Thursday, August 11, 2005

Ownership vs Resonance in Strategy

Buy in and ownership are often touted as essential in strategic planning and in ensuring planned strategic actions actually happen. I've always focused more on the process rather than the output (or document) in strategic planning. I've attempted to make strategy memorable, to boil it down to a few key guiding principles so that it continues to inform day to day action (without people having to re-read a long document every time they make a decision).

This has got me thinking about resonance. When a group of managers go away on a retreat for example and write a mission statement or vision they go through a myriad of discussions, arguments, story telling and thinking processes to end up with something that is, for them, richly embued with meaning. Then they bring it back and present it proudly to the organisation and wonder why people aren't all that excited by those carefully crafted words.

I think part of the answer has to do with ownership and involvement - if people haven't been involved in something they're less likely to be enthused about it. I also think there's more to it than that. Involvement in the process creates resonance. The words in a strategy, mission statement or vision are semantic hooks into a set of ideas, experiences and judgements they've had through the process. They become a shortcut to a set of cognitive patterns, or tacit knowledge, that reinforce and affect action.

A colleague I met with in Australia recently shared with me a story about a mission statement he'd recently developed with a community group he was a member of. He knew he would only get involvement from a small subset in a half day workshop, so he devised an activity where everybody wrote down three or four words that represented what the organisation meant for them. These were clustered and used as a basis for discussion in the workshop. This meant everyone participated, many saw their words in the final mission statement, and there were different degrees of resonance based on this graduated method of participation.

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