California Street, San Francisco / July, 2023
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Welcome to Connecting Dots the innovation leadership newsletter by Brett Macfarlane.
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Managing Instability
“Trust is gone.”
“We need to reconnect with our vision.”
“The CEO changed and so will we.”
This summer, my conversations frequently featured such statements. Often from high-performing companies with great results.
Each summer I look for such themes to anticipate the climate for innovation and change in the year ahead. Early signals emerge as colleagues and executives start to anticipate and sketch upcoming strategy processes. Often, they return with a new perspective or ambition after a much-deserved holiday.
For this autumn and the next year, there are some big topics on most people’s agendas. Innovation as always is expected to play a significant role.
Yet, it’s important to embrace this reflection phase and not dive straight into heavy thinking or research. Instead, it’s an opportunity to see the forest and the trees with broader and more holistic thinking.
So I’m just going to share a few pre-emptive provocations in the form of quotes to fight a trap many executives fall into at this time of year - The Perfect Strategy Delusion.
The Perfect Strategy Delusion: With ambition and enthusiasm comes the understandable yearning for perfection—to get things 100% right this time. Yet, this delusional pursuit of the perfect strategy (or innovation, process, hire, etc.) stifles or even kills the very innovation or change one desires.
Trap 1: Waiting for the perfect opportunity to start:
“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
~ Wayne Gretzky, the highest-scoring hockey player of all time
Cure: At the conception of your annual processes start taking relevant shots on net with new ideas and intentional experiments. Shooting from day zero gets you to day one.
Trap 2: Not feeling early results are perfect enough and moving on to something else:
“To finish first, first you must first finish.”
~ Ross Brawn OBE, Formula 1 team managing director of Ferrari
Cure: As the process progresses the work gets more complex, ambiguous and hard, keep going. The companies that ship new things early and often significantly outperform those that don’t.
Trap 3: Idealizing your strategy as perfect and not changing in response to real-world events:
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
~ Mike Tyson, world heavyweight boxing champion
Cure: Proud companies with high self-confidence struggle with accepting the reality of imperfection. Continual replanning and learning get you to the finish. Plans are disposable but planning is essential.
As you ease back into the spreadsheets, debates and reports keep the spirit of my favourite pilot, pioneer and novelist in mind:
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
~ Onwards ~
Learn more .about Brett’s leadership development practice for global executives with innovation responsibilities.
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