John Cutler

When I first chat with teams, I explore the following:

• Is the strategy implicit or explicit?
• Is the strategy coherent and plausible?
• Is it the "right" strategy, or at least a less-wrong strategy?
• Is the organization designed to support the strategy?
• If the landscape/climate is in a period of flux, can the strategy and the org design "keep up" with those shifts? Can it adapt?

Why is this important? Many teams are in limbo.

A new leader arrives pushing for a new strategy. The new strategy seems good on the surface but lacks depth; it's not explicit and coherent. The existing ("old") strategy is implicit. No one can explain it, or why things are they way they are, but somehow people have internalized it. There's so much inertia and ambiguity.

I often learn this is happening when I do a workshop. We clarify the new strategy. We break it down and make it explicit. We surface our beliefs and assumptions, as well as where we are more and less certain. So far so good. Everyone seems to agree!

But when I check back in two months, nothing much has happened. Why? The team is trying to do the new thing using the old way. "Well, those teams can't collaborate." "Everyone seems to be dependent on Team X." "We have a team with nothing to do, that can't work on the most important work." "There's so much debt to deal with."

This can go on for months and months. Years sometimes. With lots finger pointing and impatience. I make it sound simple here, but on the inside this manifests as a sort of persistent low level cognitive dissonance. No one can exactly place the problem. It's a wicked problem.

Then the kicker. The landscape/climate changes as it always does. They've failed to show progress, and the whole cycle begins anew. Enter the new leader arriving with a new strategy.

Some observations:

1. Many organizations have a tough time decoupling strategy from structure. The way they commute strategy is to talk about which teams are doing what. In their mind, strategy and structure are one and the same. The net effect is that some teams don't even acknowledge that they are shipping their org chart. Tip: Always describe your strategy (and the capabilities to support that strategy) in an org-chart agnostic way. At least at first.
2. It is so tempting to jump to the new way without making the current way—and the current strategy—explicit. No one has the patience for "dredging up the past!" By glossing that over, leaders fail to acknowledge the shifts and support required. Tip: Take some time to understand the way things are now. Honor how things are. You’ll want to jump ahead. Don’t!
3. Teams are likely to believe that they can absorb the revised strategy into their existing structure. No one likes shifting things around. Tip: Ask how you can make it safer to restructure continuously as needed.
4. When things are in flux, you'll need an org design that can roll with the changes. And this will be, almost by definition, not "optimal" for some specific problems. Tip: Get meta. How do you design a team for shifting strategies?
5. Some companies are on the right track. They need to make the current strategy a bit more explicit to aid in focus. Tip: Make it explicit.

I hope these questions and thoughts were helpful. This seems like common sense, I'm sure, but it seems to be easy to get caught in the loop I described above. I think the primary reason here is that org design decisions are often difficult to unwind. They are seen as big-bang vs. something we can do incrementally. We start slipping into framing strategies that are accomplishable with the current structure instead of designing the org based on our strategy (and to be able to accommodate future strategies).