Strategic FUEL and Time Travel
Over the past two years, I’ve been co-teaching a Change Management course at the Georgetown Center for Nonprofit Leadership. When students articulate their leadership dilemmas in the class, there’s usually no simple solution. We often end up talking about things like If you start talking about the challenges on the horizon, people might pay real attention to them in a few months. Or, If you start today with building a new team culture, you’ll be in a better place a year from now.
Another way to articulate that idea would be: Your team’s current change readiness is based on the leadership decisions you’ve made in the past. As a corollary, the decisions you make today impact how much your team will be ready for change tomorrow.
If only time travel were possible!
For most of the organizations I work with, the start of our conversation is that they believe they need to conduct strategic planning. I quickly push them on the leadership aspects of the strategic planning process and their day-to-day leadership approach because strategy has this same time-traveling dynamic.
For example, I make the point in Strategic FUEL for Nonprofits that part of developing a focused strategy is clarifying (ideally also visualizing) the strategic logic so that it is easier to see what activities are on the critical path and which are not. However, the leadership benefit of clarifying the strategic logic is that it enables evolution. When you travel to the future, the strategic logic becomes the common basis for deciding whether to stick with the current path or shift direction—a process that is otherwise fraught with politics.
Similarly, when the book articulates the benefits of making the strategy understandable, it’s not just about more effective strategy communications. Instead, it is about shifting the entire process to be one of authentic dialogue—100 two-way conversations rather than one memo. Beyond the near-term goal of generating buy-in to the strategy, this tactic has the wider objective of mimicking the dialogues that are necessary for there to be a culture in which everyone feels comfortable sharing what’s working (or not), which is critical for being able to adjust the strategy responsively.
Moreover, Strategic FUEL for Nonprofits recommends that teams adjust their day-to-day operational routines to embed strategy. The technical reason is that making the strategy real requires it to exist in the countless meetings organizations have to allocate financial and human resources, decide what projects to take on, and assess results. But the leadership goal of that move is to create a scenario in which operational meetings—which are usually more inclusive than “strategy” meetings—bring people’s minds back to the strategy and help junior leaders build their strategy muscles. All of that helps the strategy be living.
That is why I mentioned last week that Strategic Fuel for Nonprofits is a general-purpose leadership book masquerading as a sector-specific strategy book.
When you step back, there is no meaningful distinction between strategy setting and leading strategically. We can try to separate strategic planning activities and implementation activities in our minds and on our organizational calendars, but how we do one affects what’s possible in the other. Over time, they are the same thing.