Lawless Thinking brings you insights, tools and encouragement direct from our world of bold strategy delivery.

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Thought Of The Week

You can’t command empowerment.

You can’t cascade the courage to act boldly.

But you can strive to create both if you have framed the problem statement correctly.

It was a long journey with lots of time to talk. The CEO, the CPO and I were being driven to the airport after two days together with the exec team.

Their company is a global tech titan. The two people in the car with me were formidably intelligent with a long track record of success.

But they were both very worried about the next step in the strategy journey. They had ‘rolled out a strategy’ before and nothing had happened.

“We cascaded the Mission, Vision and Values, and we rolled out the behaviours. Nothing changes around here I tell you! We are locked in the permafrost!”

The approach was ‘text book’ for sure. But to what organisational problem statement is ‘cascade a Mission, Vision and Values Deck’ and ‘rollout new behaviours’ the compelling solution?

The DARE Loop demands that your problem statement is clear before you design an expensive solution and mobilise a global workforce around it: What is the Result we are designing to achieve and what Actions are required to deliver that Result?

I tested a different problem statement:

‘OK, so what would you do if your job was to get a man or woman working for [their company] in Australia, whom you’ve never met and will never meet, to want to deliver your new strategy so much that they’ll leave their comfort zone, take bold new actions, even challenge their boss and colleagues when necessary, to deliver the new way?’

[‘Would you give their boss a slide pack from HQ to cascade at them?’ I thought about, and decided against, adding.]

The profound silence was not the exciting part.

The exciting part was how their eyes came alive.

This was no longer an intractable problem of ‘permafrost’ and ‘change curves’ described in the books of academics who had never architected change or engineered high performance.

This was no longer a well-worn path called ‘culture change’ or ‘organisational change program’, of which ‘according to McKinsey & Co., over 70% end in failure’.

This was now their very own, personal, thrillingly human purpose, leadership and skills challenge. It was a challenge they’d already successfully tackled in their marriages, in their parenting adventures and in every team they had ever managed.

The successes that followed over the next two years flowed, quite naturally, from the Decisions and Actions required to deliver that precise Result; and the willingness humbly to Evaluate progress along the way.

I won’t be telling you how to do it here.  I’ll allow you, and your emerging re-definition of your problem statement, to do that. Hit reply if you want to talk it through.

But I will add one thing:

Intrinsic Motivation and Engagement Surveys

That man or woman in Australia will need to be intrinsically motivated and intrinsic motivation requires three things to be present before it can appear:

 Autonomy. Purpose. Growth:

Are you creating those three things in the people you are asking to own the strategy?

Does your ‘engagement survey’ provide you with data on whether you and your leaders are successfully generating these three things?

And who sets an individual’s goals and decides how that individual should deliver them? A team leader?

Or does a team leader skilfully translate and focus your strategic intent, and ask the expensive individual talent to decide for themselves what their contribution must logically be and how best to deliver it?

You can’t command empowerment.

You can’t cascade the courage to act boldly.

But you can strive to create both if you have framed the problem statement correctly.

Next week I’ll pose a question that gets to the heart of how we start to do just that.

Book of the Week

The book of the week is Daniel Pink’s ‘Drive’, a compelling distillation of the research on intrinsic motivation.

I recommend the book. But if your shelf of shame is as long as mine – you can get the gist in this classic 11 minute explainer from the UK’s Royal Society of Arts.

Write Your Story 🖋️

Jim