#114: Execution: Creating a 'dialtone'

In an earlier blog, we talked about the expectation of a 'dialtone' and how that represents an unstated expectation of customers and stakeholders.

At the heart of it, strategy execution is all about creating a 'dialtone'. I.e., creating value in a consistent and predictable manner.

Whatever your profession, calling, initiative or project, you are working to create a dialtone. I.e. you start with a situation that is not understood, issues are possibly clouded by fallacies and urban legends. You work thru the issues one by one till you can evolve a repeatable process to deliver value in a consistent and predictable manner.

Your every effort builds upon experience and existing capabilities. Even new capabilities are created using existing capabilities. It follows that none of your efforts are truly one off (I am trying to think of examples of truly one off projects and failing). At the physical level, you can never create 'something out of nothing', though it reads very well in marketing literature and performance reviews.

What is needed is the ability to solving problems effortlessly and consistently, handling unexpected situations, and aligned to org strategy, vision and mission. Use friction and conflict to discover missing capabilities.

#113: Fear

The feeling of dread. The fear of the unknown. What is slipping between the cracks? What is going to happen next?

This can range from the mild tension that enhances performance, to debilitating anxiety and paranoia.

If this is happening to you, the first thing to acknowledge that unless some unlawful or illegal act is being committed, this is your problem. No one is "doing it to you." You can choose to be a victim or relish the challenge of looking for the positive while working to turn things around.

The world is not perfect, it never was and never will be. Sometimes it is unclear how words like 'control' and 'predictability' even made it to the dictionary. Maybe these words describe a desire, not a fact.

Paradoxically, if you buy into the previous statement, the anxiety begins to fall away. The feeling and the need to 'cling' on to a safety net will disappear. It may not help solve the problem at hand, but you will feel happier. Not to mention, you will no longer be a pain-in-the-rear to your co-workers by reacting to your inner anxieties.

#112: Bootstrapping the planning process

Everyone knows planning in advance is a good thing. (Well, is there any other time and place to plan!) However, inertia is common and getting started requires an act of calamity. When the need to plan is recognized (at which point it moves from 'planning' to 'damage control'), everyone complains they are "behind."

It is not a matter of skill. Though planning skills are not hard to acquire, its important to learn the planning process in advance and not struggle with the process in the course of planning. Fed up with the ad hoc nature of doing business, organizations institute an annual planning process. However, the need to plan is not a once-a-year effort. It is required at the start of every initiative, program and project.

What is the sense of urgency that will get teams to plan? It often comes down to strong leadership. If the boss asks for a plan, the wheels begin to move.

Planning is the starting point to building a playbook for executing strategy. If planning does not occur, then the playbook is build tacitly, this will work for only the smallest endeavors, if at all. Organizational learning will remain 'tribal knowledge'. This means the organization will not scale as communication requires close human contact to teach and learn.

The planning process is not a game changer, getting the team to start planning is.

#111: Logomachy

Derived from Greek (logos 'word' and makhia 'fighting'), this represents an 'argument about words'.

Diversity brings benefits, but one challenge is reconciling different perspectives. The perspectives are often expressed in language and the choice of words often creates barriers instead of bringing them down.

"What is it?" should be followed by "What should we call it?"

Amazingly, this simple act will swiftly remove confusion and allow teams to focus on the essence of the problem or opportunity. Wisdom is achieved when the participants in a dialogue realize that conflict over what to call something is unproductive and dysfunctional. Understanding and agreeing what 'it is' is crucial.

The paradox is, you have to describe what 'it is' in order to agree on what 'it is'. This is a partial explanation for complexity in understanding and agreeing what 'it is'. Small wonder that groups have to work through communication gaps, frustration and chaos to answer the above two 'simple' questions.

#110: Creativity & Structure: Timing

Almost all problems, big and small, go thru this pattern.

In the initial stage:

• Its more important to be effective.
• Select a strategy (that means saying 'no' more than saying 'yes').
• Prioritize and focus on what is important.
• Resist the temptation to get carried away with 'gloom and doom' predictions or with cause and effect proposals that have not been tested and verified.
• Take baby steps till clarity on problems/opportunity arises.
  

In the latter stage:

• Its more important to be efficient.
• Do more with less.
• Capacity utilization is critical.

Each stage requires specific behaviors and techniques. Misapplication of either leads to wasted effort and frustration. Find out which stage you are in and then plan for success.

#109: Sniff Tests (vs. Gut Checks)

'Sniff tests' are similar to 'gut checks', with one subtle distinction.

Gut checks implies intuition and a self-awareness. It has to 'feel right'. This has a very important place in decision making for several reasons:

• Often, there is no data available to analyze. Either because the endeavour is so new that no one knows anything about it, or because no capabilities exist to collect and analyze data.
• Even when data is available, it may be presented in a self-serving way. The decision maker has to cut thru the clutter to get to what is super critical and ignore the biases created by the 'noise' of irrelevant information.
• With increase in experience and battle scars, thee is a tendency to trust one's gut more than the data.

Sniff tests implies that you are collecting data from an external source. After all, you cannot 'sniff your gut', even if you could, I doubt if it will smell differently based on the data you are analyzing.

A sniff test is like testing a perfume before buying the whole bottle. Another example is to reach out and look for opinions and data on whether a course of action has any merit.

As you may have guessed, because a sniff test collect so little data, gut check is still required to take a decision!

#108: Trade offs and sweet spots

This graph shows the business scenario of customer dissatisfaction. If a customer complains you can handle it one of two ways:

• Give a refund or an exchange, no questions asked.
• Make the customer justify the dissatisfaction and only the very serious will pursue indemnity.

Or you could have a combination of both. More of one means less of the other. Finding the point on the curve for your business is the first challenge. Industry norms, your operating philosophy and the nature of your product or service will dictate the 'sweet spot'. In addition to finding the sweet spot, you have to worry about executing on the promises made to the customer. Its all very well to say you will give a refund, but setting up the logistics of packing the product, shipping, paying for shipping and refunding the money are just some of the processes that need to work flawlessly. For a service, you may be required to deliver it again. Then there are the processes to capture the incidents and costs so analytics can be generated for future planning.

Treat identifying trade offs and their sweet spots followed by setting up operational processes to execute on the promises as one package for getting and keeping happy customers.

#107: Comfort versus structure

Lower the comfort, the higher the structure desired. The tendency is to stay with the familiar and take risk cautiously, if at all. As comfort increases, the desire to experiment grows, structure just gets in the way. At the highest level of comfort, behavior is almost instinctive, with the minimum of conscious thought.

As you break down the tasks that need to be done to execute your strategy, check your comfort level to determine how much structure you need. If the task you need to get done has been done before, its easier. You can acquire that knowledge by benchmarking or by hiring talent. If the task has not been done before, you can still create a semblance of structure by:

• Putting out decision gates to align progress with capabilities and readiness.
• Defining decision criteria to eliminate options that make no sense.
• Framing up the problem so efforts are focused.
  

#106: What if I CAN'T plan?

Lack of planning is often ridiculed in conversations, articles, books and blogs. There may be times where it is may seem okay NOT to plan:

• When you have no idea what to do and sitting idle is not an option.
• When you are in a start up and there are known and obvious issues to tackle.

At some point, it may be time to stop the madness and plan.

Why plan? The main outcome is to anticipate scenarios. This has several benefits if you get it right:

• Execution efforts are economical, learning by trial and error is always more expensive.
• Blunders are avoided.
• Friction and angst in execution are lowered as roles and responsibilities are clarified.
• Risk is reduced by eliminating options that make no sense at all.
• Bonus: Conversations, if facilitated well, lead to clarity, bonding and thereby to high performance teamwork.
  

If you don't get it right, you still come out ahead:

• Changing a plan from a baseline provides an opportunity to do so in a rational way (as opposed to an emotional way).
• A closed-loop learning process can be implemented to improve the planning process as well as the planning results. E.g., use the 'lessons learnt' from the plan that did not work to improve. If there was no plan, the actions were random. Yes, something can be learnt but a faulty process means no predictability in the output, so the learning is probably not going to lead to the root causes of failure.

In summary, a lack of planning points to the need for deeper analysis and understanding of the organization's situation. Asking 'why can't you plan?' will uncover some fundamental issues and barriers. Tackle that first, then get on with the job of planning.

#105: Creativity versus accounting

Strategy execution requires two kinds of work: the 'creative' and the 'accounting'.

'Creative' work requires 'problem solving':

• Discovering and inventing strategy.
• Developing new product and service offerings.
• 'Dive and catch' efforts to resolve operational challenges.
• Connecting the dots and bringing order from chaos.
  

The 'accounting' work is the tedious effort of managing the details:

• Getting an inventory of existing initiatives, programs and projects.
• Reporting status.
• Collecting and analyzing data and metrics to measure success.
• Validating that the portfolio of initiatives, programs and projects are internally consistent and aligned with customer outcomes.
• Stopping initiatives, programs and projects that are not aligned with customer outcomes.
  

Both are important. Each has a different skill set. People inclined towards one type of activity or the other: the type of people who excel in one will drive the other crazy.

The most damaging leadership behaviors are:

• Putting a creative person in an accounting role and vice versa.
• Punishing the creative people for being creative and the accountant for paying attention to detail.

Align both types to customer outcomes. This will let each type of person be themselves but focus on what is most important: customer outcomes.

#104: A barrier to action

There are times when we feel or realize that we have no control over events and outcomes. Zen masters know this to be a law of nature, but when the less enlightened first realize this, they are overcome by doom and gloom.

An initial reaction is one of 'fatalism', a feeling that events are pre-destined and if it is to be, or not to be, it will be or not be. Therefore, why bother trying to change it? There are two problems with this conclusion:

• It leads to a passive, cynical and negative approach to problem solving.
• Its no fun both for the person who has this outlook and for people who have to interact with this person.
  

If you have to be fatalistic, be so only about the past.

A different approach is to accept the realization that we have no control over anything except our actions. This will result in the following benefits:

• You will learn to live in the moment.
  
• You will put in the best effort you can and not worry about the results. Because that is all you can do, that is all you must do.
• Failures and successes will cease to sway you. Because you have little control over events and outcomes, how can you take the full blame or full success for the bad and good things that happen? A nice side benefit, this may help reduce the hubris that follows success and depression that follows failure.

Leaders have to demonstrate that control is not needed to get things done and be the role model for those who seek security and emotional refuge in 'control'.