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

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

Thought of the Week

“Nobody fears failure.

We fear the consequences of failure.”

Nobody fears failure

Allow me to illustrate:
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?

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?

Nobody fears failure. We fear the consequence of failure.

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

The Enterprise Strategy

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The Second Strategy

Your Second Strategy is:

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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”.

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

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

Which is why the Second Strategy is critical.

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!

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.

My Fortnight

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.

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

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’.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Lest we forget.

Book Of The Fortnight 

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

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.

Marquet shifts the locus of control. Authority stayed with the boss. Ownership moved to the crew. Performance soared.

The relationship was changed. Trust was built. An ‘intent’ (to quote Marquet) to change the relationship and the power dynamics.

Write YOUR story 🖋️
Jim

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

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

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!

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.

Thought of the Week

“When authority to own the Decision and Action is unclear, capable people stop thinking and start complying.”

“Permission to speak, Sir?”: Milgram, Stanford Prison and Your Strategy.

In 2016 I was engaged by London’s Met Police. Whilst there, an officer asked me for ideas to fix the problem of people not reporting suspicious activity on the Tube. It was a fascinating chat, but we didn’t solve the problem.

Later that year, however, that officer and their team made an astonishing breakthrough, creating a global case study in giving people permission to change (or, to be precise, in using behavioural economics to address a wicked problem in a dynamic, complex system).

You can apply the same thinking in the delivery of your strategy – to give people permission to help you win.

Conformity and Compliance with the System.

To execute your strategy, you need people wanting to take new Decisions and Actions to deliver new Results, far away from you in space and time.

That’s the central task of the CEO and executive team in leading transformation.

But decades of research, including Milgram, the Stanford Prison Experiment, Nuremberg Trial research, etc, show that when authority to own the Decision and Action is unclear, capable people stop thinking and start complying. They comply with either the norms of the herd or with the perceived desires of authority.

Humans need permission to Decide and Act differently in a community.

Around 4 million people use the London Tube each day: many more witnesses than criminals. However, everybody strives to blend in on the Tube. Apart from standing to the right on an escalator, it’s the main rule of the system.

Criminals rely on that system working: eyes down, nobody speaks, nobody is willing to stand out, nobody intervenes, nobody thinks it’s their place to act or that it’s their personal problem to solve.

Conformity and a lack of permission to break from the herd were the problems the Met Police faced. And their solution was a stroke of genius:

“See it. Say it. Sorted.”

In one line, the police gave every passenger:

Permission: It gives permission to stand out and act (and makes the action easy).

Purpose: You could ‘sort’ a potential disaster

New Norms of Conformity: It hints that ‘most people’ do the right thing and that changes what conformity looks like.

The Met have spread that now ubiquitous message consistently for a decade, creating a mantra every Londoner can recite.

Since the launch of See it. Say it. Sorted., more than one million reports have been sent by passengers to British Transport Police, with annual reporting increasing over eight-fold — turning London commuters from zombies (yes, I was one too) into an active safety network.

(If you don’t want to conform to the inaccurate narrative about how unsafe my great home city of London is, try the facts instead as set out in last week’s Economist)

How Accidents Happen – Permission in Gas and Nuclear Plants.

In 2023 I shared a stage at a safety conference with Mark Byard, Director of Safety and Howard Forster, COO of Cadent Gas, the UK’s biggest distributor of natural gas and one of the largest energy infrastructure operators in the UK.

Howard explained that ALL of the accidents he had seen in his long, distinguished career (apart from a few he could count on the fingers of one hand) could have been prevented IF a person who saw the problem in advance felt they had the permission to speak up.

In other words, almost all accidents were preventable but systems generated conformity and people felt they did not have permission to intervene.

He contrasted that with seeing an overalled shift worker at a nuclear power plant shouting up to a suited VIP Politician visitor being escorted by the CEO that he should be holding the handrail of the high gantry he was walking along.

On that site, Permission, Purpose and new Norms of Conformity had been established.

And Your Strategy?

The question as we turn to your strategy is, yes, how do you create the permission? But fast on its heels: how do you role model it?

Most people’s experience is that shouting instructions to the VIP client visitor is not welcomed by the CEO escorting them. Contracting the Exec and Top 100 to the new way so they can react well in the moment is critical. Without it, a poster proclaiming permission to act is, justifiably, ammunition for your cynics.

My Fortnight

It’s SKO time so I have been travelling and speaking which has been an absolute delight. Thank you to all who have invited me to your wonderful events.

The most thought provoking presentation I have seen during this time was not in an exotic SKO location, but in Nottingham, UK. 

Herman Visagie, an English teacher and housemaster from Michaelhouse School in South Africa, delivered the most extraordinarily insightful presentation about compliance and speaking out in the school pupil community, citing Milgram and the Stanford Prison Experiment and his own careful research.

Herman’s thoughtful presentation prompted me to address how we give permission to challenge conformity in the system this week.

Book Of The Fortnight

In Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein show that people in a system rarely change behaviour because they’ve been persuaded. They change because the environment makes a different action easier, safer, and more socially acceptable.

Write YOUR story 🖋️
Jim

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

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

TLDR:  Two tensions can break strategy execution across the organisation if not held by the CEO. But holding these tensions well is probably not how you got the CEO role.

A plan is not a strategy; a set of choices is. So strategy execution is a DARE Loop: Decisions and Actions to deliver defined Results (then Evaluate and Loop). Two CEO decisions can destroy strategy execution if the tension cannot be managed by the CEO:

1. When a non-strategic opportunity arrives that will delight shareholders and land your bonus (and tell all your people and customers that your strategic decisions are up for sale) can you identify and hold the tension?

2. When you are, possibly, the best decision-maker in the organisation, but you want a team that is accountable, takes decisions fast and escalates rarely – can you hold the tension at the precise moment when you want to ‘help’ somebody do it better?

The Price of Strategy Execution

Strategy definition is cheap and relatively easy. A document is prepared. Priorities are agreed. Now it is time to execute this for the next 2-5 years.

That execution demands a high personal price of the CEO.

The price is emotional and psychological: Enduring the holding of tensions. The payer never knows when the price will be demanded during a day, so they cannot prepare.

This price must be paid until the strategic transformation is complete. It’s a full Ironman distance of commitment, not a 5k Sunday parkrun.

The price is paid in two tensions that are particularly hard for a senior leader to pay: The payment is in surrender of CONTROL and OPPORTUNITY. The very attributes that got them to the top

Strategies Fail but Execution Fails More

Strategies can of course fail because they are poor. Jaguar’s ‘pink’ rebrand, New Coke’s launch and Operation Barbarossa being just three examples from the past 100 years. 

Strategies can fail because they are not strategies. This is common. A vision, some values and some ‘strategic priorities’ being a recognisable example.

But in my experience of working with executive teams when the strategy is not ‘firing’, and in getting deeper into an organisation to gather data about what is really going on: the CEO is often not fully aware of the price only they can pay. 

So, naturally, they are not paying it. When the tension is high – they fold.

They forget the strategic Results when the tension grows. They are seduced by short term Results. They then take very public Decisions and Actions that run counter to the strategy. Then they use the wrong Evaluation criteria (short term, not strategic) to assess their Results – and deem them a win.

Now we spiral. Let me show you how:

Price One: Holding Opportunity Tension

Strategy reduces the permitted decisions. This brings structure, clarity, direction and a narrative.

We carefully sell all that to the organisation, to suppliers and customers, and we invest accordingly. This is a truly enormous amount of work.

Inevitably a shiny new thing: a territory, product, operating model, some appealing cure for fear of lack of rapid progress or debilitating self-doubt or cashflow troubles, becomes compelling.

If the CEO cannot hold the tension when the desire to take non-strategic choices is high, then the work is undone. Everybody sees. Everybody breathes out, releases the tension and moves to short term wins.

Everybody knows the strategy was just ‘the flavour of the month’.

Of course, holding that tension, saying no to opportunity, does not feel ‘strategic’.

It feels like RISK. It feels like LOSS. It is ‘scary’. It runs counter to every survival instinct for the human being paid to manage the risk and ensure the survival. The ‘Tiger’ roars loudly.

The tension is immense. The challenge is real. Success requires immense courage to hold the line.

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!

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.

Price Two: Holding Control Tension

To execute the strategy fast, you will need the correct Decision and Action being owned by the correct person – and taken as quickly as possible. Habitual escalation and meetings to bring reassurance and share the exposure of decision making with others are blockers, except where truly necessary.

And yet we are changing. There is uncertainty. There is doubt. People feel risk – they are outside of their comfort zones.

There is a real tension here. Did she really give me the power? Do I really have permission to do THIS? This is a fragile moment and extremely consequential.

It requires a cohesive executive team that exercises a discipline in devolving safe decisions and holding the tension of that devolution.

Yet many, by no means all, but many exec teams are dominated by the boss. Second-guessing the boss slows the exec’s decisions and causes tensions and resentments.

But by the time we explore the data two levels down, beneath the top 100, second guessing what the boss wants us to do is a cottage industry. Everybody wants a meeting or an escalation to be given reassurance – the CEO has set the tone and the shadow is cast.

The tension the CEO needs to hold here is to resist taking on the weight of other people’s decisions – except where vital. Resisting speaking when they can see a marginally better way – but the cost of providing that in re-taking control is greater than the benefit it will bring in ‘the better way’.

Hardest of all, this tension requires resisting deploying the very attribute that got them the job. Being a superb decision maker and technical operator who is unafraid to take big decisions.

But the big decision now is:

Will I withstand every emotion in my body telling me to seize the opportunity or to take the decision that I truly want other people to take – except when it is manifestly unsafe to do so? Or will I take the wheel – causing echoes around the organisation?

My Fortnight

The weather may have been cold, but the pace of transformation has been keeping my clients and me very warm indeed.

A recurring theme is that: it’s bold – but we cannot fail. This reality brings a focus from members of my client exec teams that is a joy to work with.

Whilst the projects are confidential, the work includes partnering with leaders accountable for accelerating the production of defence capabilities (which, having sheltered from air raids in Kyiv and Lviv last year and watched the brutality of the assaults over the winter, I believe to be non-negotiable) and shifting how decisions are made (accountability) within a large pharmaceutical organisation.

With both industries being heavily regulated, the tensions described above are large and challenging. Creating and communicating an appropriate Decision-Making Architecture with vocabulary everybody can use becomes critical.

And of course, appearing at January Kickoff events to deliver variations of my DARE or DARE: to Lead keynotes has been a complete joy. Thank you to everybody who has invited me to share their stage.

Book of the Fortnight

This week is a short film about holding strategic tension. Steve Jobs slashing product lines on his return to apple is often cited as a case study in bold strategic discipline.

I recommend watching Jony Ive describe being mentored by Jobs on holding strategic tension – on what it means and what it feels like.

Write YOUR story 🖋️

Jim