Strategic Metabolism
As I was reading the previous posts in this series on strategic leadership, I realized that strategic leadership is like another process: metabolism.
In the body, metabolism is the process by which the body converts the fuel of food and drink into energy. When we have high-quality fuel + efficient conversion, we have the energy to achieve what we want.
In strategy, the high-quality fuel comes from consuming ideas from outside of the organization and understanding the needs of customers and other stakeholders. Last week, I wrote about how important it is for these efforts to be always-on, and when we think of them as fuel, it’s easy to see why.
As Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn write in their book Ideaflow, “You can't get ideas overnight. You need to keep them flowing in good times and bad. Ideas are solutions to future problems. They represent tomorrow's profits. No ideas, no tomorrow.”
The “efficient conversion” of strategy comes from all of the processes that help turn those ideas and insights into action by the organization. Those are things like:
Creating individual and group time that enables strategic thinking
Openly sharing emerging insights and questions you’re wrestling with so that others can wrestle with them as well
Building psychological safety so that people feel comfortable sharing ideas early, and providing feedback to improve them
Approaching every meeting as a strategy meeting to accelerate learning and keep everyone moving in the same direction
Pushing down decision-making so that things don’t get slowed down by hierarchical processes
The other reason the metabolism metaphor resonates with me is that it reflects a dynamic system. Being strategic isn’t just about having a good strategy at one point in time. Rather, it’s about the ability to evolve that strategy as the organization learns, and as external conditions change. Both the high-quality fuel of always-on external insights and efficient conversion into action are what enables that evolution.