like if I am, for example, going to buy milk sometime this evening, I make the promise to myself now, and some time passes, and later on I execute it. So, to use the word ephemeral, when we make these promises to ourselves, The action is up here in our minds, and we really have a problem when we start to make lots of promises to ourselves in our minds and only use our minds to manage them. So in the task management world, I talk about there being a hierarchy of skills, and the way in which we to assess this hierarchy is to use, uh, the 7 fundamentals. Now I won't go into these in a lot of detail, and they're all outlined in my book, uh, Perfect Time-Based Productivity. But these fundamentals start with the creation of a time demand and end with its completion. And in between there is all the actions that we take so that what starts off as a thought ends up as a completed action. Okay? Now the problem with the 7 Fundamentals is that nobody knows what they are. Simply put, we are a bunch of self-taught people, all adults. There is no course in high school People do teach themselves some version of the 7 Fundamentals, and they do it, you know, in an ad hoc way. So someone teaches us the concept of time when we were about 7, 8, or 9, somewhere in early adolescence. We use that concept to start to create our own time demands, and then sometime in our later adolescence or in our teen years, We teach ourselves to implement different versions of the 7 Fundamentals, some, most at a very low level of skill and a few, very few at a high level of skill. Most folks are in between and it tends to be very low. And we know this because if you ask anyone, you know, to complete a task in 3 weeks' time, there's probably a handful of people who will actually do it, let alone a year from now, let alone 3 years from now. So we human beings really have a problem when it comes to managing time demands. And the ones that tend to get done more frequently than the others aren't the "let's pick up the milk" kinds of time demands, Instead, they're habits. Habits that we execute without even thinking about them, like brushing your teeth, putting on your shoes in the morning, you know, as you climb out of bed. You don't think about doing them. They're automatically done. So the problem with strategy is that essentially you're asking every single person who is in charge of implementing a new strategy to change the way they manage their time demands to accommodate this new strategy. Unfortunately, that's not explained. It's just kind of expected that this is what you'll do. Um, in the task management world, you know, we obsess over this particular problem. Um, in the strategy world, we don't care. We just want You have to figure it out. But in this episode, we can actually, you know, speak to both sides of the coin and say that a strategy from a task management point of view is a huge ask. A new strategy, it's a big deal to ask someone to change, for example, what's in their calendar on a weekly basis. So that it includes items which are essential to completing a strategy or the project. It's a huge ask. And one of the things that I— one of the topics that I address is that if you're a really skillful strategic plan implementer or Project Implementer or PMP, you'll actually know something about the person that you're asking, you're asking, or you're making the request of that they complete particular tasks. Because there are some who are terrible at it and there are some who are amazing. I have to write a paper on this and I could drop it in the— I'll drop it in the show notes on different kind of levels of skill of executing projects and the individuals and how they approach them. So it helps when you customize the ask and the way you follow up and remind and look for early red flags, that your behavior depends on the person that you're asking or the person to whom the task is delegated. So that helps. But the point is, it's a, it's a huge request. It's a big ask. Because you're asking people to disrupt their habits and their regular routines in favor of something that was created last week in a retreat and remains quite ephemeral. And some people have a hard time implementing that because they don't believe in it. They're like, yeah, yeah, this is like what they asked for 2 years ago. Yeah, they could even tell Maria, oh yeah, another strategy, huh? Wow, good luck. Oh, I'm supposed to do something? Oh yeah, sure, just like I was supposed to do it last year and the year before, is what they're thinking, because they know that what they did was they just ignored it. They stuck to their regular habits and routines. Even if they really wanted to implement, they know that they have a 40-hour workday, there is no space, and unless they make an extraordinary effort to sit down, think through how to implement, change behavior, measure it, follow up to make sure that the work is being done, that it's not gonna happen. Now, they don't know this consciously. I'm just telling you this because people don't go through this kind of calculation. Or they may squawk and say, "Oh, I'm already busy. I don't have time for that." And then, you know, Maria might say, "Well, you just have to do it because it's a strategy of the company." and the person says, okay, and they willingly salute the flag, and knowing that there's a 2% chance that this thing is going to get done. And many people in many companies just know that they just need to wait it out, and eventually, you know, some new emergency of the day or some new problem of the week will pop up, and the strategy coming out of the retreat is going to be forgotten, set aside, buried in, and nobody's going to remember it until next year when at the next retreat they say, what happened to last year's strategy? I don't know. So given the problem I am describing, a well-known problem in the task management world but new to those in strategy, what can be done to make a difference? Well, when you understand the problem, you can now give those who are going to implement the strategy tools, and one of those tools would be awareness and training. So put it very simply, if you were to pick up my book, for example, you'd see that someone who does the exercises it lays out would end up with a profile that says, here is where you're at in terms of your task management skills, and here's what you need to work on to move to the next level of accomplishment and peace of mind. So a great place to start has nothing to do with strategy at all. It has to do with giving people the means to understand where they're at, help them to make plans, and help them to implement those plans on an individual basis. So that helps to address— that's one way to address the individual problem that I am overwhelmed, I don't have what it takes, I need more— a way to think about capacity and a way to manage my capacity on an ongoing basis. So within even within sort of the general personal improvement approach that you find in, in, in the book, there are specific behaviors that increase the odds that the strategy will be implemented at all. And one of them is called time blocking. So if you're a strategy person, you may not know that the— or you may have heard me say that The name of the podcast is the Task Management and Time Blocking Podcast. So what is time blocking? So if you haven't heard the term, take a moment. What does it sound like? It may be evident to you what it is. You may have heard it before, but it's when you take a task and literally place it in your calendar. Now this presumes that you you, the professional, actually do follow a calendar. And most don't, unfortunately. But for those who do, those who are more productive, inserting that task in your calendar dramatically increases the chances of your implementing it. So if I had my way, after, you know, at the end of a strategic planning retreat, one of the things we would do is time block individuals' time in calendars to move projects forward or move the entire project forward. So you wouldn't leave the meeting without having already made that commitment in your calendar. Okay. So time blocking as on an individual basis is a key technique that if you're implementing strategy, If the people who are going to take the actions that are going to move the strategy forward in the short term are time blocking the activities into their calendar, that's a, let's call it a green flag. It's a great sign. The chances of you're getting everyone or seeing everyone do it are extremely slim, but let's say for argument's sake, the more do it, the greater the chance of success. Okay. So that's on an individual basis. There's also something called a meeting-less meeting, which is something like time blocking on a group basis. And this idea came from a McKinsey article, put a note down to drop that in the show notes, on executive time usage. And here's the idea. An admin can be tasked with the job of tracking time executives spend on strategy on an individual basis, and then producing reports every week on how many hours are being input, you know, the number of hours is a good leading indicator of whether or not the strategy is going to get implemented at the C-suite level. True for every level, but let's just say C-suite for the time being. Well, the idea of a meeting-less meeting takes it to the next step, which is that not only do executives need to block the time, but an admin could also call a meeting let's say from 1 o'clock, 1 o'clock to 3 o'clock every Monday, and that time is for a strategy non-meeting. What does that mean? Well, that's 2 hours that each individual is going to be working on his or her contribution to the strategic plan. There are no other meetings allowed in that time slot, there's no other activities allowed in that time slot. That's, you know, if you've ever heard of boarding school, there's a time when all the students in boarding school are doing their homework, so they're collectively doing the same thing, they're just not doing it together. It's a little bit like that. It's like saying between 1 and 2 o'clock we're not going to meet, but it's going to be in your calendar as a meeting. However, your physical body is going to be elsewhere, or wherever you need it to be, so that it's moving the strategy forward. So it's not left the choice of what to do between 1 to 3, or where do I find time in my calendar for this busy activity. We're always swamped by meetings of other kinds, and there's always these emergencies that come up and displace strategy. So no, that's not going to happen. Instead, if there are 8 members of the executive team, of the C-suite, then we're going to spend 16 hours— 8 of us are going to spend 2 hours each on a Monday, which means 16 hours at least per week moving the strategy forward. So it may sound like harsh medicine, and yeah, you know what, it kind of is, but it's a requirement for the nebulous, ephemeral nature of strategy. Because you don't— you know, you can drive by the housing complex that I mentioned earlier and see that, hmm, it's been 3 months and they've not made one drop of progress. Because you can physically see the manifestation of, "Hmm, something isn't right." Or if you're in a service environment, if the service is not being delivered and the lines are long, you walk by the banking hall and you say, "Hmm, something's not right. There's 30 people in line and I can only see 2 tellers." So those are our visual manifestations of that there is something wrong. Strategy doesn't enjoy— in these early stages, right after it's been defined and you're now looking at the preliminary, primary, or, or the beginnings of implementation, you can't tell the strategy isn't being implemented. Which is why a year later C-suite will stumble into an off— into the new retreat and they say, we don't know what happened last year, I don't know. Did we— what happened to the big plans that we had? I don't know. We didn't implement anything. Yeah, but no one noticed it. So you've got to take this sort of extra level of rigorous commitment to convert the ephemeral into movement, to ensure that there are no excuses. And it may sound like, you know, you're putting all the executives in timeout or something. Maybe it is, but the idea of a meeting-less meeting— and I'll add that in the show notes as well because I wrote an article that defined what a meeting-less meeting is. But again, beyond the technique, I want you to appreciate the world of post- strategy implementation as it intersects with task management and see why these studies show that executives are already overcommitted. And according to them, they're not committed to the right things in their calendar, that they're extremely calendar and email driven. Rather than being driven by strategy. And that to be driven by strategy takes conscious effort. It's not— it won't happen by accident. It won't happen because of happy intentions and good feelings. It won't take place because everyone's motivated and we're the ones who put together the strategy, so it should be easy for us to implement. No, no, not true at all. Because the existing habit patterns, the profile of your skills, the routines you engage in every day, the email that's in your inbox unread, the meetings that you're obligated to go to, those are like a gravity that all conspire to destroy this ephemeral 'But great idea that you came up with during the strategic planning retreat.' So these are just ideas. The tracking of the time— so the McKinsey article mentioned, and again, you, you know, that may sound to you like, 'Oh, executives don't need that level of coddling.' There's nothing to do with egos and their level of experience. Frankly, I've met CEOs who are, according to the terminology that we use in task management in the book, they're white belts, which is the beginner belt. In other words, their skills are low. They create problems for other people because they are low. And I don't— I won't say for you for a moment that of the hundreds of people that we've surveyed, and we have the data that I could share with you, that I don't see that executive skills in task management are better than average. Now, these people are smarter, they're more decisive, they're— they have more experience, but as it pertains to their task management skills, they're no better than the average employee. They're worse in the sense that they have more built-in commitments, more mandatory meetings to attend, more fiduciary responsibilities that can't be avoided, more things that make it difficult to implement anything new, strategic or otherwise, anything that requires a commitment from their calendars. So another couple other elements that you should also look at are performance management. But good performance management around strategy implementation should save you time down the road. In, in, in particular, if you're someone who is the manager of someone who is involved in implementing the strategy, the feedback that you give them and the improvement milestones, they should include some some degree of task management as it becomes clear that the number of tasks that they're taking on is growing. And hopefully you're someone who approaches, who thinks about task management not from a fixed point of view, like you only can manage X number of tasks per week and that's all, but that you're a growing individual and that your capacity can expand. You just need the assistance necessary to expand the number of tasks that you can manage. It's a matter of growth as opposed to being fixed, kind of along the lines of what Carol Dweck talks about in fixed versus growth mindset. So hopefully you're a manager who believes that, and performance management for you is your way of helping an employee to expand his or her capacity to manage, for example, tasks related to the strategic plan. So put that in your performance management system, do the training necessary, train the managers to be coaches, and you'll be establishing a win-win for everyone concerned. Okay, that's another, that's another, another idea of what can be done. And then also you can make the kind of structural organizational changes, um, so that strategy is easier to implement. Now, many of the kinds of strategies I see companies coming up with, I mentioned before, they don't fall into one single vice presidential area. They tend to cross areas, which is why they are so important and why they're so difficult to implement. Now, unfortunately, as I mentioned, the strategy only comes together at the CEO level. CEO is kind of the level at which an organizational strategy has to be managed because he or she, or maybe a COO, they see the company from end to end, including all functions. As opposed to the functional managers or product-oriented managers or those who head up SBUs, and they only see their areas of, of responsibility. But the idea is, is to change, look at the structure and say, is it fit for purpose? Is it going to help us to implement this strategy, or is it going to get in the way? And part of what you're trying to do here is to enable the implementation of these new ideas and also ensure that they don't mean that the C-suite has to meet multiple times to update the strategy, or the CEO has to come to meetings in order to intervene because people aren't clear on what the strategy is, but that it's— it makes sense organizationally and they can understand their part in the strategy because of the way the organization is structured. Now, different ways to do that. You could change the hardwiring of the organization, the reporting. You can also create cross-functional teams that meet on a regular basis. There's many different ways to, to do it, but the point is it'll save you a lot of time and effort and cut down the number of tasks if you structure the organization so that it's even for a temporary, on a temporary basis, it's designed in a way that allows for the implementation of the strategy. So, I know we've covered a lot of ideas here, and I'm depending on your level of interest in either topic, You've probably heard some jargon that you've never heard before. There will be a transcript, as there normally is, a transcript available, so you'll be able to go back and, you know, here am I speaking with a Jamaican accent, and if you're not from Jamaica, you may be listening to a couple of words and wondering, "What did he mean when he said that?" Well, hopefully the transcript should help. But also, reach out to me with any questions because For me, you know, I mentioned this before that I wish, I wish that I could do a day of task management and time blocking, productivity, time management training after every strategic planning retreat. Because I can, I get a sense of where individuals are at and where the team is at and the likelihood of their success going forward. In terms of their task management. And usually the sense I get is, if not alarming, I'm at least concerned, maybe the way Maria is, or maybe the way that you are, that the last mile, kind of the thing that the person does on a daily basis, obviously, right? If a quantum of people in the company don't pick up a number of new behaviors and do some things differently consistently enough, then the new strategy is sunk because it all boils down to behavior changes. Every single thing in that strategy translates into some action or repetitive actions that need to be taken in real time. You know, just lying down and hoping that the strategy will manifest itself, thoughts and prayers, is not gonna— that's not what does it. What does it is a task, is a series of repetitive and one-time tasks, and these must find their way into the 40 hours assigned to each individual And if that does not happen, then it doesn't matter how great your strategy is. It's dead on arrival. So I hope I've opened up your mind, depending on where you're coming from, to understand that if you can see the whole picture, you could appreciate a certain level of kind of nuance that you need to bring and deeper understanding so that you don't end up with the disappointment that Maria alluded to, you know, of not seeing a strategy implemented and then not really knowing why, or kind of like, how come? How come it happened? People seem to be so excited about it. Excitement is one thing, you know, being emotionally charged is— I'm not gonna say those aren't good things, but they don't overcome habits, routines, lots of meetings, lots of email. Those things have a grip on companies, on every single organization, and so far there's not a strong movement to loosen that grip. By, for example, understanding the 7 fundamentals. Instead, I find that staff remain stuck. People don't understand the whole problem, and no one is offering the kind of solutions that will solve the problem, not just once, but forever. So don't go away. I want to tell you what the next episode of the podcast that you follow is gonna be, and I'll simply record two different endings to this and let you know what's gonna happen in the next episode. So keep listening. Here's a clip from our next episode with Alexis Savkin.

And sometimes they send us their strategy, and typically it's a document in Microsoft Excel, or probably in the worst case PowerPoint slides. And typically what they mean by strategy, they mean by strategy a long list of KPIs. And then we have a kind of internal, you know, maturity system for strategies. So uh, immature major strategies, like strategies at low level of development for us, are those with just a list of KPIs, indicators they want to track, and this supposed to, uh, explain what the intention is, what they want to achieve. Okay, we can deduce it, but it's not like the best option. Uh, in the middle we have strategies where we see strategies and they align with the goals. We see some initiatives, so basically we can imagine more or less how things are expected to move, what will be moving, what will be the drivers, and probably what will be the outcomes. And in the best case, I think it's about like 5% of our cases, uh, we see the reasoning behind the goals, we can see a clear cause and effect, like where you want to start, where you want to end, And, uh, well, basically, uh, that's the levels. And, uh, but again, most of the cases is just a list of indicators people track.

So basically— And if you like the work we're doing, feel free to follow us at our website strategyconf/fwconsulting.com. Or like or leave a comment on one of the popular podcast apps such as Stitcher or iTunes. This is Francis Wade, and I'm signing out from the Jump Leap Long-Term Strategic Planning Podcast. See you later.