The strategy was agreed in the spring. The board signed it off, the away day went well, the slide deck has been to every town hall. Six months on, the organisation is doing what it did before, slightly faster, with a new vocabulary. Nobody has refused anything. Nothing has moved.
This is the most common shape of organisational problem I’m asked to look at, and it’s rarely what the people asking think it is. They usually think it’s a communication problem (people haven’t understood), a capability problem (people can’t) or, privately, a resistance problem (people won’t). The last one is the most useful, as long as you take it as information rather than an obstacle. People don’t resist at random. They are adjusting sensibly to the organisation they actually work in, with its structure, its roles, the way the senior team behaves and the things that get measured, and that organisation hasn’t changed. What they’re doing tells you what the organisation is really like, which is the thing the strategy quietly assumed was different.
Why announcements don’t work
Michael Beer and Russell Eisenstat spent a decade studying companies whose strategies stalled on the way to implementation and published what they found in the MIT Sloan Management Review in 2000. They called the causes “silent killers”, because everyone below the top knows about them and nobody says so in a meeting with the chief executive present. There are six: a senior management style that is either top-down or hands-off; a strategy that is unclear or sits on top of conflicting priorities; a senior team that doesn’t work as a team; poor communication up and down the organisation; poor coordination across functions and sites; and a layer of managers beneath the senior team who haven’t been developed to lead.
Read that list against your own organisation and the gap usually explains itself. The strategy isn’t being blocked. It’s being filtered through a structure and a leadership group that were built for the old one.
Beer had made a related argument ten years earlier, with Eisenstat and Bert Spector, in the Harvard Business Review: the big centrally driven programme, with its values launch, its training rollout and its new appraisal form, mostly changes nothing. They called it the fallacy of programmatic change. The Gestalt tradition I work in had got there first, from a different direction. Arnold Beisser’s paradoxical theory of change, written in 1970, holds that people change when they become more fully what they are, not when they try to be what they aren’t. A programme asks the whole organisation to be something else from a date. What actually moves it is the senior team seeing clearly what the organisation is and what it’s doing now, including the parts nobody says in the meeting, and then making the structural changes that follow from that rather than imposing them on top of it.
The oldest point in this literature is still the most ignored. Alfred Chandler’s 1962 study of American corporations, Strategy and Structure, found that structure followed strategy, and that companies which changed one without the other paid for it in years of drift. A new strategy that is run through the old structure is a decision to keep the old strategy and call it something else.
Which gap you’ve got
Three questions sort most cases.
Does the senior team own the strategy, or just the chief executive? If the executive team can’t explain the trade-offs the strategy requires without the chief executive in the conversation, the gap starts at the top, and it’s a senior team problem before it’s an organisational one.
Could a competent manager two levels down tell you what the strategy asks them to stop doing? Strategies that only add are decks, not strategies. If the stop list doesn’t exist, the priorities conflict, and people will keep doing what they’re measured on.
Has anything about roles, reporting lines or what’s rewarded changed since the strategy did? If not, the organisation is still built for the last one, and no amount of leadership development will fix a structure.
The answers decide where to start. Sometimes it’s the senior team, sometimes it’s the structure, often it’s the layer underneath that was never designed to carry a strategy at all. What it is almost never is a communications plan.
Where the work starts
Which is why the work doesn’t begin with a plan. It begins with an accurate picture of the present: who is actually doing what, where the strategy is being quietly rerouted, and what that says about the organisation as it is. Most of that comes from conversations, not surveys, and most of it the senior team half knows already. The shape of that work, and how I decide where to begin, is on the organisational consulting page.
References
Beer, M. and Eisenstat, R.A. (2000) ‘The silent killers of strategy implementation and learning’, MIT Sloan Management Review, 41(4), pp. 29–40. sloanreview.mit.edu.
Beer, M., Eisenstat, R.A. and Spector, B. (1990) ‘Why change programs don’t produce change’, Harvard Business Review, November–December 1990. hbr.org.
Beisser, A. (1970) ‘The paradoxical theory of change’, in Fagan, J. and Shepherd, I.L. (eds) Gestalt Therapy Now. Palo Alto: Science and Behavior Books, pp. 77–80. gestalt.org.
Chandler, A.D. (1962) Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.