The Second Strategy

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The Second Strategy

Lawless Thinking Large Low 1

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Lawless Thinking brings you insights, tools and encouragement direct from my world of bold C-suite strategy delivery.

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If this edition was forwarded to you, you can sign up here to receive your own copy in the future.

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Thought of the Week

“Nobody fears failure. We fear the consequences of failure.”

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Nobody fears failure

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Allow me to illustrate:

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I may miss my plane: I have children at home, no money for another flight and a difficult boss who could fire me if I am not present at 9am tomorrow. Do I fear the failure to make my flight?

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I may miss my plane: I am single, can buy another ticket without thinking about cost and can work from anywhere in the meantime. Do I fear the failure to make my flight?

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Nobody fears failure. We fear the consequence of failure.

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Let’s leave that idea here for a moment and think about strategy.

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The Enterprise Strategy

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An Enterprise Strategy is a set of Decisions dictating how you will (and will not) Act in the future to concentrate all your powers to achieve a defined Result.

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This can be expensive, but relatively easy, to create. Turning the slide deck into disciplined Decisions and bold Actions at a global scale is complex.

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Why? Primarily because you are asking people you have never met to do new things, and stop doing old things (therefore uncertain and fear-inducing), when you are not close to them in space or time.

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Change happens at the speed of trust – not at the speed of the cascaded ‘behaviours deck’. And the if the ‘behaviours deck’ bears no resemblance to the stories I hear from survivors of Exec Team encounters, it’s just more material for the W*nkernomics boys.

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We take risks according to the stories about the consequences of failure – not the behaviours deck.

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So you need what I refer to as a ‘Second Strategy’.

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The Second Strategy

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Your Second Strategy is:

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“A set of Decisions dictating how the Exec Team and Top 100 will (and will not) Act in the future to achieve a defined Result through their organisation.”

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This is not ‘leadership training’. It is a change in a relationship dynamic. It is similar to the tools needed to set a unique and delicate marriage on a long-term success path.

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And, like a marriage, if these Decisions are not defined, owned and believed in by those who must Act on them every day, and who truly desire the Result: They are ignored.

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For clarity, this work will usually include defining (and contracting to) actions that will generate trust: Consistency, Congruence, Clarity, Simplicity, Confidence-building, Speed, Inspiration and Empowerment (meaning specifically delegated Decision rights) – in every encounter with any member of the executive team.

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Building Performance and Speed: A New Relationship, not ‘the behaviours piece’

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Outside of my advisory work, I will have around 50 pre-keynote briefing calls this year asking me to help with:

· Lack of accountability

· They freeze in uncertainty

· They escalate any hard decision

· We have a meetings culture

· It’s not happening at all / Not happening fast enough

· Nobody is willing to ‘leave the comfort zone’

· They must stop fearing failure

· They must take risks

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These can be blind spots on the part of the people in the room, of course.

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These may also be symptoms of a belief that the price of any incorrect Decision or Action is too high for me: “I cannot pay the price of moving fast and making an error around here, I’d better call a meeting”.

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Nobody fears failure. We only fear the consequence of failure.

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The consequence of failure is, generally, set by the stories people tell about their experiences with the CEO and the Exec Team.

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Which is why the Second Strategy is critical.

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My dive to 101m in 2010 raised funds for paediatric medicine research after my little daughter’s recovery from serious illness.

Flowing on from that difficult time, I have supported Together for Short Lives for many years and this year they have allowed me to run the London Marathon for them!

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TfSL support babies, children and young people living with life limiting conditions, their families and the professionals that care for them. And you can support them too if you could spare a moment to sponsor my marathon run here.

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My Fortnight

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Firstly, my thanks to people defrosting aeroplanes and making runways safe from Vilnius to Brussels to Warsaw and to the Polish and Ukrainian railway teams who delivered me safely to Lviv. It has been a rich fortnight of meetings and events.

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I will relay only one experience. One that will hit home especially to those on school WhatsApp groups around the world.

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It becomes all too easy to think that parents raising children in tents in Gaza, or under Russian bombs in Ukraine, are somehow ‘able to cope’. That one ‘grows accustomed’ to it and is ‘resilient’.

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I arranged a coffee with a friend in Lviv for the hour before she was to collect her 5-year-old child from school.

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Russia began bombing Lviv as I was walking to the coffee shop. We switched venue to a tunnel full of scared, hiding citizens. We listened to ballistic missiles strike civilian and energy infrastructure as we spoke about our children and our lives.

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But she was distracted and kept her eye on her phone.

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Because that is where there the photos of the children in the school shelter were being shared to calm the parents. Five-year-olds. Trying to sing and dance the noise of Russian ballistic missiles away.

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When we arrived at the school, my friend got the update from the teacher that all parents of tinies remember. Except, not quite as we remember. It was not about what she ate or whether was happy at school today.

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The report was about how well she managed her stress levels, underground, while Russia bombed civilian targets around her.

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Lest we forget.

Book Of The Fortnight

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If you’d like to read a ‘Second Strategy’ case study, I recommend ‘Turn the Ship Around’ by David Marquet.

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Marquet tells the story of taking command of a nuclear submarine and realising that the crew had been trained by the previous ‘exec team’ not to think but to wait, to defer, to comply and to seek permissions. In such a high risk environment that felt nice and safe safe. Until it wasn’t safe.