It’s one of those moments we all remember from childhood: planting the beans in our third-grade science class. Yes, it’s about science, but it’s also about another deeper lesson: it takes time for the underground work to pay off in visible outcomes.
Large ships turn slowly, and even when you do the right thing, are confident in the physics and have done the work, the time between making the call and seeing confirming results at scale is the most difficult moment a transforming leader faces.
Why the angst at this moment? Because the outcome is not certain. We really can run out of time, cash and talent while waiting for the trajectory to change.
How do we know when it’s right to hang on and pull harder or let go and move on?
I’ve worked with dozens of leaders who find themselves in that moment, and I can report that while it is still challenging, there are concrete things that will add value without tearing out the plants to look at the roots.
The first, best, thing to do is have a plan going in that sets you up for success by focusing on precisely the right action for your planned strategic move (more on that below). Once you have the plan in place, the ideas below will help you productively lead through “the zone of confusion,” when anxiety peaks and the team will be tempted to cling to their old habits and practices. These five tools will help both you and your executive team members step confidently on the emerging foundation.
5 Valuable Things You Can do While You are Staying the Course
The challenging thing about leading strategic moves is that we tend to grant ourselves success once the “high level” work is in place. This can lead to a blind spot between what our biases say is inevitable and what really happens at 4 pm on Tuesday. These five items will drive a more detailed runway-level conversation, exposing gaps early, and leading to a better outcome.
- Talk, test, refine the message. Plant the strategy far and wide. Communicate with your staff, talk to your partners and talk with your clients. Improve the words, the storytelling and the metaphors. See what works and let go of language that doesn’t land. One of the most common issues and points of internal resistance for new approaches come from central service teams – primarily because they haven’t been brought in on their role in the imperative and what must be done.
- Expand the list of “what must be true.” For our beans we needed soil, light and moisture. Similarly, in your strategy formation, your facilitator helped you to lay a solid foundation of what the environment is and what you expect it to be. This should give you insight into what must be happening to confirm you are on the right track. Expand it, listen for it and clarify it. Set the listening posts, create the metrics, and review them regularly. Engage your most insightful partners in a quest to be objective.
- Refine the strategic hypothesis. If we put seeds in the soil and nurture them, then in 8-10 days we’ll have bean plants. Every strategy pivots around the sentence “if (we do this) then we expect (this positive result) and we’ll know it because (of this measurement).” Ultimately, every strategic move starts as a highly informed guess that is confirmed at first by intuition and then by data analysis, then with experiments that confirm portions of the hypothesis, then finally the full hypothesis as the throttle is pushed up.
- Be vigilant for disconfirming information, but don’t panic. If it gets to be 9 days with no bean plants, don’t empty all the dirt out to see what happens. It is so easy to build a high confirmation bias at the early stages, that when a negative point or issue emerges, it can be very unsettling. Experience tells us that these are usually refinements to the scope of application and not full out reversals of a well-planned strategy.
- Work hard to find the “slipping clutch.” Do the lights go out in the classroom at 7pm and come back in the morning? Is someone being too helpful and pouring too much water on the plants? It’s really hard to connect the 30,000 foot strategy to the front lines of the customer at 4 pm on a Tuesday. Go there. Get out of the office and find those real issues that are keeping your hard won strategic insight from creating value for your customers and clients.
I’ve sat in that chair, felt the uncertainty, and experienced the sleepless nights.
The good news is that I’ve found, through that experience (and as a right-hand advisor to complex firms for the last decade), a rock-solid framework that executive teams can use as a diagnostic and prioritization tool to build a path forward that provides actionable confidence, leveraged direction and internal clarity.
If you are embarking on a high-stakes, irreversible journey, the time to take the best actions for success is now, pre-deployment. Already pulled the trigger? We can help there as well – it just makes for a more complex starting point.
If you’d like to connect with me, I reserve time for 20 minute, non-salesy insight calls for leaders like you. If you’d like to learn more, please schedule directly using this link, or reach out to me at scott@scottpropp.com.
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