Four Behaviors That Stifle Strategic Thinking

One thing I don’t miss from my former life is being invited several times a year by other organizations to participate in so-called “strategic planning” sessions.

Never mind that regardless of intent, nearly all of them ended up having nothing to do with strategic thinking, dumbed down instead to developing a tactical to-do list.

Real strategy-making deals with uncertainty and ambiguity and very few people are comfortable with that.  More on that later in this essay but there is another reason these sessions usually end up being a waste of time.

It is because they nearly always employ the outdated 1950s notion of brainstorming, which until discredited in the 1960s was promoted as a means to increase creativity by 50%.

So run as fast as possible from any group today still using this practice.  It has long been shown to suck the life out of creativity instead.

I’m not talking about soliciting ideas, observations and input in group settings which can later be analyzed and filtered for patterns and connections that could be useful strategically.

I’m talking about sessions where groups are asked to distill or narrow down the input as a group.

Whether it be participants, governing boards, teams, executives or even some consultants, there are four types of behaviors that undermine this endeavor according to experts such as Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic.

“Social loafing” is one which is the predisposition of many people to become bystanders when in a group setting, looking much as if they are watching a tennis match.

Then there is “social anxiety” which refers to those poor souls who, rather than engage in critical thinking, soon begin to defend other people’s ideas from serious scrutiny and evaluation.
They are usually also the folks who cut off debate, “bless their hearts.”

Even if a few people in the group are given to discussion, evaluation and strategic thinking, others engage in what is called “regression to the mean,” meaning they dumb down the results of the meeting to the level of those who don’t or won’t or can’t think critically.

Some of this is due to what is called “production blocking,” terminology researchers use to describe a phenomena related to the size of the group.

It refers to the fact that the number of good ideas generated by a group plateaus when there are more than six or seven participants and plummets as the size of the group increases.

And this is even before what I call the “good ole boy” effect occurs, which is when two or three participants align on an agenda in advance of the brainstorming and spend the session trying to persuade or more often bully the group into getting their way.

I can’t tell you how many times I was invited to these sessions because of my expertise in strategic visitor-centric economic and cultural development only to be forced to listen to someone without a clue pontificate on how something would be great for tourism.

Now the new CEO of Hogan Assessment Systems, Chamorro-Premuzic explains the behavior of those who were so eager to lecture me on what was good for tourism in his recent book entitled, Confidence: How Much You Really Need and How to Get It.

My problem was never confidence.  But shaping community consensus taught me how often it is that far too many otherwise reasonable people get hoodwinked, as noted in the book, when lobbied by those high on the narcissism scale, into mistaking confidence for competence.

Dr. Chamorro-Premuzic has also found that virtual or online collaboration is far more productive than in-person group think not only because it tempers these behaviors but because participants become more thoughtful overall.

Most so-called strategic efforts, however, actually digress into tactical plans.  The late Stephen G. Haines, an expert in strategy-making distinguished strategic as the “what” versus the tactical of “how.”

Think “roadmap” versus the “vehicles for the trip.”

To paraphrase Gallup experts in the psychology of workplace strengths, being strategic comes from being able to see patterns in data and events “where others simply see complexity.”

Okay, “piece a cake,” right?

The key word is “patterns.”  People who can quickly see patterns and make connections strategically use that ability to sort through various scenarios and see alternatives which allows them to be more creative and innovative.

The reason so few people are strategically inclined is that it requires being comfortable with uncertainty.  Fear of impatience with uncertainty can make us disregard important cues.
In her classic book Beyond Fear, Dr. Dorothy Rowe, a clinical psychologist, argues that more than death itself, we fear uncertainty.

But the comfort with uncertainty that comes with being strategic is much more than falling back on intuition, at least the kinds that are merely gut instincts or snap judgments, which also give profiling a bad name.

It comes down to what Dr. William Duggan at Columbia describes as Strategic Intuition in his book by that title, “a clear thought,” but “not fast” and even somewhat “slow.”

Think “percolate” when you think of strategic intuition or what Steven Johnson calls a “slow hunch” in his book Where Good Ideas Come From, which by contrast is another reason brainstorming sessions end up being so superficial.

In a now classic white paper for McKinsey & Company, Dr. Hugh Courtney who is now the Dean of International Business and Strategy at Northeastern, broke “uncertainty” down into four levels.

Level 1 is “A clear enough future” based on market research and near term capacity, which in my experience is where most organizations stop when attempting to think strategically, if at all.

Level 2 deals with “alternative futures” often in my experience related to trying to keep up with, emulate or “fast follow” competitors, again pretty straight forward but near term in nature.

Level 3 is when a push is made to deal on a spectrum with “a range of futures” but still pretty predictable.

Level 4 is looking out into “true ambiguity,” still data-derivative but more qualitative and speculative in nature.

Plans should strive to deal with all four levels but most clearly stop at the first.  Insights into level 4 often comes from looking back at history for clues to patterns that will influence the future.

Truly strategic organizations employ all four levels but organically evolve strategies by immediately informing them as new information become available.

It is amazing how rapid, in a relative sense, that even the most long term uncertainties are able to be dialed into focus, only to be replaced by more longer term uncertainties.

Why bother then?  Because research confirms that more strategic organizations are not only more nimble and innovative but they perform at higher levels.


But strategy-making is hard work, even for people who are naturally inclined.

The Core vs. Transient Values of Place

As Mugs and I drive cross country each year via different routes, we average 9 or 10 hours a day on the road and always stop in time to grab dinner, if possible, at a local restaurant and swing through the downtown area.

On this trip stops included Tuscaloosa, Fort Worth, Santa Fe, Richfield (UT,) Salt Lake, Dillon (MT,) Coeur d’Alene, Casper, Lincoln and Nashville before returning to Durham, North Carolina where we live.

I also read or re-read books on the trip, often related to places along the way, including this year, Creating the Land of the Sky, Rising Tide, The Big Burn and West of the Revolution, a horizontal snapshot across North American during the time of the American Revolution.

Usually histories drill down into an event but horizontal histories are fascinating because they link events across context.

I even re-read the fictional This House of Sky, the memoir of an author who grew up ten years ahead of me along the Montana Side of the Bitterroots.

To get “centered” each morning, I randomly read for a few minutes from the life and beliefs of Saint Francis of Assisi.

It was remarkable how similar revitalized downtowns were along the way, almost as if they were following a formula.  They were similar down to the variety of street trees also planted back in Downtown Durham and the near universal application of the description “cool.”

I happened to be re-reading The City: A Global History by Joel Kotkin as I enjoyed my now once-weekly “steak night” by dropping into Misty’s, an acclaimed local restaurant and located in the “P District” of Downtown Lincoln, Nebraska.

It is a local favorite familiar to one of Lincoln’s native sons who will be chef of Nanasteak when three friends open it in Durham’s historic American Tobacco District, lending a touch of Durham authenticity to a section devoid.

Equidistant from Misty’s in downtown Lincoln is a plaza, a performing arts center featuring Broadway musicals, a minor league baseball stadium, and historic buildings adapted for residential lofts and hotels, all seemingly replicated in every downtown now at the expense of differentiation and often obscuring organic traits.

Kotkin, the director of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University is an expert in the evolution of cities over the last nearly 10,000 years.

He laments that the rush of cities now “to convert old warehouses, factories, and even office buildings” into “residential resorts” is not sustainable because “an economy oriented to entertainment, tourism and ‘creative functions’ is ill suited to provide upward mobility.”

He warns that “focused largely on boosting culture and constructing spectacular buildings, urban governments may tend to neglect” what makes cities sustainable including relentlessly fostering a strong and always evolving “middle class.”

These places risk becoming “dual cities,” inhabited only by the rich and the low wage workers it takes to provide for them.

Professor Kotkin makes a compelling argument that historically, cities that continue to thrive over time engender a “shared identity” and “a peculiar and strong attachment, sentiments that separate one specific place from others.”

He would agree with Bill Baker, an expert at helping communities drill down into the values and traits that make them distinct, that these elements of sense of place are far more significant than physical traits such as historic structures.

Fortuitous for Durham where acceptance of differences has historically been a key part of its personality over many generations, this aspect is one of the pivotal and predictive traits Kotkin pinpoints as to why some places rise and fall while others remain vital.

Coincidentally, I first read Kotkin’s book, The City, in 2006, right after Baker had concluded his work over a two year period in conjunction with thousands of Durham residents to distill its overarching personality or, as we say in marketing, brand.

It was also the year I attended a small destination marketing conference of professionals beginning to embrace a strategy I had somehow stumbled onto early in the four-decade career from which I retired at the end of 2009.

Distinguished from idolization of mega-cultural facilities that have proven to homogenize community identity, it is anchored foremost in differentiation and authenticity of sense of place, organically incorporating only distinctive facilities of appropriate scale.

It isn’t easy to revitalize city centers but care must be taken to differentiate, and often that means protecting cultural, historic and natural elements from the very forces of homogenization it unleashes.  Place-making is often more about deciding “what not to do.”

This is why sustainable revitalization is more like “gardening” than “big game hunting.” Once erased, distinctiveness is impossible to “salt and pepper” back into formulas without going through another cycle of decline and resurrection.

At dinner recently, a long-time friend of mine at the very center of Durham’s revitalized core rhetorically asked, “What does Durham need to do to get more of the entrepreneurs it has always spawned to stay and buy homes here?”

“Just be true to who we are at our most temporal level,” I replied remembering Kotkin’s admonition.  People who share and help perpetuate that distinctiveness will be drawn to build their lives here.

Seeking to become something your not or frenetically replicating other places in pursuit of what Kotkin terms the “transient values” of “hipness, coolness, artfulness, and fashionability” is a recipe for losing a community’s soul.

Places “without moral cohesion (shared values) or a sense of civic identity, we are doomed to decadence and decline.”

The Ripple Effect of Dog Poop as A Keystone Strategy

Instead of an overarching strategy, many communities chase after every grant possible, discarding workable programs spawned by one grant to chase after yet another grant.

This is far more common than you might think, including in my adopted home of Durham, North Carolina.

It is what happens when strategy-making is inside out vs. outside in and defined by resource limitations rather than being revenue or results driven.

So I smiled when news articles picked up that struggling Naples, Italy announced what some would call a “keystone” strategy by taking DNA samples to aggressively crack down on pet owners who let their dog poop all over sidewalks and other public places there without bothering to pick it up.

Why would a community with major problems focus on dog poop?

It is really another take on the counterintuitive “broken windows” theory, a “keystone” strategy at the heart of crime reduction in many cities.

It is based on the observations by social scientists that people, not just criminals “take cues from their surroundings and calibrate their behavior.”  Some places, such as New York almost immediately seized upon this as a powerful “overarching” or “keystone strategy.

Many others have wasted the subsequent decades arguing against it, essentially settling for having no “overarching” strategy at all.

Identifying a “keystone” strategy is also how Paul O’Neill, a nearly life-long bureaucrat famously turned Alcoa around while CEO, by making safety the giant company’s focus.

Many experts thought O’Neill was nuts but safety turned the company around.  It is because “keystone” or “overarching” strategies have a ripple effect.  In his book The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg calls them transformational.

O’Neill had picked up the importance of “keystone” strategy by studying what made some government agencies so much more effective than others.

It is the same reason that something as simple as fastidious community attention to appearance and upkeep can ripple throughout other areas because it is linked to reducing littering and crime in general, reducing domestic violence, improving general public health, increasing property values, stimulating economic development, encouraging volunteerism and philanthropy as well as enhancing community pride.

In nature, changes that have immense ripple effect are called “trophic cascades,” an ecological process that ripples through the ecology.  An example of this is the reintroduction of wolves after 70 years into Yellowstone Park, which cuts into my native nook of Idaho.

Described in this incredible video clip by columnist George Monbiot based on his fascinating book entitled, Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life, the reintroduction of wolves in this area even changed its physical geography.

Closer to home, urban reforestation if practiced holistically and with gusto, can also have a cascading or ripple effect.

Local and state governments try to be strategic.  But they fail for two basic reasons.  They let available resources suffocate strategy-making, resulting in an addiction to grants and a revolving door of programs that are never given the capacity to be scalable.

The other reason these strategic plans fail is that they neglect to identify an “overarching” strategy, one that can synergize multiple goals into a concentrated focus and create disruptive change.

It really is that simple.

Manifestation of a Community Value

Many felt it was prescient that Durham, North Carolina, where I live, happened to honor social entrepreneurs at its Annual Tribute Luncheon in the spring of 2009.

Conceived in 2008, the honorees for that event seemed to foretell an explosion of entrepreneurial interest here including campus-like hubs such as Bull City Forward and two American Undergrounds.

However, that may be more coincidence.  The roots of Bull City Forward can also be traced to meetings in 2008, one of which was attended by an ATL organizer.  So it appears the revelation itself was entrepreneurial.

But Durham’s almost temporal entrepreneurial nature had been unearthed two years earlier during a two year process from 2004-2006 involving hundreds and hundreds of residents as well as external audiences culminating in the distillation of Durham’s “overarching” personality including community values.

It may also be coincidence that the notion of “social entrepreneurs,” was simultaneously gleaned during that two year drill-down to reveal Durham’s brand, when one of the executives involved with managing that process happened to read a 2004 Fast Company Magazine article.

The magazine recognized 20 companies as “best of the best” social capitalists including one based in Durham, The Center for Community Self-Help which was founded in 1980.  This clue led to uncovering a deep vein of community interest and activism that had been long taken for granted.

The idea that Durham is inherently entrepreneurial didn’t surface from a wish to be so or from envy or because it is now in vogue, but because it was unearthed by hundreds and hundreds of citizens digging down to discover Durham’s enduring distinctiveness.

A community’s personality, or brand in marketing parlance, is not an aspiration or a slogan or a tactic or even a strategy.  It can’t be imported, exported, transplanted or developed.

Its elements cannot be not born of or made sustainable from envy or trends.  While not always unique to a community, their distinct manifestation is.

Today’s press is all about the incredible American Underground with two 20,000+ sq. ft. downtown Durham campuses within a few blocks of each other.  It was recently recognized as part of the exclusive Google for Entrepreneurs Tech Hub Network.

But this and any subsequent efforts will always stand on the shoulders of generations of entrepreneurs here dating to the late antebellum 1850s of Durham’s founding.

That is what I mean by near-temporal.

First Step Toward Appearance As Overarching

Communities such as Durham, North Carolina, where I live are well advised to create a local inter-agency and inter-organization counterpart to the report assembled each year to meet state statute by the Office of Beautification of the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT.)

Durham’s localized version could be more comprehensive and include collected data related to the composition and tonnage of solid waste and recycling as well as roadside mowing, litter removal and indexing, urban forestry, stream clean up, advocacy and beautification efforts, as well as annual public opinion surveys of internal and external stakeholders related to appearance.

It could be coordinated by Keep Durham Beautiful (KDB,) a non-profit embedded in City General Services, but also serving the County.

KDB could gather data from City and County agencies and various commissions, Research Triangle Park, NCDOT, the Durham Appearance Advocacy Group and the Downtown Business Improvement District.

It would also glean information from the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau, public, private and charter schools, universities, Preservation Durham, vintage clothing stores, watershed and neighborhood associations and the courts and various law enforcement agencies.

The purpose of aggregating the data would be to help focus benchmarks, illuminate progress as well as inform an overarching strategy. It would also be valuable to overcome fragmentation and to inform progress toward sustainability goals.

Should the City and County strategic plans ever include an overarching strategy, no better case could be made than appearance and clean up. It touches nearly every aspect of these plans including public safety and health, economic development, tax base and valuation, poverty reduction, community pride and image, neighborhood vitality, asset stewardship, quality of life and place, wayfinding and traffic management and much more.

Sure doesn’t sound superficial to me but I probably subscribe to a more holistic view of community appearance.  If there is bureaucratic resistance or inertia, the report could be assembled by the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau as part of its State of Durham’s Image.

Of course, I’ve lent voice to this viewpoint many times over the years with little or no success. The case only becomes stronger with no rival in sight.  Maybe we can start with the report.

A Finishing Touch For The City’s Strategic Plan

I love the City of Durham’s new website for tracking progress under its new strategic plan. There is only one thing missing that would tie together the plan’s five goals:

• Strong and Diverse Economy
• Safe and Secure Community
• Thriving Livable Neighborhoods
• Well-Managed City
• Stewardship of City’s Physical Assets

All that’s missing is an overarching strategy that would interweave each of the goals into a “concentrated force,” the essence of good strategy. Strategy experts such as Al Reis liken an overarching element to a setting on a garden hose nozzle (in Durham it would be attached to a water barrel, of course).

Turn it one way, you have a fine mist that military strategists term “scatteration of forces”, turn it the other way and you have a powerful stream that can blast away dirt and grime.

After reading of the City’s goals closely, including the one named “Well-Managed City,” it seems to me that there is one overarching strategy that can tie each of them into a concentrated force.

It is called different things: aesthetics (one of the top three factors that predict resident attachment to a city,) beautification, appearance etc. I’ll use aesthetics.

By now City officials are sensing from resident comments about the number of newly re-paved road, just how much a different upkeep can make in perception. That’s just a fraction of what they will sense if they will just they tackle overall aesthetics with similar intensity.

Here are just some of the ways aesthetics can tie together each of the City’s goals:

• Strong & Diverse Economy – This one’s easy. There is a correlation between visual blight and economic decline just as there is between scenic conservation and economic growth, both the traditional form deployed by the City and the visitor-centric economic and cultural development it jointly leverages with the County through the self-funded Durham’s community/destination marketing authority.

• Safe & Secure Community – This one’s even easier. Both the well-proven “Broken-Windows theory” of crime reduction and prevention and Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) correlate good aesthetics to reduced crime and perceptions of public safety.

• Thriving, Livable Neighborhoods – Okay these are all easy. Prompt elimination of litter and graffiti, clean streets, sidewalks and vacant lots, well kept roadsides and medians are overall “environmental order” to reduce anti-social behavior including racism and stimulate social capital and increase property values.

• Well-Managed City – Of course, good aesthetics will address the first objective through increased reduction of litter through recycling but will also increase property values under financial management and the reaction employees will get from residents will encourage them to try harder and feel more fulfilled in their work, especially the majority whom don’t live in Durham.

• Stewardship of City’s Physical Assets – This is inherently about aesthetics including well maintained parks, landscaping around public facilities, clean streets and air and water pollution control is just good business and inspire private property owners to do the same.

To Durham’s credit, it was one of the first community’s to ban outdoor billboards way back in 1984, a bipartisan effort spearheaded by a Republican Council member from Hope Valley. Our community has done many things to foster and preserve sense of place. But we’ve really dropped the ball when it comes to aesthetics.

While some may think it may be too late to add an overarching strategy to the City’s excellent plan, the County is in a strategic planning process where aesthetics can be both adapted and/or then presented as an overarching strategy to tie both the City and County’s plans together.

Every strategic plan needs a overarching strategy that can synergize multiple goals into a concentrated force.

If They Thought Billboards Touched A Nerve…

I was amazed that elected officials were amazed at the number and ratio of emails they received opposing a change in the Durham billboard ban, prior to the Durham City Council taking a unanimous vote against a request by Fairway Outdoor Advertising.

Maybe some hadn’t fully grasped the results of a poll conducted to inform discussion by NANOPHRADES as part of DCVB’s annual survey. It clearly showed strong community support to retain the ordinance as is.

But if elected officials were surprised that element of community appearance touched a nerve, they should recall now how important overall appearance is to residents in scientific polls.

Thinking it superficial I suspect, local governments here have steadily cut back on beautification, litter removal and mowing and maintenance of medians, right-of-ways, roadways so much over the years, they’ve probably forgotten what “best practice” was.

And I understand some administrators had quite a chuckle at a proposal by one of their own results-based citizen groups to make clean-up and beautification an overarching strategy since it has been well proven to impact assessed valuation/revenues, crime reduction and prevention, public health, economic development, neighborhoods, code enforcement and several dozen other public responsibilities.

It must be tough to keep a finger on the pulse of a community. But everyone knows it takes much more than watching your inbox or counting noses at a public hearing.

Maybe the real legacy of this drawn out debate and drama but failed billboard issue will finally connect some dots that overall appearance issues are a top priority for Durham residents.