Photo by striatic
A post from Mark Howell from Strategy Central cites an interesting quote from David Maister’s blog on how to move from the language of destinations to action….
"Whether you are talking about purpose, mission, vision, values, goals, objectives or almost ANY of the traditional concepts that people use, the only practical way to make it real is to do two (simultaneous) things:
(a) stop talking about the future destination, and start thinking about the rules you would have to live by in order to get there; and
(b) translate the generalities of the organization’s purpose, mission, values or principles into what it would mean for individuals and confirm that the organization’s members are, in fact, prepared to be held accountable and live by those individual rules.
Once you have a crafted a clear vision and purpose, the next step requires that we move on to execution. Moving to execution requires that their be some high-level constraints, rules or principles that guide how we take action towards the vision and purpose.
Consider the article Analysis of Paralysis by Dan Heath and Chip Heath, in Fast Company, which discusses a key principle that supports the need for rules and principles to guide us as we move from vision to action: "If your strategy doesn’t help employees act, it’s not a strategy." Effective leaders help the organisation to act to bring about their vision. The power of principles and guiding rules to help people to act is effectively illustrated in this quote from the article…
"Researchers Eldar Shafir and Donald Redelmeier helped prove this point in an article in The Journal of the American Medical Association. They gave doctors the medical history of a 67-year-old man who’d been suffering chronic hip pain from osteoarthritis. He’d been given drugs to treat his pain, but they had been ineffective, so there was only one viable option: hip-replacement surgery, which would involve a long and painful recovery. Then a final check with the pharmacy uncovered one medication that hadn’t been tried. Would the doctors like to give the drug a shot? Forty-seven percent of doctors chose to try the medication in a final attempt to keep the patient from going under the knife.
Another group of doctors saw the same facts, except they were told that the pharmacy had discovered two medications that hadn’t been tried. If you were the patient with the bum hip, you’d be thrilled–two nonsurgical options are better than one. But when the doctors were presented with two nonsurgical options, only 28% chose to try either one.
What happened here is decision paralysis. More options, even good ones, can freeze us, leading us to stick with the "default" plan, which in this case was slicing open someone’s hip. This clearly is not rational behavior, but it is human behavior. Similar tests with different groups have revealed consistent results.
Think about the sources of decision paralysis in your organization. Every business must choose among attractive options: growing revenue versus maximizing profitability, quality versus speed to market. Fold together lots of these tensions, and you have a surefire recipe for paralysis. It took only two options to fuzz the doctors’ brains. How many options have your people got? As Barry Schwartz puts it in his book The Paradox of Choice, as we face more and more options, ‘we become overloaded…. Choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.’ …. Simplicity is the way out. Imagine if the doctors in the psychology study had worked for a hospital with the mission statement, "Invasive treatments should be a last resort." Suddenly, the choice isn’t so paralyzing, even with two drugs. The statement is simple because it makes a decision easier, not because it’s dumbed down. Doctors aren’t idiots."
The underlying principle is that: Simplicity allows people to act. A set of clear rules and principles to guide action towards the vision provide the necessary simplicity require to move people from vision to action…
- As a leader are you helping the organisation make choices?
- Are you making it simple for people to act?
- Do you have a set of principles or rule that help people to act?
Technorati Tags: Strategy, Vision, Principles, Values, Simple, Simplicity, Management, Purpose, Leadership, Business, Action, Execution
Related posts:
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 0 comments… add one now }