Find the through-line or make one
Photo by Ivan Torres.
Growing up, Johnathan and his siblings asked for food so spicy that their mom couldn't eat her own cooking. This profound love of spice meant that when Melissa first started attending family gatherings in Canada, she had to eat food from the kid's table. And yes that's exactly as mortifying as it sounds. It was a proud moment when she graduated to eating the grown-up jerk chicken.
So when a good friend gifted our house a "hot sauce of the month" club, we were very curious to see what the club meant by "hot." The answer has been all over the map. Most of what's arrived in the mail only makes it a few weeks before it's gone. This is high praise for any "of-the-month" style food product.
About a week ago, the latest sauce shows up. The copy on the bottle makes BIG CLAIMS. This is a sauce from Minnesota talking about how they are better at Louisiana hot sauce than Louisiana. Which is just some BOLD shit to write on a bottle. Like, OK, we're with you. Let's see how this goes.
We open the bottle and it's mellow. Shockingly mellow. So we shake it up. Maybe the heat is at the bottom of the bottle? Uh, no such luck. Still lovely and tasty but there is just no heat to be found. And because we are nerds about organizations and work, we started dissecting the thing.
How is it possible that the packaging and marketing and brand teams made one claim? And the product and fulfillment team delivered something completely different? Did the marketing team actually taste the sauce before writing the copy? Has anyone on this team ever been to Louisiana? Or tried any of their world-famous, found-in-every-grocery-store-nationwide, Beyoncé-carries-some-in-her-purse hot sauce?
Shipping the org chart
The answer for how you get marketing claims wholly independent of what's in the bottle is Conway's law. Way back in 1967, Conway observed that an organization's output tends to look a lot like it's internal communication and organizational structure. And while the concept isn't new, a lot of tech workers (us included) often shorthand this concept to "don't ship the org chart." Credit for this pithier version goes to Steven Sinofsky.
So in this instance, "shipping the org chart" might be a marketing team working far from the factory that produces the sauce. The marketing team isn't trying to embarrass the company or to piss off their customers. They just don't have access to a fundamental piece of the puzzle (the relative heat or lack thereof). And similarly, the folks producing the sauce may have prepped and bottled it without reading the copy on the label. Again, no one is trying to sink the brand. They just show up and work in their respective silos, and the rest takes care of itself.
This happens. This happens for teams making hot sauce and this happens for the rest of us, too.
Some popular bad answers
We haven't worked with any hot sauce bosses (yet! Return our calls, Matouk!) but we have definitely heard this story before. Sales teams building their own decks because they can't use the one from marketing. Engineering running their own backlog because product is still reworking the roadmap. And no one ever, ever checking in with finance about what is actually in-plan for this year's budget.
When you talk with these people, though, they aren't trying to sabotage things. Like, sure, there's occasional grousing about "that team doesn't understand what we do." If your org is more than 100 people, you probably have silos, you probably de-individuate distant parts of the org, you probably a little bit think of your own team as the one that keeps everything actually going. Fine.
But the driving force for all that misalignment usually isn't self-importance, it's impatience. It's that your team needs to do something. And so the questions we get are often of the form, "How do I set goals without a strategy?" Or "How do I get my team working on the right things, when no one has told me what the right things are?" Which usually boils down to "... when no one knows what the right things are."
One bad answer people fall in love with is, "you can't." That any work without a strategic frame is wasted, and it would be better to sit still than to waste that effort. We have worked with people who would not — could not — start until the organization's strategy was clear and made sense to them. Our hope for them is that they find an org where they have that level of clarity, but most organizations won't. And more to the point, it's needlessly rigid. Working without a strategy will lead to some waste, for sure, but also some progress on things that turn out to be helpful. Sitting still might avoid some wasted work, but it gets there by wasting time, and that's also expensive.
The other bad answer people fall in love with is, "just do your job." Here the implication is that strategy is, we suppose, for wusses? Irrelevant? The idea is to just put your head down, do the work to the best of your ability and if the pieces don't fit some master plan, that's a problem for someone above your pay grade. Which, to a point, is fine? For someone fresh out of school this might be a workable, if somewhat boring, approach. But once you're managing a team, asking about those things is doing your job. Coordinating and aligning the work of a team of people is not above your pay grade, it's what we pay you for.
We're gonna need some less terrible answers.
Coherent Action
We've talked before about Good Strategy Bad Strategy, and Rumelt's concept of Coherent Action. That once you answer a few big questions about who you want to serve and how you plan to be different, the heavy lifting of strategy is to find the set of actions you're gonna take to make it happen. And specifically, that you unlock amazing strength and velocity when you get those actions, from different parts of the organization, to line up with one another. To cohere. Because the opposite of strategic isn't tactical or operational or in the weeds. The opposite of strategic is scattered.
When you lead a team and you're not sure what to work on, coherence is the lens we suggest you start with. Look at your team's work, and the teams around you. Is it a coherent story about several teams pushing to achieve a shared thing, or is it a scattering of good ideas and to-dos? Is it a thoughtful meal, or a buffet? Start with intra-team coherence if you want, but the real focus here is coherence between teams.
One of the most powerful things about coherence as a concept is that it forces you to consider your work in the context of the org. A lot of the things that feel like good ideas in your team meeting turn out to be useless to other teams. That doesn't mean they can never happen, but it does give you a pretty clear sense of which work matters most. If you and your boss and the teams who rely on you or support you are all aligned, you have the basis for doing some work with real impact. And if you strongly disagree, you have found a productive place for some discussion and decision making. Either way, that's progress.
The problem isn't that the hot sauce isn't hot. There's totally a market for flavourful, mellow hot sauce that doesn't damage people. The problem isn't the marketing, either — the packaging as a whole was pretty great. The problem is the incoherence. One part of the org making promises that another part didn't expect to deliver on. If this is happening in your organization, your job is to root it out and figure out which kind of thing you're building. We hope it's something delicious.
— Melissa & Johnathan