They don't get the strategy

"They don't get the strategy!"

These were precisely the words the chief executive used: ‘They don’t get the strategy’. This was not a small company: it was listed on the FTSE100. It was not a particularly new strategy, as they had been implementing it for around two years. It wasn’t a particularly new management team, and the chief executive had been in post around four years. It was a well researched and documented strategy. It was so well documented that it took me a week to go through all the strategy documents I had been given as background reading.

Yet the chief executive was still frustrated. As far as he was concerned, ‘They didn’t get the strategy’. If they don’t get it, then it is unlikely to be implemented or deliver the results. He was right to be frustrated.

He is not alone and the problem is not peculiar to his type of organization. I have heard this complaint, in all sorts of organizations from large commercial, to public sector bodies, from medium sized listed companies, to family and privately owned organizations. Despite all the valiant efforts of the management team, the message is not getting through as intended by as the person who conceived it.

Yet some organizations communicate their strategy really well. They manage to communicate what they want to achieve and how they will go about it. They get people motivated and remove the blocks that have prevented the strategy from working in the past; blocks that may be deeply embedded within the culture of the organization. They get people behind the strategy, adding to it and making it work in their part of the business. In short, they make it happen.

This book is about what you can do to make the difference in communicating your strategy. It provides you with the tools you can use to plan how the strategy will be communicated. It presents techniques to help communicate the strategy. It equips you with ways to think about how strategy is communicated, analyze what might have gone wrong in the past and make decisions about the best way to get your strategy across. There are some techniques you will be able to apply immediately and others you can incorporate into your communication plans.

You will also find out why I say, "All plans should be burnt"

Phil Jones, Author Communicating Strategy

You can't swim in sea salt

Do you ask your staff to boil down a message to a single page? Do you find that you are being asked to boil down and shorten down documents? "Just give me the one page version" they say.

I was chatting to a client who was getting frustrated by this. He was being asked to set out how his team help the management to address strategic planning and performance management. Yet the requests were for shorter and shorter documents, despite the complexity of the organisation and the way the planning process was being run.

He was lamenting the fact that they were becoming so short it was impossible to put any content of value in them. He was being asked to boil down the message to something so short and simple it was becoming meaningless.

As he spoke I had this image of a flask of sea water in chemistry lessons at school. As the flask was heated by the Bunsen burner it boiled away until all that was left in the bottom of the flask was a thin residue of the few solids that were originally dissolved in the water. The sea salt.

Whilst this was useful in Chemistry, it is useful in management terms. Whilst you can swim in the sea, when all the water is boiled away, you can no longer swim in it. Hence the phrase that shot into my head, "You can't swim in sea salt"

Ok its an odd thought. You can take this further. As the salt is concentrated (before it is fully boiled away) you end up with a concentrate that is like the dead sea. The salt is so concentrated that you float in the water and never get immersed.

I know - its stretching the point, but its a big issue. Of course managers want a simple message - but not simplistic. Staff need to take time to think through their message and get it across well. You can't use the excuse, "I didn't have time to write you a short letter so I wrote you a long one"

But management have a responsibility also. They need to spend time on issues and look at the detail and the depth. Otherwise they float across the top never immersing themselves in the detail, never getting wet.

This was the concern of my colleague. He was concerned that in boiling it down too far, there was nothing left of substance. The subtleties were not there, the risks could not be spelled out and the implications for others were lost.

Of course this is true when the strategy is being communicated and for many other aspects of management. I suggest you apply the "All plans should be burnt test?" If you lost the memo, would the implications still be in people's heads?

So if you are a manager be sure you do not boil the ocean down to nothing. If you are helping your managers there will be times when you need to say, "This is more subtle than that - and I need you to help".

Boil away, but in the end - you can't swim in sea salt.

Phil

"All plans should be burnt"

"All plans should be burnt"

Recently the managing Director of a client organisation was presenting their strategy to the senior managers. He started by openly admitted that he got the phrase "All plans should be burnt" from me and said he would do the same.

However, as there were smoke detectors in the room, he had to rip the strategy up rather than burn it. So he did.

The reason I say, "All plans should be burnt" is very simple.

People are making decisions on a day to day basis that influence the strategy. Thy do not refer to plans every 5 minutes. They rely on what is in their heads.

If the organisation's strategy and plans are in people's heads, then people act on them and they get executed. In this case it is safe to burn them as the plans have served their purpose of communicating the strategy.

If the plans are not in peoples' heads, then they are being ignored, are a waste of time, and might as well be burnt.

So all plans should be burnt.

Of course auditors don't like this, but what does that matter. If they want to find out whether the strategy is understood and working, they can do the same as anyone else. If a strategy is sitting on a shelf it is not being implemented. Go and ask those who should be implementing it.

Phil Jones
Author "Communicating Strategy"