Don't ignore the neon signs in your organization

The value in discarding approaches that aren't working within your organization.

Hello everyone 👋

This week we are talking about a perplexing phenomenon we all face in our personal and professional lives. Why do we keep doing something that is not working? 

I. The neon signs in our lives

I’m always looking for small comments with large repercussions, especially those comments made in passing. For example, in a recent strategy session, the president of the organization said, “we have been trying to expand our services into a specific market for years, without much success. Can you help us?”

From the perspective of the president, that was meant as an invitation to start brainstorming ideas on how to finally make the expansion work. From my perspective, it was a huge neon sign that his team needs to do something drastically different. 

There’s a belief in our culture that if we work at something hard enough, we can eventually achieve it. The only thing stopping us from reaching our goal is a lack of determination. Organizations can fall prey to the same trap, going after the same goal over and over again, without much progress.

Business stories in the press tells us about the founder who was broke for many years until one day everything clicked. He or she kept pressing on, doing the same thing until there was a breakthrough.

There are two things wrong with these kinds of stories.

1. We don’t always know the full details. Perhaps the founder met the right person by chance or perhaps they had other elements in their personal background that helped them achieve success.

2. We don’t hear about the many other organizations who are no longer around, even though they took the same actions.

The question is not if you can do something but if you should. 

II. Would you keep pulling at a closed door? 

I told the president that if they had tried to expand into a specific market for multiple years without much success, then it was time to discard that goal and do something else.

It’s not what he wanted to hear. After all, we had gathered to talk about the strategy for the organization and it was assumed that expanding into this specific market was going to be one of the key priorities.

He was wrong.

Strategy is about making reasonable bets on how to reach a specific future state. If something hasn’t worked in the past, why keep attempting it?

Have you ever gone to open a door, just to find it doesn’t move at all? Many doors have inconsistent logic, at least here in Canada. Some open by pulling, some open by pushing and you won’t always know at a glance.

If you pull a door and it doesn’t open, you might try one or two more times but eventually you will try to push. If that doesn’t work, you will look for another door or check to see if there’s someone that can help you.

What you wouldn’t do is keep pulling at a door for five, ten or fifteen times, hoping that something changed between the fourth and seventh attempt. If you saw someone do that, you would question their mental state.

And yet, organizations find themselves pulling at doors that won’t open all the time. Here are common examples I hear often.

• A team member is difficult to work with but they should be given an eighth opportunity to improve (instead of firing the person)

• There’s too much work for your team to do but another project management tool will resolve the issues (instead of reducing the workload)

• A product is not selling but another marketing campaign will increase sales (instead of scrapping the product)

If you’re facing any situation over and over again, it is time to make a different decision.

III. What if your goal could not happen in the next three years, what would you do?

I gave the president and his team an exercise to get them thinking differently about their white whale expansion problem. I broke them into groups of four and posed the following question to them.

If you could not expand into any new market over the next three years, what would you do differently to hit your growth targets?

The goal of this question is to convert the elusive goal and turn it into a constraint. By removing the possibility of expansion, the team could now explore other alternatives. After 20 minutes, they had several ideas that could drive growth that did not require expansion.

Not all the ideas were viable but they had an important similarity. They were not tainted by the expansion question. 

If you’re continuously failing at the same task over and over again, your excitement to do it again is understandably low. I have noticed teams get deflated when asked to think of yet another way to reach a difficult goal. It’s like being told to keep pulling at the closed door, even if they know deep down it won’t open.

By making a different decision, teams can embrace a can-do attitude that isn’t just hyped up motivation. They can work towards a goal with an open mind and if that doesn’t work, they can let it go and try something else.

Teams like the one mentioned in this example aren’t broken. They are full of smart people doing their best but the problem is that they are aiming in the wrong direction. A different decision, prompted by the right question, can make all the difference.

Don’t ignore the neon signs.

IV. Zealous Listening and Meeting Cultures

Two articles to share with you this week.

Doug Squirrel wrote a fantastic short article on what it means to listen energetically. This goes beyond “active listening” and is a critical skill for leaders who are forced to make important decisions in a short amount of time. He’s a short excerpt and you can sign up for his newsletter to access the rest of the article.

I watched the Head of Product listen carefully to an impassioned plea to expand the company’s offerings to new countries—then curtly reply, “We’re not doing that now.” I was initially pleased that he’d heeded my coaching to be clear and decisive, but the next day he surprised me by rowing back. “I looked into it further, “ he said, “and it turns out that internationalisation affects our whole go-to-market plan. If we don’t lay the foundations now, we can’t expand later in the year when we need to.”

Gustavo Razzetti

wrote a great article on how organizations develop “meeting cultures.” His distinction on fearful vs tribal cultures is fascinating.

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That’s all I have for today. Enjoy the rest of your week.

Ruben

P.S. If you’re looking to approach your organizational goals differently, check out my strategy work. It’s great way to look at what is working, what is not and how to find ways to supercharge your efforts.