Planning Isn’t Helpful If You Can’t Remember Your Agreements

When my friend, Kristin Cobble, and I founded Groupaya, my previous consulting firm, in 2011, one of our goals was to model the best practices of high-performing groups. We didn’t want to just help other groups develop these skills and habits. We wanted to show what a high-performance group looked like.

One habit we were sure we’d adopt was making time to talk together about strategy and culture. In our planning stage, our associate, Rebecca Petzel, facilitated us through a number of important conversations, including one about our values. We eventually converged on six words that we thought best represented our most important shared values.

I was proud, even smug about the time we had invested in this work. In my mind, we were modeling what it meant to be a values-driven company. So I was taken aback when, six months later, Rebecca asked us if we could name our six values, and both Kristin and I could only name four between us.

What was the point of coming up with a list of values if we couldn’t remember what they were?

Entrepreneur and investor, Marc Andreessen, once said, “The process of planning is very valuable, for forcing you to think hard about what you are doing, but the actual plan that results from it is probably useless.” In some ways, this was true for us. Because of the conversations we had had with each other, we were more aligned, and we understood and trusted each other more. Furthermore, even though we didn’t remember all six of our words, we still cared deeply about each and every one of those values, and our work reflected this. How your values come through in your actions is the point of values work, not the list itself.

However, what if we hadn’t been living the values that we had named? How would anyone have known? The problem wasn’t that we couldn’t remember our six words. The problem was that we weren’t constantly thinking together about them, talking together about them, reflecting together on what it meant to live them. We weren’t holding ourselves accountable to our values, because we weren’t taking the time to assess ourselves. We were making it hard to stay aligned around our values, because we weren’t taking the time to talk about what this meant and why it was important.

I was embarrassed, but I also knew that we weren’t alone. Donald Sull, a senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, asked middle managers at over 250 companies to list their companies’ top five strategic priorities. Half of them could not even remember one. Only a third could remember two. Even worse, only half said they understood the connections between their companies’ priorities and initiatives. They had seen the priorities plenty of times — almost 90 percent said that top leaders communicated the strategy frequently enough. Those who remembered them just didn’t understand them.

Once we recognized the problem, we were able to fix it. But I’m amazed by how many leaders and consultants make the same mistakes that we made… and keep making them. It starts by understanding what the mistakes are.

The first mistake is not making time for the whole team to talk about strategy and culture.

The second mistake is assuming that your work is done after one meeting.

My colleague, Catherine Madden, made this wonderful video last year about psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus’s pioneering research around memory and the “Forgetting Curve” for Edutopia.

The brilliant Nicky Case took these concepts even further in this interactive explanation of how you counter the Forgetting Curve. I highly recommend that everyone look at both, but I’ll summarize their key points here:

  • In the 1880s, Ebbinghaus found that — without any reinforcement — we forget what we learn or hear at an exponential rate. After just one hour, we will already forget half of what we’ve learned. After one day, we will forget two-thirds.
  • There are a number of ways to counter this. The basic one is to reinforce what you learn. But you have to do it quickly, and you have to do it repetitively, because doing it once only slows down the curve. (Explore Nicky’s explanation of spaced repetition to understand this more deeply.)
  • Some methods are more effective at reinforcing than others, specifically peer learning and visualizations.

Given this, what’s the right way to do strategy and culture work? The first step is to create space for the whole group to discuss strategy and culture. However, if all you’re doing is scheduling one meeting, you’re doing it wrong, regardless of how expertly you design or facilitate it. You also need to:

  • Write down the agreements from the meeting. Bonus points if you use pictures. More bonus points if the participants themselves draw the pictures. (As an aside, this also applies to next steps and decisions made at any meeting. If you don’t write them down, they might as well not have happened.)
  • Make sure everyone knows where the agreements are. Put them somewhere where everyone will see them often. (Again, this also applies to next steps and decisions made.) My colleague, Rachel Weidinger, has a great trick with remote teams. She’ll have her teammates print their agreements, post them somewhere near their workspaces, and take and share photos of where they put them so that everyone else knows that they’ve done this. It creates accountability, and it also lets people see each other workspaces, which has other benefits with remote work.
  • Schedule followups at the same time as you’re planning your meeting. These could take many forms. They could be pair conversations, they could be designated time at the beginning or end of regular standup meetings or checkins, they could be regularly scheduled reviews of the artifacts, etc. Be creative — they don’t have to be meetings. What matters most is doing these repetitively and frequently.

None of this is easy. Doing them doesn’t mean that you’ll succeed, but not doing them guarantees that you’ll fail.

Do-It-Yourself Strategy and Culture

Biker

In 2009, I was asked by the Wikimedia Foundation to design and lead a movement-wide strategic planning process. The goal was to create a high-quality, five-year strategic plan the same way that Wikipedia was created — by creating a space where anyone in the world who cared could come and literally co-author the plan.

We had two fundamental challenges. First, it wasn’t enough to simply have a plan. It had to be a good plan that some significant percentage of the movement both understood and felt ownership over.

Second, we were asking people in the community to develop a strategy, but most people had no idea what strategy was. (This, frankly, is true of people in general, even in business.) It was different from Wikipedia in that most people already have a mental model of what an encyclopedia is. We had to be more concrete about what it was that we were asking people to do.

I explained that strategic planning, when done well, consists of collectively exploring four basic questions:

  • Where are we now?
  • Where do we want to go? Why?
  • How do we get there?

I further explained that we were going to create a website with these questions, we were going to get as many people as possible to explore these questions on that website, and by the end of the year, we would have our movement-wide, five-year strategic plan.

And that’s essentially what we did.

Get the right people to explore core questions together. Where are we now? Where do we want to go, and why? How do we get there? Provide the space and the support to help these people have the most effective conversation possible. Trust that something good will emerge and that those who created it will feel ownership over it.

This is how I’ve always done strategy, regardless of the size or shape of the group. It looks different every time, but the basic principles are always the same. People were intrigued by what we accomplished with Wikimedia, because it was global and primarily online, because we had gaudy results, and because Wikipedia is a sexy project. However, I was simply using the same basic approach that I use when working with small teams and even my own life.

The craft of developing strategy is figuring out how best to explore these core questions. It’s not hard to come up with answers. The challenge is coming up with good answers. To do that, you need to give the right people the opportunity and the space to struggle over these questions. That process doesn’t just result in better answers. It results in greater ownership over those answers.

Breakfast and Culture

What’s your strategy for eating breakfast in the morning?

Are you a grab-and-run person, either from your own kitchen or from a coffee shop near your office? Eating breakfast at home is cheaper than eating out, but eating out might be faster. Are you optimizing for time or money? Why?

Maybe you have kids, and you value the ritual of kicking off the day eating together? Maybe you’re a night owl, and you’d rather get an extra 30-minutes of sleep than worry about eating at all in the morning.

Where do you want to go? Why? How do you get there? These are key strategic questions, but you can’t answer them without also considering culture — your patterns of behavior, your values, your mindsets, your identity. Choosing to cook your own meals is as much a cultural decision as it is a strategic one.

In my past life as a collaboration consultant, groups would hire me to help with either strategy or culture, but never both. I realized fairly quickly that trying to separate those two processes was largely artificial, that you couldn’t explore one without inevitably colliding with the other.

Peter Drucker famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” He did not intend to say that one was more important than the other, but that both were necessarily intertwined. Or, as my friend, Jeff Hwang, has more accurately put it, “Saying culture eats strategy for breakfast is like saying your left foot eats your right foot for breakfast. You need both.”

As with strategy, culture work is a process of collective inquiry, except instead of focusing on action (where do you want to go?), the questions are centered around identity:

  • Who are we now?
  • Who do we want to be, and why?
  • How do we get there?

The key to effective culture work is to explore these questions yourself, to struggle over them together as a group, and to constantly revisit them as you try things and learn.

DIY Strategy and Culture

Toward the end of 2013, Dharmishta Rood, who was then managing Code for America’s startups program, asked me if I would mentor one of its incubator companies, which was having some challenges around communication and decision-making. I had been toying with some ideas for a do-it-yourself toolkit that would help groups develop better collaborative habits on their own, and I suggested that we start there.

We immediately ran into problems. The toolkit assumed that the group was already aligned around a core strategy, but with this group, that wasn’t the case. They had been going, going, going without stopping to step back and ask themselves what they were trying to accomplish, how they wanted to accomplish those things, and why. (This is very typical with startups.)

This group needed space to do some core work around strategy and culture. I threw out my old toolkit and created a new one designed to help groups have strategy and culture conversations continuously and productively on their own. The revised toolkit was based on the key questions underlying strategy and culture depicted as two cyclical loops:

Strategy / Culture Questions

While most strategy or culture processes are progressively staged, in practice, inquiry is never linear, nor should it be. Spending time on one question surfaces new insights into the other questions, and vice-versa. Where you start and the order in which you go are not important. What matters is that you get to all of the questions eventually and that you revisit them constantly — hence the two cycles. My colleague, Kate Wing, recently noted the resemblance of the diagram to bicycle wheels, which is why we now call it the Strategy-Culture Bicycle.

Dharmishta and I saw the Bicycle pay immediate dividends with this group. People were able to wade through the complexity and overwhelm, notice and celebrate what they had already accomplished, and identify high-priority questions that needed further discussion. Furthermore, the process was simple enough that it did not require a third-party’s assistance. They were able to do it fine on their own, and they would get better at it as they practiced.

Pleased and a bit surprised by its effectiveness, I asked my long-time colleague, Amy Wu of Duende, to partner with me on these toolkits. We prototyped another version of the toolkit with four of last year’s Code for America accelerator companies, and once again, saw great success.

We’ve gone through eight iterations together, we’ve tested the kit with over a dozen groups and individuals (for personal and professional life planning), and we’ve added some complementary components. A number of practitioners have used the toolkit on their own to help other groups, including me, Dharmishta, Amy, Kate, and Rebecca Petzel.

I’m thrilled by the potential of toolkits like these to help build the capacity of practitioners to act more strategically and to design their aspired culture. As with all of my work, these toolkits are available here and are public domain, meaning that they are freely available and that you can do anything you want with them. You can also purchase pre-printed packages.

Please use them, share them, and share your experiences! Your feedback will help us continuously improve them.

Three Steps for Acting Strategically: Get Clear, Stay Clear, Practice

Sunrise Over San Francisco

All good consultants — no matter what the field — are strategy consultants in disguise.

I was a collaboration consultant for over a decade, which meant that my job was to do whatever it took to help groups collaborate more effectively. Collaboration is about working together toward a shared goal, and I naturally thought that my focus would be on the “working together” part. However, more often than not, the “shared goal” piece ended up becoming the crux of my work. I was not explicitly in the business of helping groups develop strategy, but that’s often what the job entailed.

Good strategy consultants are many things, but fundamentally, they are good at asking “what” and “why” questions:

What are you trying to accomplish?

Why?

Why really?

Good technical consultants — from communications to design to evaluation to technology — do the exact same thing. They can’t do their work effectively without understanding your what and why, and their jobs often necessitate helping you figure out your answers to those questions.

Really good consultants help groups figure out their answers to these questions in a collaborative way. (This is why good collaboration consultants make good strategy consultants.) You’re creating space and time for them to have conversations that they probably wouldn’t otherwise be having. Skilled consultants are good at both creating the space and helping to guide the conversation in that space — which, at its core, consists of asking good “what” and “why” questions.

Making space for conversation and asking good questions. Do we really need to hire consultants for this?

My exploration over the past year has been about scaling collaborative literacy. As a consultant, I was able to hone my own collaborative literacy and apply it toward client projects. When I started thinking about how others could develop this same proficiency, I started by asking myself, “What do I do that’s valuable and that anyone else could also do?” I came up with a list, which included making space for conversation and asking good questions.

I then asked, “What am I really doing when I do these things?” I came up with three things:

  1. Get clear.
  2. Stay clear.
  3. Practice.

This, in a nutshell, is the essence of acting strategically. All of the special tools and methodologies that good strategy consultants use are in service of these three things in concert. When groups stray, it’s because they’re not applying these tools in service of getting clear, staying clear, and practicing. It has to be all three. Just doing one or two doesn’t cut it.

I truly believe that anyone can learn how to do these three things well. All it requires is time, commitment, and intentionality. The first time you do it, you will be terrible at it, or at least very mediocre. Nevertheless, you will still find the process valuable. Furthermore, if you are intentional about learning and trying over and over again, you will eventually become great at it. Having external support — be it consultants, colleagues, or friends — can accelerate and enhance this process. Regardless of whether or not you seek additional help, all groups should be doing these things themselves.

I’ve been experimenting with a set of very simple do-it-yourself tools for developing strategy and culture, which I’ll be unveiling here next month (although if you’re interested in a preview, email me, or leave a comment below). They are designed to support anyone in the process of getting clear and staying clear, and they require no special skills or experience to use. The practice part is up to you. It’s been both humbling and gratifying to watch our testers use these tools. On the one hand, testing has surfaced a lot of faulty assumptions, which has forced me and my colleagues to go back to the drawing board. On the other hand, our testers are getting great value out of using these tools, even in their rough forms.

All good consultants are strategy consultants in disguise, but everyone is capable of doing what strategy consultants do… and more. I am incredibly excited about the potential of scaling this literacy, so that this kind of consulting becomes a niche, not a proxy for doing the kind of work we all can and should be doing ourselves. Get clear, stay clear, practice.