In my last week’s insights pills I’ve made a reference to Dave Aron’s thought on the “tragedy of the perpendicular”, a.k.a. the tail that wags the dog, with an observation on top of how I see this happening in the interplay of strategy, plans and execution. It got a bit of traction with Rob England highlighting that in the below post.
That has lead me to further think about it and grapple further with the idea… This is how my mind works, and why I don’t refrain from putting out there, this kind of half-baked articulations, in trust that by thinking out loud I will get to something bigger and deeper, not to mention simply allowing me to articulate things better as I engage or just observe reactions (which acts as feedback loops).
First things first, I think I need to clarify what I mean with strategy at the level of what my comment was directed towards. Here the quite famous Rumelt’s framework from his good strategy/bad strategy book can come handy… And what I mean with strategy is once you have all the elements in place:
Articulated a relatively well-defined challenge you want to do something about;
You’ve developed a guiding policy which acts as a sort of constraint that gives you direction on what to focus on, yet still quite high-level;
You designed coherent actions with what you think is realistic to do next.
Embedded to the framework, it is expected that all of this exercise is informed by a diagnosis, thus with data and factual information that backs it up.
All good and well with that, and definitely has a place in suitable context – the concept of bounded applicability should be almost a mantra for anyone working with processes and stuff like that.
The problem which I’ve pointed out in my short comment, is that I see this often getting upside down in the sense of thinking that the core job is to this part, the narrowing of the problem or challenge to solve and so forth. It’s kind of perceived by many as the ‘sexy’ part, and absolutely the one we need to get right, because then we “just” need to execute.
And that’s exactly where danger lives, or at least risks creeping in… Because guess what? Thus far, you haven’t done any actual adding-value work. To put it bluntly, your customers couldn’t care less about what you wrote down, what you are up to in your strategizing work, they don’t even care whether you use any framework for that or not. They barely care whether you thought about stuff before doing them.
They do care, though, whether you delivered what they needed. They do care whether their problem has been solved, or eased, or that they perceive value on what you have given to them. And that is mostly a matter of execution.
Execution is your core job and should always be.
Yes, hopefully you are doing things thoughtfully and picking the right things to do now, so that you are not at mercy of cheer luck only, and that is, stripping it all to the essence, what a strategy is about. And hopefully you are sequencing things well so that you set yourself to success and to deliver timely – thus doing a bit of planning. But that done in a much more organic and continuous way. As an emerging process that gets adapted as you learn more about stuff.
Thus, when I talk about being careful not to let the “tail wag the dog”, so to speak, I mean as a matter of priority, and perhaps almost hierarchy. And that I think that, if we have to put it in a linear order, then it has to be strategy subjected to execution, and not the other way around.
That does not mean that is an either/or kind of thing though. Just like it is not with the dog, the tail and the wagging, by the way.
Recently Morten Elvang took a stab at combining the Cynefin framework by Dave Snowden with Lean Portfolio Management, for practical guidance in what he described as a kind of a dance. I think there is a lot into that metaphor. And if you really observe what goes between a dog and its tail, you may notice that sometimes the tail will be used by the dog for a matter of equilibrium, redirection and adjustment in general. And that perhaps is a good metaphor for what strategy should be while you are properly and more focused on your core which is to execute, to get valuable stuff done.
That way we can…
Ensure that the dog (execution) wags the tail (strategy), for as long as we need the tail (strategy) to slightly redirect and adjust to new observed phenomenon in an emergent basis.
by Rodrigo Sperb, feel free to connect (I only refuse invites from people clearly with an agenda to ‘coldly’ sell something to me), happy to engage and interact