Don’t Let Your Strategy Suffer : Do This First
Managing the pressure of complexity
I conducted two strategy sessions this week. Both were very productive, and helped the respective teams think in directions which they had never explored before.
BUT one got very heated. Particularly between two individuals who were completely disagreeing on the way to possibly execute something. This option would have meant a large departure from what the company had always done before. So, the stakes were high.
The strange thing is that this change would only be something that we’d have looked to implement at a future date. At this point it was clearly conceptual.
Tempers were rising. All of us felt ourselves being sucked in to varying degrees. Eventually we all agreed on what could be done after the session that would give us information to be better able to address this point. Tempers were still frayed though, and we were all very relieved when we broke for lunch. To be honest, we were all rather worn out by such a robust session.
By the end of the day everyone’s energy was back up, we had found some wonderful solutions that can dramatically change the company’s future, which could be done in a few months, and the two who had been at odds had patched things up and were working well together once more. Everyone was energised and excited about the future. We had emerged from the fire and everyone was feeling stronger for it.
This scene, of direct conflict, is not unusual. In fact, it’s a great sign in strategy workshops. It means you are getting to real issues. One of the tests to see if you have gotten to really important things, or not, is if everyone is just agreeing, being polite and backing one idea. Then you probably only have sham options on the table.
Teams can only be effective if they are willing to confront each other, and really question each other deeply.
This doesn’t need to be malicious, or nasty. In fact, it should never be that. In rugby there is a saying, ‘play the ball, not the man’. What it means is that you should confront the issue, but not the person behind the issue, or taking the opposite view to you.
Why do tempers flare though? Surely, it’s possible to disagree with each other in a calm and logical way.
Unfortunately, this is a result of our brains trying to deal with uncertainty. Our brains HATE uncertainty and try to simplify things. That is why people often make a suboptimal choice, without appearing to think things through, when there are multiple options and high stakes,
In strategy sessions it presents like this: Things get complicated. The stakes are high. Our brains don’t like the pressure, and they want to simplify things. So, they latch on to one idea. One option. The other person does the same, but to a different option, and before you know it. POW. People are in each other’s faces and getting progressively angrier and angrier because the other person is standing in the way of them reducing their stress levels.
‘If only the other person agrees with me’, we tell ourselves, ‘Then my solution is the only way to go and we can move on, and I’ll feel relieved’. Unfortunately, the other person feels the same about you. So, you blame them for your rising stress and push even harder to get them to agree, to reduce that stress, but you force them to push back harder in return. This is totally unconscious, and we don’t even realise why we are feeling this way. This is completely normal.
As soon as we paused and I explained what was behind the strong emotions there was a collective sigh and a ‘oh, so that’s what we were feeling’.
Once they had experienced what I call ‘complication stress’ and had gotten over that first instance of it, and they were told why they had been affected like that they were better prepared for when it happened again later, and they were much more able to deal with their own psychological discomfort.
Sometimes being able to label something goes a long way to helping you to deal with it.
Learning this lesson and learning how to deal with this kind of stress is critical if you are going to develop robust, strong strategies. If you don’t learn this lesson, you will either have strategy session devolve into unending conflict, or you’ll all choose any option just to get rid of the stress of holding multiple options of unclear attractiveness in your heads at the same time.
A good facilitator can help to point this out in order to help the team break the spiral before it gets too far out of hand, but it’s the individual people in the session that need to develop the skills to self-manage themselves and get used to dealing with this stress.
Sometimes you must hold multiple options in your head for weeks or months while you test them in the market and gather enough information to make an informed choice. If you and your team can’t learn to do this then your strategies will always be suboptimal.
There’s no easy fix. You need to explain this to people and build mechanisms to let everyone pause when things are getting heated. Remind them of ‘complication stress’, and let people take a break to compose themselves.
Often there is a fundamental gap in understanding, or missing information with both party believing certain factors to be true. Find out what information is needed (sometimes that will take lots of investigation) to figure out what is correct and work out clear action steps to gather that information so you can reconvene on the point when you have more information.
Remember, strategy is simply making choices, based on information. Sometimes the only appropriate strategy is to gather more information and reconvene.
Don’t cave to the ‘complication stress’ and make a quick decision to make everyone feel better. Learn, and help others to learn, how to hold multiple different options in their minds until there is a clear best option.