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We
need to learn to detect self-defeating attitudes of members of our
strategic team when they must grapple with a new formulation of strategy
for some emergently crucial area of the business. Many managers will
tend to hold to the hidden belief that when the inevitable problems
arise in trying to execute a perfectly good strategy that it means
that something must be wrong with the strategy itself.
All problems that come up in carrying
out a strategy should be treated as learning and improvement opportunities for
everyone involved. All can improve their strategic thinking ability, the quality
of their decisions and the effectiveness of their actions. Sometimes people need
reminded of this.
When a strategic plan is being carried
out, it invariably brings up more than one decision area. The team will need
to map out the right options across all decision areas so that actual decisions
taken in different areas are resonantly harmonious and coordinated in a shared
mental model of all decision-makers so that decision takers in different areas
of the enterprise are not cancelling each other out.
If we are truly committed to making
a reasonable strategy work, if we have a genuine shared learning and improvement
attitude about it, it will have a tendency to inspire and motivate others in
and around the strategic effort. But, if we are of two minds about the whole
thing, if we are less than enthusiastic about the strategy, then any number of
good shared thinking exercises or derivation of interesting implementation models
will all fall by the wayside due to the contagion of cynical gloom.
This entire social psychological background
to any strategic implementation activity in an organisation means that we have
to learn to take a closer and deeper look at what is making most people uncomfortable
in any particular zone of strategic engagement where shared thinking and coordination
of action are clearly indispensable. Even where the solutional focus seems to
theoretically satisfy all the objective requirements of the situation, managers
can be covertly agreeing among themselves to live in an atmosphere of cover-up
of secret discomfort. If all this is not surfaced and dealt with to the point
of developing real awakened insight in all members of the team, they will not
be able to take effective action because they do not believe in it.
This kind of organisational review
implies that everybody will have to stop assuming that they already know what
significant customers, clients or important allies are thinking. The strategic
team must learn to make the necessary contacts with customers, clients or allies
and listen carefully to where these entities are really coming from about the
activities of our organisation. If our team is wholly enclosed in its own internal
organisational efforts, then members are dwelling in a strategic vacuum, which
inevitably results in a strategic blockage, a loss of strategic capacity.
The crux of the strategic organisational
problem thus becomes a failure of team members to ask the right strategic
questions. In addition to this, because they are typical human
beings, many of them will develop muddled answers to the questions that do manage
to get asked. Instead of genuine thinking, we get shared, collusional muddle.
And it all seems to be o.k. because everybody is getting into that space. Then
everybody just carries on in a state of strategic irrelevance.
The corrective for all this now becomes
a shared agreement to think the unthinkable, as when
we do genuine scenario planning or multiple reality modelling.
One typical unthinkable organisational
thought is that we really are not strategically adequate
and truly need everyone
involved to get into appropriate areas of strategic learning and improvement.
What if our ability to implement strategy borders on worse than pathetic? Will
our self-esteem prevent us from facing this?
The left-brain conservative intellect
will itself ask spurious questions about procedure or requirements for details
which will inhibit higher level questioning toward strategic breakthrough and
insight. This is an active characteristic of strategic learning disability and
it is all too common among typical managers. The left-brain conservative intellect
is a mechanical categorising system that cannot see beyond its own operational
boundaries. Unable to be viable in the real thinking zone, it keeps itself active
in the lower level details it has been trained to handle, using this activity
as a substitute for real thinking and shared decision modelling. Hence what often
tries to pass itself off as useful professional judgement is just a defensive
routine for covering-up personal strategic inadequacy.
The left-brain conservative intellect
of strategically useless professional judgment will inevitably insist that it
is itself owed all sorts of explanations if it is to become convinced to do a
good job of strategic implementation. It will find it difficult indeed to fulfill
a strategy it does not want to understand. Certain mentalities like to complain
about the dark shadows they see in their position, yet will refuse to step into
the light and learn how to learn. What is happening inside the
consciousness of these people will actually be the decisive factor in their position,
not what is coming to them from outside their consciousness.
Again and again, it will be this fundamental psychological area of cognition
that needs attention, examination and profound self-questioning of any manager
caught in the left-brain conservative intellect trap of professional judgment.
Any reasonably intelligent manager
or professional can achieve cognitive liberation and the ability to learn, but
this requires a voluntary disconnection from beliefs about the self derived from
memories of past knowledge and experience. It also means that attention has to
be voluntarily turned toward something higher, new and different beyond the usual
thinking pattern, including especially the thinking pattern that is actively
and emotionally concerned in the current strategic organisational challenge with
its surrounding interpersonal difficulties, anxieties or hidden judgments.
Team members have to understand that
what they are most deeply needing to do for themselves in the situation can really
be done, but this means that everybody will have to agree to not allow superficial
obstacles and distractions to discourage them and push them back into old self-defeating
patterns. This must be said, for it is a natural fact that the mind gets panicky
when it meets a problem it cannot readily and immediately solve. In its anxiety
to relieve the tension of the situation, the mind will all too easily turn toward
a false solution which just creates repeated panicky problems and reinforces
learning disabilities.
Ultimately, as more and more people
in the organisational situation can wake up to what all this is really about,
they will discover what is truly right for them for both their personal and group
progress. This will speak for itself. Others who prefer to remain blind, blinkered
and stuck in left-brain conservative judgment will simply be by-passed and left
behind.
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