“Foresensing”–The Key to Evergreen

In the days before texting I had friends, who even after email had become common via mobile devices, would always call or leave a voice mail message when they needed something or had a question.

It typically involved a document or some research finding.  So I would fulfill the requests quickly via email to leave a paper trail, but these individuals would invariably call again for clarification.

That is unless they disagreed with the information I had sent or something our organization was doing predicated on the findings, in which case they would write a lengthy email neglecting to include the background and copy a trillion other people, now understood as a cardinal sin.

Boy, I sure miss that drama.  But don’t jump to the conclusion that they had a learning or reading disability.

People who did that may have been much more strategic and savvy than it seems.  They probably accepted something I, too, understood at the time but chose not to further enable:

1. Many people no longer read;  2. Even more prefer to shape decisions and opinions on anecdotes and personalities rather than data and information; and 3. Very few are paying attention to the future or evolving.

In community work, like business and government, the world is awash with dead or dying organizational models which are kept on life support by people either addicted to those behaviors or overly conscious of those still all-too-prevalent conditions.

This is why “best practices” are so easy to spot, not merely for purposes of copying, but because the organizations that exhibit them are purposely wired for what entrepreneurial researcher Dr. Joseph Pistrui calls “nextsensing.”

During my now-concluded career in community destination marketing to generate visitor-centric economic and cultural development in four different parts of the country, I was what some would now characterize as an “evergreen entrepreneur.”

Only, I was on the quasi-public-private side of things. Still, according to some, I exhibited all 7 characteristics of evergreen entrepreneurs to some extent in the five different startups with which I was involved and/or led.

I enjoyed startups because you not only get to build an organization from scratch but you get to evolve each one by quantum leaps each time.  During the last half of my career, I learned to do this every few months with the same organization.

Nextsensing doesn’t come from “group-think” exercises such as brainstorming which, as studies have shown, is a pure waste of time unless accompanied with a very healthy dose of critical thinking.

Unfortunately, most people who facilitate or are drawn to the “kumbaya” school of brainstorming seem averse to thinking at all, let alone critically, because to them, asking questions is criticism.

But this is only one of the reasons that the traditional approach to making strategic plans is often futile, or when successful, are destined to be quickly relegated to a dusty shelf (buried on a rarely seen portion of a computer drive.)

An even more compelling reason these plans are now ineffective is that true strategic insight, strategic foresight or “nextsensing,” must be woven into the DNA of an organization in such a way that it occurs organically in real time.

Writing about this aspect in a classic book entitled, The Living Company: Growth, Learning and Longevity in Business, author and researcher Arie de Geus famously wrote “The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be your only sustainable advantage.”

Earlier, in 1988, de Geus termed this as “institutional learning” in an article in Harvard Business Review.  He explained that this type of learning is much more difficult than individual learning.

Organizations that are “evergreen” outperform those that are focused only on near-term returns.  According to studies, de Geus explains that they “institutionalize change” rather than reacting to crisis.

In the past, even evolving organizations could afford to gestate learning anywhere from 12 to 18 months before acting on it.

Today, that evolution must be in real time.

Researchers involved with the Nextsensing Project have identified four skills needed to see the future in real time:

1. Stretch Sensibilities – A mindset and commitment to exploration.
2. Stand for Change – Set new directions and adjust priorities.
3. Create a new Order – Retool the enterprise to set new goals and trigger actions no one else has set or achieved.
4. Lead with “Foresense” – Transform hunch to vision and new skills.

In late 1970s, Bert Lance, a banker and native-Georgian who headed the Office of Budget and Management for then President Jimmy Carter popularized the expression, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” an old Swedish proverb.

No even remotely sustainable organization has that luxury today.

Strategic Evolution

Looking back, being among the first of its type to bet on the Internet as a paradigm shift in marketing wasn’t the most emergent strategy giving Durham’s nascent marketing organization an edge.

Before two-thirds of Americans had heard of it and fewer than 14% were using it, the most emergent strategy was seizing on the website as the platform or repository for any and all information where not only staff had access.

From there it was also accessible or pushed out via content marketing to internal stakeholders such Durham residents, organizations and officials, but also to external stakeholders such as potential visitors, sports and meeting event organizers, real estate agents and developers, project feasibility consultants and financiers.

Somehow DCVB stumbled on to the realization way back then that not only was data and information the most sure-fire way to drive decision making, but holding it back as proprietary and then parceling out on demand was suddenly an extremely obsolete business strategy.

Of course, as Microsoft founder Bill Gates wrote a few years later in his book entitled, The Road Ahead:

"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.

Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction."

Today, we rarely overestimate the change that occurs every two years but many still fail to heed the caution at the end of what Gates wrote.

Two years after he penned that caution in 1995, Phillip Evans, now managing director of the Boston Consulting Group and former Harvard professor, co-wrote an award-winning article in Harvard Business Review entitled Strategy and the New Economics of Information.

He signaled a transformation that we now know dropped communications costs much faster than transaction costs, collapsed and fragmented economies of scale and changed the strategic value of data proprietary to curation and sharing.  If you missed it, click here for his TED overview last month.

A related paper was published a few weeks ago by McKinsey & Company entitled Are You Ready for the Resource Revolution.  Written by Stefan Heck and Matt Rogers, it explores what they call the “biggest business opportunity in a century,” dramatically improving the use of resources such as water.

The future, according to Evans, is about cooperation and collaboration as much as competition, something community destination marketing organizations have long practiced and coined as “coopetition.”  It is now the business strategy of the future.

Although specific to Durham metrics, many communities have always borrowed data from the DCVB site just as a few here and there in Durham have attempted to pull the organization back into the past.

Strategy-making, though, can’t be copied, at least not without the vision to drive its execution.  It has been known for many decades that strategy is not about planning or analysis, it is about perpetual and real time synthesis.

It must be embedded in an organization’s culture.

Many communities settle for being “fast followers,” a term coined by Dr. Henry Mintzberg in the same paper and a subsequent book from which I learned the idea of “emergent strategy” nearly three decades ago.

Mintzberg was also an early adopter of data as curation and put links to his papers and books online including a new one entitled, Rebalancing Society – Radical Renewal, Beyond Left, Right, and Center.

It is a rant, but don’t expect to skim it for understanding.  He envisions ideology not as a spectrum with extremes but as a circle including the public sector, the private sector and the plural sector or what he calls “communityship,” and what DeTocqueville, at the dawn of this nation, called a uniquely American innovation.

Each, according to Mintzberg, has a “potentially fatal flaw.”  He notes, “Governments can be crude.  Markets can be crass.  And communities can be closed, at the limit xenophobic…Crudeness, crassness and closed-ness are countered when each sector takes its appropriate place in society with the other two while helping to keep them and their institutions in balance.”

Now re-read this with your organization in mind and balance as strategy-making.  Balance, Curation, Cooperation and Resource Optimization – it is a whole new world.

Sound too “out there?”  So was embracing the Internet in the early 1990s.

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.

The Anxiety Inherent In True Strategy-Making

A day late, because snow had closed RDU, I dashed out to the Pacific Northwest and back again over the long weekend to rendezvous with family and toast my mom’s 85th birthday, which occurred  a couple of weeks ago.

I takes nine to ten hours each way including waiting at the gate and a layover, this time at Chicago’s O’Hare.  With noise cancelling headphones, I can use the time for what Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, calls “deep reading.”

Even when highly focused like I was then, “a reader’s mind typically wanders anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of the time according to one of the books I read en route entitled, Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, by Daniel Goleman.

Gallup’s State Of The American Workplace shows that only 30% of the workforce in the United States is truly engaged.

Goleman cites researchers at Harvard and Stanford who found that that these employees experience “flow,” which is keyed “when we align what we do with what we enjoy.” But even then only 20% of people have these moments “at least once a day” and 15% less often.

Aligning these studies, it appears that a large number of workers are daydreaming during the day, a state that when not over-indulged can incubate “creative discovery.”

The 20% who are actively disengaged may be “stuck in the state neurobiologists call ‘frazzle’…where their attention fixates on their worries, not their jobs.”

In fact, half of our thoughts are daydreams.  During the half day I spent with just my two sisters in the time between my departure and that of my daughter and grandsons, they shared something they had learned recently.

Our decisions are ruled either by fear or by love.  I suspect those preoccupied by their worries are ruled by the former.

As you can tell from reading this blog, I have a rich memory of events that occurred between the ages of three and eight, memories my sisters often say they don’t have from that span in their lives.

According to a new study published in the Journal Memory in November by researchers at Emory, this was probably because my parents let me repeat unaided recall of memories, only connecting them to the age I was at the time the events occurred.

They may have become too busy to be that patient as their family grew.  The researchers found that at the ages of 5, 6 and 7, kids were able to remember 63 to 72 percent of the events they had at age 3.

Following ages 8 or 9, that recall falls to 35% and the “narratives were less complete.  This is because our lives also become more complex at those ages.

Apparently as we get older, if we do happen to remember these events, they have more details, but for many childhood amnesia prevails.

On the return leg of my trip I re-read an article I had skimmed last month by Roger Martin in the current issue of Harvard Business Review entitled, The Big Lie of Strategic Planning.

It reminded me of a book I read in the early 1990s while I was shaping a strategic blueprint for Durham, North Carolina’s visitor-centric economic and cultural development.  It was an elaboration on a paper I read as I was headed to Anchorage, Alaska in a similar capacity in 1978.

A key takeaway from both the paper and the book entitled, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, was “emergent strategy,” the ultimate objective of a strategic plan.

The author, Dr. Henry Mintzberg of McGill University, argues that strategy cannot be planned because planning is about analysis and strategy is about synthesis.

Far too many executives, in fear of uncertainty, hardwire a strategic plan down to nothing more than a tactical plan.  As Martin notes, today the term emergent strategy has been perverted into nothing more than being a “fast follower” of competitor’s choices.

These executives restrain the process with a cost-focus when according to Martin, strategic planning is about revenue, not cost.  Obsession with cost destroys strategy-making by forcing it to be too perfect.

Martin, who is the former dean and now academic director of the Martin Prosperity Institute (centers of creativity) at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Business, argues that demands for certainty in strategy-making turns them into mere “plans stead of strategy.”

I’ve blogged before about “strategic intuition,” which involves freeing yourself from goals and objectives.  A strategic plan should not be an excuse to turn off strategic thinking.

Strategy-making relies on the recall some have of events before we were 5 or 7 because from that retrospection springs a curiosity to see the future through the lens of the past.

Maybe being strategic requires being comfortable with uncertainty and the ability to make decisions not from fear but from love.

Nothing’s Really New

A friend of mine from my Alaska days in the 1980’s, having read this blog, emailed recently that I haven’t changed a bit.

He reminded me that on an airplane trip we took together over the North Pole to harvest potential business from Europe early in that decade, I did something I often do today in this blog.

He had watched me go through a huge brief case of reading materials, tearing pages from periodicals and using a handheld Epson device (regarded as the first laptop) to create notes and then print them out on ticker tape to staple to clippings for routing or mailing after I got home.

Running a community destination marketing organization requires gathering marketing intelligence wherever possible but my friend observed that in most cases, I was routing the clippings to other people in community, most unrelated to my former visitor-centric career.

A best practices consultant who interviewed several hundred community leaders hypothesized that this habit of circulating information was one of the reasons our organization was considered so much more relevant than peer organizations were in other communities.

I do enjoy it so I guess it is no surprise that I do something similar in retirement now with these essays.

Marketers for any enterprise should be on the forefront of trends and changes but far too many lag behind even within their own organization.  This is clear in the USA report from the “Annual Global CEO Survey” by PwC.

CEOs were the only members of the C-suite to cite technological advances as the trend that will be most disruptive in the future.  In the US, only 36% of CEOs believed that those responsible for their marketing and brand management were prepared to make the changes necessary.

I suspect this is why you often see marketing departments so out of touch with their organization’s sustainability efforts, such as when they use roadside billboards which require huge amounts of deforestation, ultimately reducing carbon sequestration and fostering pollution.

Of even more concern to CEOs may be that only 20% believed their R&D divisions were prepared for the coming changes that will be wrought by technology.

Looking at the verbatims, those surveyed have very large concerns. These are the ones pursued by those I refer to as “big game hunters” on the supply-driven side of economic development (as opposed to those working on the demand-side such as tourism) which they hope to land in their communities of states.

Even though small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) were hit much harder during the recession, they remain where the action is.  The 23 million SMBs in America (fewer than 100 employees) generate 54% of the sales, provide 55% of the jobs and fill up 30-50% of all commercial space.

Since the 1970s, SMBs have accounted for 66% of all net new jobs.  About 98% or 22.5 million are independent, locally owned concerns that account for 54% of all U.S. sales.

They are under threat from chains for which 600,000-plus franchised small businesses in the U.S. account for 40% of all retail sales and provide 8 million jobs.

It isn’t just technological trends where big business marketers are unprepared.  Studies show big business often doesn’t understand small and medium-size businesses which for 70% are their customers.

The battle ground for this misunderstanding is on Main Street.  Part of the solution is better exchange and sharing of marketing intelligence and data.

Many local organizations that represent small businesses eschew strategy plans in favor of frenetically running around in an attempt to find a “parade” and then desperately seeking to be at the head or at least be the convener.

They have no patience for being at a table of equals if they can’t dominate the conversation.  They fail to see that a strategic plan is merely a pathway to make it easier to spot and react to trends as they arise.

They especially fail to grasp that today’s new breed of strategic thinkers see into the future by analyzing the past, sometimes referred to as “temporal planning,” something I stumbled onto decades ago by virtue of fusing my college major into my eventual four-decade career in community marketing.

But the aversion to strategic thinking among many organizations portending to represent business is why businesses of all sizes - but especially small businesses - have lost patience with and increasingly find these organizations irrelevant, leaving them to devolve into places where only “whiners” congregate.

Identifying and responding to trends is best done when organizations share and treat each other not only as equals but with a deeply respected division of effort and expertise.

Strategic partnering such as this works best when all eyes are trying to spot trends regardless of relevance to one partner or another but then quickly to shuttle them to the partner for which they are most relevant.

I realize this is annoying for generalists, who having been successful at one thing assume they are now expert at everything, dismissing organizations with expertise specifically suited.

In parting, I’ll forward 2014 trends by Sparks & Honey which takes an ecosystem approach to 80 areas of trend and culture.  If you find this amazing, you should see one of their custom reports.

Share them with strategic partners at a table of equals and assign which organizations will take point based on expertise and focus.

My favorite?  I’m retired.  My expertise now is narrowed to sharing.

Call it “content marketing.”  Just don’t refer to it as part of the new “sharing/collaborative economy.”

That isn’t new.  Nothing really is.

Strategic Introspection

It’s been twenty-four years since I was recruited to Durham.  A friend who is also retiring recently surmised it was probably because I already had various levels of experience at founding and growing community-destination marketing organizations (DMOs.)

Others during my now-concluded career credited me with strategic vision, something that always made me feel humbled and a bit awkward to describe when asked, often even now in retirement. 

Maybe that is part of what fueled my interest in how researchers and other experts describe strategy, insight and vision beginning with a keen interest I developed in strategic geniuses such as Napoleon, George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant dating from college days and before.

Start-ups are chaotic.  In the first few months a lot revolves around what Dr. William Duggan at Columbia Business School calls the “expert intuition,” that comes from being able to make quick decisions based on repetitive personal experience and practice.

This is what a hitter uses in baseball.  In his incredible book On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not, neuroscientist Dr. Robert A Burton explains that at the minimum it takes 200 milliseconds to react to the typical major league pitch traveling between 80-100 miles per hour which will cross home plate in approximately .380 to .460 milliseconds.

The ball travels nine feet before the batter’s retina can process that it left the pitcher’s hand.  There is no time for deliberation because the reaction time and swing alone equal the travel time to the catcher’s mitt.

However, there is some strategic thinking involved too.  The best hitters closely study the background and past performance of pitchers in order to make an educated guess about the kind of pitches that may be thrown in certain circumstances.  Pitchers do the same with opposing team hitters.

I was credited with the thoroughness of the various plans I cranked out for marketing, organization, performance metrics and decision-making within weeks of each of my DMO start-ups.  Of course people usually didn’t realize these plans were just a form of scaffolding and place-holders.

I needed time, not to do in-depth planning which would come later, but to get my head around the over-arching strategy unique during a given time to each community I represented.  According to Duggan’s books and lectures, this comes from what he calls “strategic intuition.”

Classes I took in the 1970s at BYU that touched on strategic thinking and planning took the approach still taught in many schools today: “figure out where you are; decide what you want to be; make a plan;” “set goals and objectives; then identify tactics.”

In other words “ready-aim-fire.”

As Duggan notes in several of his books, papers and interviews, the word strategy dates to 400 B.C. but it didn’t become a field of study until 1810, first related to the military, then by the late nineteenth century in business and by the twentieth century in social enterprise including the public sector.

The planning model I learned in my college days originated in the late 1830s.  However, lacking the resources of large organizations during my career and possibly due to proclivity,  I accidentally stumbled and bumbled into a very different - and according to Duggan - a far more effective and creative approach put forth a few years earlier.

The planning-first approach over relies on “expert intuition” which is based on what you know.  Using “strategic intuition” to first identify an over-arching strategy takes more time up front but you make up for it in effectiveness. It begins with scouring historical resources to find “what works.”

It involves disconnecting the dots and reconnecting them as informed by digging back into history, past studies and background with fresh eyes and then coupling your experience with the experiences of many others.  In the case of Durham, this process took me almost two years from the time we launched, but this aspect was also ongoing.

Some dismiss this as part of the creative process vs. planning.  I realize from reading analysts such as Duggan that strategic thinking for me was both/and but it always began with seeking “strategic insight.”  The flaw Duggan finds with the more wide spread “planning model” is that “learning what works comes at the end not the beginning,” what he terms a “fatal flaw.”

Many large organizations start a strategic planning process with top-down goals and objectives from a governing board and then add tactical elements.  Even after the fact, many fail to identity an over-arching strategy and the eventual outcome is these plans resemble operational plans more than strategic plans and fail to project into the future.

Even when predicated on “strategic intuition,” plans should be organic and updated in real time as new information is gathered and new “strategic insights” surface.  Having a plan is not an excuse to turn off strategic thinking.

Some organizations get by without any strategic planning or thinking required by their governing boards or stakeholders and a few may still consider their leaders to have strategic vision.

Ironically, these individuals unencumbered by structure may still benefit from some elements of “strategic intuition.”   While they may not be accessing background or data stored on the shelves neuroscientists tell us we have in our brains, they still have what Duggan calls “presence of mind.”

This means they can free themselves of goals and objectives and switch directions when an insight or new combination of elements occurs to them or is presented by others.  They must also have the resolution and drive to persevere.

Even so, without more accountability and a fuller approach to strategic thinking and planning it is likely their decisions will often be contaminated by what the new book entitled Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath describes as the “four villains” of good decision-making, “narrow-framing,” “confirmation bias,” “short-term emotion” and “overconfidence.”

By failing to anchor in what Duggan calls the precedents at the heart of “creative strategy,” they not only fail to be visionary but they miss a crucial ingredient for innovation.  They also risk being held hostage by special interests.

I never had the luxury to fly solo like that but I know from introspection and study more about why some people viewed me as strategic and visionary than I ever did at any time during my career.

To learn more about strategic thinking, one can do no better than to read Professor Duggan’s books Napoleon’s Glance, The Art of What Works, Strategic Intuition and Creative Strategy.  He’s also a great story teller.

The Strategic and Creative Value of Procrastination

I ran into a friend a few weeks ago while waiting for an oil change.  I introduced her to someone else I knew in the waiting room by explaining what she does for a living.  She introduced me to her friend with the comment, “he does whatever he wants.”

If I wasn’t a “workaholic” during my career, I don’t know who was, so people worried that retirement would be a difficult adjustment.  It hasn’t been.  They may have assumed that I went about my job with such passion that there wasn’t any left over.  That isn’t how passion works, at least for me anyway.

Lets just say I was pretty “engaged” during my career and still am with a number of pursuits including researching and writing essays for this blog.  A common narrative among ideological conservatives is that people working in government are not engaged.

However, that condition is not limited to public servants.  An on-going nationwide tracking poll by Gallup with a huge sample of more than 151,000 found that only 30% of American workers are engaged.

The Gallup survey also found that “one in five American workers are actively disengaged.”  Similarly, a human resources expert that I worked with told me more than a decade ago that, in any given year, approximately 20% of employees in even the highest performing of organizations are not a good fit.

Another way to look at this is that, according to Gallup, 7 out of every 10 workers including more than six out of ten managers, executives and officials are not fully engaged.  This problem cuts across all organizations regardless of size or sector, private, non-profit and public including those elected to high office.

Before the great recession, Gallup estimated the lost productivity from workers who are actively disengaged alone was $370 billion annually.

The 25-year study by the late Dr. Donald O. Clifton that led to the development of Strengths Finder found that “the most important predictor of the success of a company or division was how many people answered yes to the question ‘Do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?’”

Success in my now-concluded 40-year career as well as in retirement is not so much about the fact that I can now “do whatever I want” but that I’ve always been blessed with the opportunity to do what I do best every day.

During my career I didn’t have a reputation as a “list-checker,” in the pejorative sense of that term, probably because my intensity and inherent “bias for action” has always been coupled with with a love of learning and a knack for integrating new ideas and concepts into insight and innovation.

Those who give “list-checking” a bad name seem to make decisions too quickly, based on far too little information and usually refuse to be informed by any new information.  Masked with an appearance of ultra-confidence and a deep-seated fear of The Plateau Effect, “list-checkers” tend to steamroll more than they collaborate.

The Nobel Prize-winning neuroscience theory of “intelligent memory” teaches that data analysis and so-called intuition work together or parallel in the brain.  “List-checkers” have the potential to be as insightful as anyone if they will just slow down and let their brains tap into data.

At a different place on the spectrum from “list-checkers” are procrastinators.  As infuriating as procrastination in a workplace or a community can be, those with “structured procrastination” a term coined by Dr. John Perry who co-directs the Stanford Center for the Explanation of Consciousness and is the author of The Art of Procrastination, are usually getting far more done than “list-checkers.”

Together with Walter Chen, Perry posted a short essay about healthy procrastination on The Build Network.  Chen a former lawyer and now founder of iDoneThis, a software that fosters collaboration and productivity, also blogs at 99u -Insights on making ideas happen.

To me, another reason that structured procrastinators are so much more productive than “list-checkers” is the way innovation works.  As illustrated in a 4 minute video called Where Good Ideas Come From, also the title of his book published in late 2011, author Steven Johnson explains that good ideas and innovations have long incubation periods as “hunches.”

“Structured procrastinators” seem to grasp that better than others.  They also understand better than “list-checkers” or even hybrids such as me that ideas and insights get better when informed not only by data but by networking with others.

A few years before I retired, I read the  book Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement by Dr. William Duggan, a management professor at Columbia University Business School.  It is summarized on this EconTalk podcast.

Previously,  I had read his earlier book entitled Napoleon’s Glance: The Secret of Strategy, also the title of a course he teaches at Columbia.  According to Duggan, business schools often teach strategic analysis but stop short of strategic thinking or ideation, deeming them instead part of the creative process.

Duggan argues that there are three kinds of intuition (remember intelligent memory above,) “ordinary, expert and strategic.”  “Ordinary intuition” is a gut instinct, a mere feeling.  “Expert intuition” is a snap judgment.

“List-checkers” seem to over rely on these two forms of intuition and proclaiming to be visionaries use them to defend judgments lacking in supportive data.

“Strategic intuition” according to the science in Duggan’s book “is a clear thought…it’s not fast…it’s slow.”  It percolates.  It is what Johnson describes as the “slow hunch.”

Remember, the Internet percolated this way for more than ten years in the mind of its inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee.  “Strategic intuition” provides a much clearer vision with enough time to be informed by data and other hunches.

“Structured procrastinators” appear to somehow understand the power of the “strategic intuition.”  It is also why “deliberative” bodies such as elected officials should be wary of lobbyists and special interests who want to force their hand.

It is also my experience that the best decisions are win-win decisions and these take time and “strategic intuition.”

Where Democracy Is Still Potent

Recently during a public hearing in southwestern North Carolina, the head of the state association for outdoor billboards tried to argue that North Carolina was a safer and better place in the 1970s when it didn’t have roadside trees.

Of course that wasn’t the case, but his point was that cutting down all of the trees along the state’s roadways and especially around billboards would make them safer.  Of course, that isn’t true either.  Current setbacks for trees along roadsides have long been calibrated based on meticulous safety research.

However, those who might fall for this faulty reasoning, which unfortunately may include far too many legislators coupled with copious amounts of campaign donations, might be surprised to learn that it was proven at the dawn of motorized vehicles that cutting down roadside vegetation actually made roadways less safe.

This phenomenon was first observed in the English countryside where early roadways were often lined on both sides by very tall hedgerows.  However, when the hedges were lowered, it was found that drivers then increased speeds and drove more recklessly because they “felt safer.”

Andrew Zolli, co-author with Ann Marie Healy of the 2012 book Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back, included that tidbit in a presentation recently.  He also shared findings that when bicyclists wear helmets they may wisely be protected from the occasional fall but the fact is that when they wear one, drivers feel they can move closer to bicyclists at higher speeds increasing the likelihood of accidents.

Zolli is the executive director and curator for a fascinating organization known as PopTech, a collaboration of social innovators and scientists dedicated to investigating, prototyping and growing social innovations and breakthroughs.

In my opinion, at heart he is a futurist.  In a recent presentation Zolli noted that one reason we’re so lousy at predicting the future is a condition he calls “novelty bias.”  When we think long term, we take what is newest and make it the dominant feature of the future.

We’re doing that now with many technologies.  Today smartphones and tablets are toppling desktops and laptops but that doesn’t mean they won’t be just as rapidly toppled.  Thinking long term means looking beyond today.

Zolli notes that we have a tendency to focus too much attention on fast-moving threats such as terrorism, and not on far more powerful slow-moving threats such as climate change.

For instance, he cites that we’re spending trillions on the 1 in 28 million chance we’ll be impacted by an act of terrorism but zilch on the 1 in 6 chance we’ll be impacted by climate change.

Too often this misdirection is fueled by media frenzies that give us very unrealistic expectations.

The same phenomena can be fueled by social media such as neighborhood listservs.  On one level they can provide a useful heads up on suspicious activity, but on other levels they amplify and recirculate alarm to the point that many subscribers tune out just when they should be tuning in.

In organizations of every size you can see “novelty bias” undermining strategic thinking both at the management and board governance levels.  As Dr. Michael Porter argues, ninety-five percent of executives are too focused on operational effectiveness.

Governing boards often spend far too much time on compliance and not enough on strategic thinking.  This results in what Porter cautions is trying to mimic and then best the competition.

Truly strategic thinking should lead them instead to “compete to be unique.”

I find it disingenuous that many of the people who trash government regulation as ineffective are adherents of the ideology that has gutted its capacity over the last forty years.

But I agree with Zolli that regulations often become far too complex to be effective, primarily made that way, in my experience, by lobbyists who continue to pollute the regulatory process on behalf of special interests long after the legislative mandate.

A wry example Zolli gives is that BP had stringent rules for being careful with the handling of coffee while something obviously wasn’t working as intended with higher risk requirements such as proper capping of wells.

Regulations need to be more nimble and resilient to be effective and that starts with far more adequate enforcement by executive branches at every level. Regulations must also protect the process from legislative and special interest meddling.

Strategic thinking begins with executives and governing boards being aligned on the true purpose of the organization.  This isn’t, as the authors of Can’t Buy Me Like argue, just a mission or vision statement.

Purpose has more to do with intent.  Who is served?  How are lives touched and improved?  What is the organization’s ethos or character?  Purpose according to the authors is the core that informs every move.  It isn’t just about marketing.  In fact, they point out that an organization’s true purpose may never show up in its marketing.

If as consumers we only valued organizations, brands and products with passion, maybe we wouldn’t need regulations.  The author of Red Thread Thinking defines passion as drive connected to the heart of what the organization is all about.

Since the 1980s, anti-government partisans have largely gutted the effectiveness of regulations.  Today their work perverts true democracy by demonstrating that six people for whom only a few of us were permitted to cast ballots can thwart things supported by 90% of Americans or North Carolinians.

However, we are not powerless.  There are companies such as Chipotle Mexican Grill, that even as meat inspection has been eviscerated, has firmly stood for “food with integrity” and a core purpose illustrated by the commercial at this link and in this article in Onearth magazine about the pork growers who inspired it.

A tool I use and hope to help improve by factoring in companies that use desecration marketing such as outdoor billboards is GoodGuide which is most useful in the form of a smartphone app.

It ranks companies, brands and products by a 1 to 10 scale for how they treat society, health and the environment.

This is where true democracy can still  be potent.

The Role Of Strategic Thinking In Leadership

Recently I was asked to lecture at the Walker College of Business at ASU on strategic thinking, an ability with which I was often credited during my now-concluded 40-year career as a community-destination marketing exec.

The presentation went well, but being a strategic thinker and explaining what a strategic thinker is are very different.  I know from the Clifton StrengthsFinder that strategic thinking is one of four sets of talents used in leadership including other groupings for executing, influencing and relationship building.

Strategic thinking includes the talent for being analytical (challenging), using context (understanding the present by curating the past), being futuristic (having visions of what could be), ideation (ability to find connections between disparate phenomena), input (ability to deal with conflict), intellection (muscular brains), learner (continuously and never-ending improvement) and well, being strategic (ability to spot patterns and issues to create alternative ways to proceed).

Those tempted to cherry pick among these and 26 other areas of talent for a self-description, should really take the StrenghtsFinder survey for an objective assessment of their personal mix of talents.  Having genuine “chops” is more than just who you say or think you are in your own wonderful self.

Another good resource on the role of strategic thinking in leadership is the new book by Harvard Business School professor Cynthia Montgomery published in May and entitled The Strategist – Be The Leader Your Business Needs excerpts of which were adapted for a paper just issued by McKinsey.

Montgomery, the Timken Professor of Business Administration at Harvard and an excellent researcher and writer, summarizes the unique value strategic leaders bring to organizations including:

• The strategist as meaning maker – “It is the leader – the strategist as meaning maker – who must make the vital choices that determine a company’s very identity.”

 

• The strategist as voice of reason – “A leader must serve as a voice of reason when a bold strategy to reshape an industry’s forces actually reflects indifference to them.”

 

• The strategist as operator – “A great strategy, in short, is not a dream or lofty idea, but rather a bridge between the economics of the market, the ideas at the core of a business, and action…the bridge must rest on a foundation of clarity and realism [data]…strategy or execution is a false dichotomy…”

Oh, by the way, if you know or have worked with me, you’re not surprised that three of my five more prominent talents according to StrengthFinder are in the areas of strategic thinking and one each in the areas of executing and influencing:

Strategic

Create alternative ways to proceed. Faced with any given scenario, can quickly spot the relevant patterns and issues.

Learner

A great desire to learn and to continuously improve.

Ideation

Able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena.

Activator

Can make things happen by turning thoughts into action.

Achiever

Great deal of stamina and work hard…great satisfaction from being busy and productive.

StrenghFinder reports go into much more depth including how to mitigate or finesse the impact of these strengths on people in your presence.

I’ve compared that back with an analysis Dr. Clifton conducted on me in 1986 as a young community-destination marketing exec when he was in the early stages of building a database of strengths necessary for various occupations.  He reminded me of the results of that assessment in a letter of congratulations when I was recruited three years later to Durham, NC, where I still live in retirement, to jump-start the community’s destination marketing organization.

The terms he used had evolved by the time he developed StrengthsFinder twelve years later when the database had reached 100,000.  But his 1986 assessment is very consistent with this later analysis using a database well past 10 million.

Dr. Clifton passed away nearly 10 years ago but his legacy continues to grow as does my appreciation for my time as an early beneficiary of his brilliant research which continues to help individuals identify their talents so that they’re able to find areas of endeavor where they are able to excel.

Strategic Planning Is Organic, Not One-And-Done

I've created a few strategic blueprints and supervised the process for others during my now-concluded career in community-destination marketing management.  So I understand a little bit about what a Herculean effort it must've been, even with consultants to produce strategic plans recently for both the City of Durham and Durham County.

I remember how stunned I once was when a consultant told me that the plan I had written and supervised in 1992 and then updated each year for a much smaller organization was recognized internationally as best practice.  I also remember how stunned he was to learn it had been produced internally.

I was even more stunned when he told me in front of my governing board at the time that it would have cost $100,000 or more if you import done externally.

Of course the strategic plans produced for the City and County are not nearly as in depth as the one with which I was so closely involved  because it was a much tinier and more narrowly-focused organization but also in my view the City’s and County’s are sub strategic plans sandwiched between the overarching Durham Comprehensive Plan and soon-to-be created tactical plans for each of the 20+ agencies that make up each of these large organizations.

As I thoroughly read and enjoyed the individual plans for the City and County which have been accepted/adopted by their respective governing bodies, I hoped that enough flexibility had been built in to the process for the management and staff of these organizations to infill things that are always overlooked in any process of this size.

Plans such as these should be organic anyway.  Even though by nature they are multiple-year plans, they are much stronger and improved if small modifications can be made ongoing rather than one-and-done.

For instance, it is probably just an oversight that Keep Durham Beautiful and the Durham Appearance Advocacy Group were not included under the excellent list of community partnerships that were begun near the end of the City plan.  I also see “appearance” listed as a priority in the SWOC section (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, challenges – more typically referred to as threats in private sector plans – or SWOT) but seemingly not addressed in the action portion.

It may be just my take but ironically, it seems that infrastructure has been broadened to include “green” infrastructure in the older, bigger-picture Comprehensive Plan but may still be somewhat limited to traditional references in plans specific to the City or County.

A helpful addition to each plan for residents might be to modify the respective mission statements so that the inherent division of effort between the City and County is more apparent.  This would particularly help those who are under the mistaken impression that the the organizations are unnecessary duplications.

It would be a shame and a waste of time if small details like this can't be remedied without going back through City Council, which for a governing board is far too involved in day-to-day minutia.

I was pleased that both plans include visitors as external stakeholders and customers, something overlooked by many communities.  I was also impressed that both plans included a central role for communications and marketing and that things such as community image and pride were mentioned.

I was also pleased to see both plans include a statement of core values, especially one in the County’s plan about “building consensus through give and take.”  Had that value existed during my now-concluded career, I would not only have far fewer tire tracks up my front and backsides, but many win/lose decisions would have been more win-win with even better results.

It is a little puzzling that these two plans don't more explicitly connect the dots back to the equally excellent but much longer-term and bigger-picture Comprehensive Plan that is just completing a midcourse update and overarches both organizations.  I hope it's not a case of the overarching plan being “siloed” and that I'm just missing something.

An example would be the comprehensive plan’s goal and objectives for”Roadway Image” in Chapter 4, Community Character and Design.  There are places in both the City and County plans that could've easily tied back to the two areas in particular where residents have recently given the community negative scores on scientific surveys such as roadside appearance and communitywide wayfinding.

That same segment in the Comprehensive Plan seems to signal that expanding the Urban Tree Canopy, street tree replacement and buried utility lines should be noted in the individual strategic plan for each organization. These are just examples and of course related to passions of mine, but they aren't isolated.

I think the creation of these two strategic plans is a huge step forward and a real tribute to the many excellent public administrators who worked so hard to create them and many more who will now be expected to not only execute them, but keep them current.