Ministry

Making Strategy Stick (Part Five)

By jgiroux ⋅ September 24, 2008 ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Making strategies stick: Three principles

The three barriers to talking strategy—the Curse of Knowledge, decision paralysis, and a lack of a common strategic vocabulary—emerge for different reasons, but they can be overcome in similar ways. Note that Cranium’s CHIFF manages to overcome all three. It transfers a brand vision of top management in a way that overcomes the Curse of Knowledge. It guides stakeholders in selecting among competing choices, which overcomes decision paralysis. And it establishes vocabulary that allows everyone in the organization to communicate on the same turf—it even helps a Chinese supplier to argue credibly with the company’s founder.

CHIFF is a sticky strategy within Cranium. There are several principles that can help a strategy be stickier within an organization:

1. Be concrete. The beauty of concrete language—language about people and actions and things that can be discovered via the senses—is that everyone understands it in a similar way. The “unemployed college professor” provides a level of common understanding that an “upscale but budget-conscious customer” does not.

2. Say something unexpected. If a strategy is common sense, leaders shouldn’t have to spend much time or energy communicating it. If, on the other hand, there are elements of the strategy that aren’t common sense—that aren’t happening naturally and intuitively—then it’s important to focus on those elements. And, in communicating “uncommon sense,” don’t hedge. Don’t make uncommon sense sound like common sense. BP said “No dry holes,” not “minimize our risk of unsuccessful explorations.” The two statements have similar intent, but the first is likely to stick and the second is not.

3. Tell stories. A good story is a substitute for, not garnish for, an abstract strategy statement. Remember, you can reconstruct the moral from the story, but you can’t reconstruct the story from the moral. Think of the power packed into the FedEx Purple Promise Awards stories or Costco’s “salmon stories.” If there are no stories that symbolize a strategy well, that is a warning flag about the strategy—it may not be sufficiently clear or actionable to manifest itself in the actions of specific individuals. Otherwise, there’d be stories.

A strategy that is built into the way an organization talks cannot be inert.

Avoiding inert strategies

The conventional wisdom is that managers should devote ample time to presenting and discussing strategy. In fact, the most common refrain in strategic communication is: repetition, repetition, repetition. Keep repeating the strategy, again and again, until it finally sinks in. Here’s the problem: Repetition doesn’t prevent the curse of knowledge or encourage two-way communication. Repetition doesn’t eliminate ambiguity or provide a common discussion ground. Repetition is helpful but it is not sufficient to make a strategy stick. And sticky strategic�  communication, like “salmon stories,” doesn’t need much repetition—psychology research tells us it’s much easier to remember concrete language and stories.

Note that the ability to “talk strategy” does not make the strategy a good one. There is a well-established canon of knowledge about what makes a good strategy, and in this article, we have not contributed to it. Rather, we are proposing that leaders treat strategy as a 2-step process. Step 1 is determining the right strategy. Step 2 is communicating it in a way that allows it to become part of the organizational vocabulary. Both are necessary.

Unfortunately many organizations stop at Step 1. Or they implement Step 1 and follow up with 150 executive speeches broadcasting a vision that is impossible for employees to remember and use. But if strategies are to be activated—if they are to manifest themselves in the actions of stakeholders in the organization—they must be woven into the organization’s conversations.

A strategy that is built into the way an organization talks cannot be inert. If your frontline employees can talk about your strategy, can tell stories about it, can talk back to their managers and feel credible doing so, then the strategy is doing precisely what it was intended to do—guide behavior.

About The Authors: Brothers Chip Heath and Dan Heath are the co-authors of “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die”. Chip and Dan have spoken and consulted on the topic of “making ideas stick” with audiences from organizations such as Microsoft, Nissan, Fannie Mae, and West Point. Chip Heath is a Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He lives in Los Gatos, California. Dan Heath is a consultant at Duke Corporate Education. A former researcher at Harvard Business School, he is a co-founder of Thinkwell, an innovative new-media textbook company. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.