The strategists, the smugglers, and the silent
Photo by Skitterphoto.
Ex-pat life during American Thanksgiving. Two full days of phone calls from extended family, all of whom have forgotten that just because they have the day off doesn't mean you do.
Which is funny cause it's the rest of the globe's complaint about the Americans anyway. That they think they are the center of the world. And that they can rattle off every state capital (in song!), but know very little about history or geography outside of that.
Whether you're American or working for a U.S. company, you know that right around Thanksgiving, something important happens. Sometimes a few days before the break but usually the Monday after. A starter's pistol goes off for the rest of the year. Along with it, the sense that anything that you were hoping to get done better happen right now. Or risk not happening at all.
So we've got the whole org jamming to push things over the finish line at the eleventh hour. Spend down the budget. Close out the project. Wrap things up. And then at the exact same time, we ask leaders to turn their attention to planning for next year. Please provide a holistic view of 2023 planning, complete with goals, budget, headcount. Oh and able to withstand a recession of indeterminate length. Good luck.
This plan can't fail
The popular approach to the last few working weeks of the calendar year is extremely failure-prone. If you're in an org where you've got something like this and it's working for you, don't let us push you off it. But for most folks in most orgs, the end of Q4 is mad-dash, frenzied chaos. The near-midnight googling for "what should my 2023 OKRs be?" so you have something to bring to the Directors' meeting the next morning. Or taking goals you wrote for the past year, adding 20% growth across the board, and clicking Save As and updating the year.
So you bring what you have to the meeting but when you get there, nothing lines up. The eng goals and the product goals are very far apart. And then some exec at the end of the table crosses their arms and asks, "What's going to feel like a win?" You know "getting out of this meeting in under six hours" isn't the right answer. But it's the one that comes to mind.
The best you can say for this approach to EOY is that at least we end the year with some draft goals in place. And a plan to refine them after the holidays. The worst is that, in our organization, strategy and goal-setting is a fiction.
Bosses. This is not the steady-handed approach to annual strategic planning your non-existent business profs had in mind.
Executive smuggling
The core failure here is the process. Strategy processes are written by people who like doing strategy. That is not all people. You might get genuine excitement and energy from a prompt like, "Okay, blank slate, the sky's the limit, what should our business do next year?" Most people don't.
What ends up happening in a process like this is a separation into camps. The few leaders who enjoy doing strategic planning jump in with both feet. They give the illusion that the process is working, because it works for them. Others feel utterly out of their depth and go quiet. And the rest, typically the majority of your leaders, become smugglers. For them, the entire exercise becomes one of trying to ingeniously hide their teams' needs and wants and existing plans inside a package that looks like strategy.
Speaking as a couple of former smugglers, this does not lead to good strategic outcomes.
The goal of a planning process is to get the team aligned on where we are and where we want to go. A planning process that silences some leaders, and has others contorting themselves to cheat the system, is a bad process. Not because we said so. But because it isn't doing its job.
Get back in the weeds
The strategists in your midst will talk about getting to a 25,000 ft view of things. But effective strategic planning is an alignment tool. Alignment as in the whole team. Everyone. You need a process that anticipates strategists, smugglers, and silence. It's not possible to get aligned if you've got three people soaring above the clouds with everyone else standing on the ground. You need to build a ladder. The strategists will still get their strategy on, but starting from the operational details on the ground has two major benefits.
First, your planning process ends up better informed. Goals work better when they're anchored in reality. Reality about your team's velocity. Reality about trade-offs and dependencies between teams. Reality about how underwater some parts of the org are, and the operational risk that represents. It sounds obvious, but so many goals documents aren't. Without tactical context, executive teams will write wishlist goals in December that the rest of the organization laughs off in January. And by May, that laughter will have turned into cynicism and frustration.
And second, it's a much easier on-ramp. The way any executive learns to see around corners is by getting good at listening to the corners of their org. And that includes the corners led by people who have learned to shut up in planning meetings because they're "not good at strategy." We promise those leaders know their team, though. They know what's easy and what's hard, and what keeps getting overlooked. Which commitments they can hit every time, and which are dead on day one of the quarter. It's an inclusion moment, and also just more operationally excellent, to invite that perspective in.
So, from an operational place, what has 2022 been? Ask yourself, and ask your team. Before we all start committing ourselves to a plan for 2023, stop and take stock of where you are now.
If you want to sound extra business-y, you can say that you're building a clear point of view on your operational posture. But basically you're writing down some observations. Observations like:
What are the patterns that keep tripping this team up when we try to do hard things?
What are our sources of conflict or friction, and what is the root cause of that conflict?
What are the things we nail every single time, and that represent a source of operational strength for the org?
What do we keep deferring? And, for each of those things, does it feel better to imagine prioritizing it, or dropping it?
For us, this exercise always feels like excavation. It takes deliberate digging. The observations we find near the surface are usually less than half of the total list, and only sometimes the most important. But a solid 60-minute session is generally all it takes to reach the bottom of the dig. And when we look up, we have a pretty comprehensive picture.
This doesn't mean you're done. You still need to make some strategic choices about where you're placing bets for next year. You still need to write actual goals for the team. One thing this does mean, though, is that you all know where you're starting from. Like, actually know. And actually all of you. The strategists, the smugglers, and the silent, are on the same page. That's alignment you didn't have yesterday. And the other thing you'll find is that, now that you've written it all down, it's out of your head. Take a walk around, go eat something. When you come back, you may find it's much easier to elevate and think about what those goals should actually be.
(ps — this process can be helpful for life goals, too, not just your work ok bye xoxo)
- Melissa and Johnathan