Ep 22 Strategy Across Silos | Master Planning Redefined

It's the Jump Leap Long Term Strategy Podcast, Episode 22. Your company has just received a master plan for the way you do your business. It's like a huge strategic plan. Now, you could be in the public sector where it covers several organizations including yours. Or you may be in the private sector where the plan describes changes across several business units in a single company which serve distinct customers in separate ways. But in either case, you have a problem. It has a— great set ideas in In fact, it covers all the great ideas in your role in the organization and more. However, as you look at it, you start to think it looks more like a pipe dream than an actual strategy. In other words, it's a plan those who are accountable and responsible cannot implement. Why? Because it's just too much. What, what happened to bring you to this place? Whereas you look at this master plan, you realize and you have a sinking feeling that it's not gonna work. What happened? Tune into this episode to join me in tackling this wicked problem. I'm Francis Wade and welcome to the Jump Leap Long Term Strategy Podcast. And welcome back. And if you never tuned into an episode here at the Jump Leap Strategy Podcast, this is a solo version, solo episode, which means that, uh, like any of our episodes, I will be doing some time in diagnosing the problem that I introduced at the very beginning. Now I won't have someone else to bounce ideas off of, which I usually do, or in one of the episodes where I have a guest, but in this case I will be doing this similar kind of diagnosis where I'm going to try to tear apart the problem, tear apart the issues to arrive at some of the underlying thinking that I think would be useful for you. Now, the reason that we do that on this podcast and take this kind of unusual approach is that we— when someone else is here, or I am trying to show you the inner workings of the issue, the assumptions, um, the you might say, the paradigms, the mental models, the contexts, the mindsets, all the stuff that's beneath the hood, that if you could know what they are, you could then decide, oh, I agree, or I disagree, or I'm gonna apply it this way, or I'm gonna apply it in a different way. But they would give you some indication as to how to use the conversation or the discussion or the insights that I'll share in your actual situation. In other words, I want to get below just telling you the idea, the solution, or the answer as I see it, and take you into the kind of the logic that goes into the answer, if that makes any sense. It's better than just sharing the answer at the end and seeing, you know, have you wonder where did that come from. And here I want you to decide for yourself Does the analysis and the diagnosis that I'm sharing actually make sense? And where did I get this approach from? I didn't invent it, no. Einstein said, if I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd still spend 55 minutes thinking about it and 5 minutes solving it. So here we're doing some thinking and then some solving. So I invite you to join me as I tear apart the, the issue, the challenge, the problem, and then offer me some feedback wherever you may, uh, find me. You could find me at longtermstrategy.info if you're a subscriber and drop a comment on this episode there, or you may find me on LinkedIn and drop me a comment on the episode once it goes live on LinkedIn. Those are the two places where I'm very likely to see it. So let's start off with a story, and the story is about Charlene. She is the new head of a strategic planning unit within the government of her country. She was excited about her new role and the contributions she could make to her fellow citizens. That was at first, but now she's confronted by the fact that the job isn't easy. It's much harder than she thought. So she just came off a conference call with representatives from 3 ministries and 2 agencies. Each organization is required to cooperate to produce the most important results related to the problems the country is having with undocumented immigrants. About a month earlier, they received the final immigrant master plan, which is a million-page, a thousand-page report from outside consultants. Expensive outside consultants which lay out all the projects that are needed that they should pursue from the outside perspective. And you know, to the consultants' credit, they didn't just come up with this based on their expertise. They spent a great deal of time— focus groups, surveying, interviewing, talking to employees, other stakeholders, immigrants. They talked to a lot of people and have come up with a whole bunch of ideas, so they don't seem altogether foreign. Now, they also brought in some stuff from outside, best practices from other countries, so there's that in there also. It's a lot of ideas in a single place. As such, when the report arrived, it described that this should be done over a 10-year period, um, but There are no details about which projects receive which priorities or what sequence it should be done in terms of that 10-year period. There's no 1 year or 2 year or 3 years, just 10 years, do all this stuff. Each of our colleagues on the call that I mentioned earlier have read the documents. They read the documents, it seems, but they aren't used to working with each other, and it's been slow going. Even setting up the initial meeting was hard. In fact, it reminded her of her former days in the private sector. So she's new to the public sector, new to government. After she rose to the position of Chief Operating Officer of a major company which had multiple business units, she received a shock when she got that promotion. Turns out that the 15-year strategic plan produced by corporate headquarters was being ignored by the heads of the business units. It had some great ideas, she thought, and above all, and they all read them and they agreed to them in writing, you know, they signed off on it, sent emails saying this looks good, but that plan also called for changes in future funding from their central accounts. The CEO and his team did their best to be bold and innovative. They were the ones who put together the plan, but it didn't really seem to inspire these unit heads. So she's sitting in her office staring at the ceiling, and she's comparing her experience in both places, private sector and public sector, and there seems to be something in common to both situations. But, but what, what is it exactly? Maybe she could get to the heart of it. She could understand why there is resistance here in this new job and why there was resistance in her old job. Hope you're enjoying this free excerpt from the Jump Leap Long Term Strategy Podcast. Interested in finding out more about getting a subscription to full episodes? Visit www.longtermstrategy.info. What, what should she even think about this problem? So as you're listening, I can imagine that if her situation, Charlene's situation, resonates with you any at all, that you're also someone who who wants to create strategies that solve the most difficult problems that a large or larger organization faces. So you could be a part of a government like she is, or you could be a part of a multinational, but, or not multinational, sorry, a multi-business unit organization where in both situations there are some competing priorities between units where there's a likelihood that they could operate like silos. And then there's a class of problems that she is trying to solve or address, or the company is trying to do something with about that cross-silos or cross-organizations, that they're not nice and simple, that they involve organizations of people who are working really hard on potentially competing, or if not competing, at least divergent interests. And now, in the case of a government or in a single organization with many business units, someone is trying to bring it all together, kind of like herding cats. And one place where that— where these competing interests must come together is in a strategic plan or a single strategy. So there could be lots of good people who are working really hard and who are very well intended, who are working at cross purposes. They may not be talking with each other. They may be relying on old thinking, uh, business as usual. And, um, along comes some consultants, or in, in the second case, the case of the private sector that I mentioned, it could be the headquarters people who put together a strategy which has a lot of really good ideas. Now the problem is that in spite of the presence of these, uh, great ideas in this master planning document or in this overall overarching long-term strategy, you still find that the organization is not making the progress that you'd want it to make. And you could be feeling a little bit of annoyance or maybe frustration confusion, you know, really wondering why a lot of money, time, effort has gone into creating a grand strategy, a long-term vision, and it's not turning into the kind of results that you want. Um, and you know, it's kind of heartbreaking to see good people rowing, rowing in different directions in the same boat, if that's even possible. But You know, at least they're out of sync. So when they're rowing, they're rowing at cross purposes because their timing is off, for example, and they're not going very quickly. So there ought to be a way to bring people together so that you can keep your forward momentum going. Um, not to say this is easy to do, as we'll see in a moment, but When silos won't cooperate, there's a different way, perhaps a new way to do master planning so that it resolves the problem that I'm describing, or maybe that you, Charlene, is going through, or that you resonate with and can kind of recognize from what I've said so far. So even if you've never even come across a master plan ever before, or a master strategic plan of the nature that I'm describing, chances are you will at some point in your career. And you will pick up a document, or even more to the point, you'll be involved in an effort in which one is put together. And the plan that's put together, you may have a reaction like the one that I mentioned. When you're looking at it and you're starting to think there's something not quite credible about this. And as you do that, you wonder if this will have an impact on the trust factor, you know, the trust that employees have in the organization, because maybe as they and other stakeholders look at the same master plan that you're looking at, they might very well have the same feeling, like there's something not quite right about this, and it's, it's not sure why, but it's not something. And if, if that loss of credibility and loss of trust continues, then your master plan, your long-term strategic plan, could be doomed. You know, all the good ideas that were put together, all the visioning that was done, all the aspirations that were developed all of the great inspirational missions, visions that were invested in, the big kickoff, all those things may not actually turn into anything because of this loss of trust. And maybe you sense that there are lurking somewhere some constraints that render this plan less than feasible. Even if it's developed in a conservative way, you may still sort of look at it and wonder, do we have the time? You may think in different dimensions— time, the money, do we have the bodies, the human resources, do we have the appetite for the change, do we have the technology? Um, can we trust that there's not going to be a pandemic? So you sort of, as you look at the aspirations in the plan, you weigh them against some of the realities that you're aware of, and some things seems to be coming up short in your mind. But again, you can't quite put your finger on it. So what most companies do, hate to say, is they kind of accept the plan, the master plan from the consultants, or the business units accept the thinking of the headquarters team, the headquarters strategy, and they pretty much just go back to business as usual, which means that they simply rely on what they've always relied on and do what they've always done. And if they see that there's some capacity lacking human resources, money, time, budget, all the things that I mentioned. They kind of hope that they'll get resolved in time, where there'll be some windfall of one of those resources, whatever they think is the one that's short, and maybe it'll happen in time. So they're living in hope. Um, meanwhile, they're complying with the plan. Now, by complying with the plan you may equate that to quite quietly killing the damn thing. No, that happens all the time between groups that put together plans for other people to implement. It's just that in this particular case, I'm talking about a master plan that covers many organizations, public sector, and the organizations that are being covered. So here in Jamaica, we have— and we're a country of 3 million people We have one government and some 100+ ministries, departments, and agencies that are separate organizations that report into the central government. I guess report to the Prime Minister, um, or if we had a president, would report to a president. And we're a small country, and in larger countries there's many, many more than that. But the overall plan has all these organizations reporting to it. And each of them could be hoping that if they just do what they always have done, that this too will pass and it will have its day. And, or maybe they're lucky, some extra funds will come in and they'll be able to do some bits and pieces, but that's as far as it goes. So that mindset, that kind of let's comply mindset also exists in the private sector. And the story that she told of, you know, her experience as a COO and having these heads of these business units go along with, uh, the plan from headquarters with no real enthusiasm is just equivalent to saying that they're going through the motions, they're being good corporate citizens, they're being team players. Meanwhile, intentionally or unintentionally, they're doing— they're killing the thing. So that's what usually happens in response to these master plans. The vast majority of them don't get implemented. So why, why, why doesn't that work. Well, to say the least, uh, these plans require engagement, and not phony engagement or compliant engagement or minimal engagement. They require real engagement. So these organizations need, at the organizational level, to do more than just salute the flag. They need to play a significant role. And that significant role just don't manifest by itself. It doesn't manifest very often. And you could argue and say, well, why? Well, you may say it has something to do with an element of change management that's just not being managed. It's not, not just not taking place. And I would suggest that in order to produce game-changing preemptive long-term strategy, there's always an element of change management. And if you don't execute that element skillfully, then you're gonna have some of this compliant killing you softly kind of behaviors by business units and heads of organizations, by CEOs of subsidiaries, or CEOs of ministries. Um, in the States, you would say departments, like Department of Energy or Department of Commerce, that these people would, you know, they would just, 'Yes, sir,' and not really be engaged, just kind of go through the motions. So This lack of change management, where does that come from? You know, I've looked at a bunch of master plans very, very recently, uh, and as I've scanned them, I've noticed that the way people relate to these plans, which, you know, 100 pages, 200 pages, many hundred pages, it's as if these plans are ends in and of themselves. The purpose of these plans is to put down something in writing that we're going to do, and that these plans are the result and they are the end-all and be-all. Like, these, these are the purpose, the reason, the end product, the outcome. Like, these written documents are the end. These are— this is the summit. Now, from a change management point of view, this is crazy thinking. And if you have experience in change management, you may know that a document is just like an artifact in an entire process, in an entire exercise, or a multi-year intervention. It's just one point. Now, that's not how a consultant sees it if the consultant is the one who is producing the document. For them, this is the end of the game. This is where accolades are heaped, payment is made, victory is declared, and you know, like the Lone Ranger, they ride off into the sunset, leaving behind an organization with a document. Well, the problem isn't the document. But we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll get into why the document is nowhere near sufficient. I've kind of already— You've reached the end of a complimentary clip from the Jump Leap Long-Term Strategy Podcast. To hear the full episode, go over to www.longtermstrategy.info and grab a subscription or a free trial. See you there. Here's an excerpt from our next episode with Peter Kompo.

Uh, that there's a connection between the future and their decisions today and what they're thinking about doing today. He's got to find a way to to connect them and get them excited about that and get them feeling that tension. Um, and there may be different cases. He may not know it himself, he may just believe it, but he has to find it, and he's looking for the team's help to do that.

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.