Strategy-Culture Bicycle – Faster Than 20

The Emperor Has No Clothes: Acting Strategically While Recovering from Process Trauma

A huge part of my job over the years has been helping groups recover from Process Trauma (and its ugly cousin Consultant Trauma). It’s caused when a group goes through some kind of process, such as strategic planning, and has a horrible experience. It almost always results in the group deciding never to pursue that process again unless they’re forced to, which exacerbates the trauma.

As empathetic as I am to Process Trauma, I am troubled that groups tend to give up on process rather than making adjustments and trying again. If I have a bad experience with a personal fitness trainer, I’m not going to give up on exercise as a path to getting healthier. Why do we do this with our work?

I think it’s because people often don’t understand why they’re going through a process in the first place. Instead of pressing for clarity, most folks accept it without questioning it. It’s the organizational version of the Emperor’s New Clothes. People assume that others must know better, or they’re intimidated by the terminology, and they give in.

Strategy work is rife with Process Trauma. However, strategy work matters because acting strategically matters. It’s the difference between systematically working toward your higher purpose and flailing in the weeds, trying to put out fires wherever you see them. It’s the difference between flowing in alignment with others and moving at cross-purposes. It’s the difference between success and failure.

I recently put together a short video where I explain what strategy is, how to develop good strategy, and how to build strong strategic muscles:

I hope this video helps people recover from Process Trauma while also clarifying why and how to do this work. I want to empower folks to speak up when the Emperor has no clothes. I want people to understand that skilled practitioners aren’t good at coming up with answers, but at helping the group ask and explore the right questions. I want people to understand that all good strategy is collective and emergent.

I also hope this video helps folks understand why tools like the Strategy / Culture Bicycle are designed the way they are and imagine alternative ways of using them. There’s no one right way to develop good strategy. It’s critical that groups approach it as something they need to figure out for themselves, which takes time and practice.

I would love to start a larger conversation about how to align around good strategy. Many strategy consultants are not intentional about helping groups align, which is why their processes often fail. However, collaboration practitioners who are intentional about alignment often stop there rather than making sure that what they align around is good. I touch on some of this in the video, but the devil is always in the details.

What strikes me about Hans Christian Andersen’s version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is that the emperor keeps walking, naked as the day he was born, head held high, even after the crowd starts hooting at him. Strategy is hard. If you’re not struggling at it, you’re probably not doing it right. But stubbornly marching ahead, ignoring the people around you, guarantees Process Trauma and failure. Good things happen when people know the purpose of a process, make adjustments when they struggle, and practice, practice, practice.

Thanks to H. Jessica Kim for reviewing an early draft of this post. Photo by Png Nexus, CC BY NC-ND 2.0.

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“Balance Bikes” for Group Process

In 2013, I left the consulting firm I cofounded, because I wanted to figure out how I could make more of an impact with my work. Specifically, I wanted to figure out how to help groups collaborate more effectively in ways that did not require consulting support.

My hypothesis was simple. Collaboration is a craft, and as with all crafts — from sports to music — you get better through lots and lots of practice. My goal was to come up with ways to help people practice.

Initially, I was biased against tool development as a possible path to scale, largely because I felt that most people viewed tools as a silver bullet whose mere presence would magically make any group better. Even though this was the opposite of how I viewed tools, I didn’t want to unintentionally contribute to this problematic mindset, which I felt discouraged practice.

However, an unexpected conversation at a party changed my mind. I was catching up with a friend from college whom I hadn’t seen in years. He mentioned that he had gotten into bike racing, and we started discussing the joy and pain of learning something new as adults. That’s when he introduced me to balance bikes.

Most people my age learned how to ride bicycles either via brute force (keep trying and trying until you figure it out) or training wheels. The theory behind training wheels is that learning how to ride a bike is hard because people are afraid of falling. Training wheels eliminate that fear.

However, as my friend explained, the other reason that learning how to ride a bike is hard is that it requires balance, and balance takes practice to develop. Training wheels act as a crutch, and hence, discourage you from learning balance.

Balance bikes are low bikes without pedals. Kids (and unfortunately, I have only seen them designed for kids) propel themselves by pushing with their feet, then lifting their feet and gliding for as long as possible. They don’t fear falling, because they can put their feet on the ground any time. However, balance bikes also encourage you to glide (which is what makes riding bikes so fun), and, in doing so, encourages you to practice balancing.

Every tool that I’ve shared on this site is meant to be like a balance bike. They were designed to help you practice and develop strong muscles and habits around group process. You can keep using them for as long as you find them useful, but what matters most for your group’s effectiveness is that you continue to develop the right muscles, regardless of how.

For example, the Strategy / Culture Bicycle (whose name is a nod to how useful I find bicycle metaphors) is designed to help you develop stronger strategy muscles. When I facilitate strategy for groups, I usually eschew the Bicycle, instead custom designing processes based on the challenge at hand and the group’s readiness. However, these processes embody the same principles as the Bicycle. If you don’t have the know-how to custom design something, practicing with the Bicycle will help you develop that know-how.

I’m currently piloting a community of practice focused on using the Goals / Success Spectrum to build more strategic and collaborative muscles. I’m heartened to see how quickly people progress after just a few repetitions, and I’m even more excited about the few who are starting to realize that their quick progress is just the tip of the iceberg, that the real possibility comes from regular repetition and reflection. My hope is for everyone who uses my tools (however they come to them) to understand this — that it’s not about the tools themselves, but about building strong muscles, mindsets, and habits.

Photo by Strider Bikes. CC BY-ND.

Do-It-Yourself Strategy and Culture

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:

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.