Fads
I have facilitated two cities' strategic planning sessions during the past month. In these cases, and in others I have undertaken in the last several years, I have used a methodology I developed entitled Storylines. It draws upon elements of narrative theory and qualitative analysis to characterize the ideas and opinions of participants and to identify the common threads that link themes and concepts.
The motivation to create, test and use Storylines was my skepticism about the value of other approaches to strategy development and goal setting for which I had been an observer and participant. My main criticism of these approaches is that the tools facilitators use are often misapplied.
There is a simple reason for this. Someone identifies the next new thing designed to overcome conceptual hurdles in specific settings, and applies it to a different use case. Conference sessions, articles, and books follow. Executives and managers climb on the bandwagon in hope of jumpstarting their own organizations' agendas and enhancing performance. Participants are brought along for the ride. No one stops to think about whether this is the best way to plan for an uncertain future.
We should be more wary of following the latest management fads. When positive results are seen, we should at least a ask whether they might be the result of a Hawthorne effect.
I saw an advertisement recently in which proposals were sought for assisting an organization with its strategic planning efforts. A description was offered for the work to be performed that included a SWOT analysis and the development of BHAGs. It appears that the organization's leadership has already determined onto which bandwagon's it wishes to leap. Perhaps similar efforts produced results they found satisfactory. If so, and they are content to continue in that same direction, more power to them. On the other hand, can they be sure that an alternative approach will not help take the organization to an entirely new level of performance?
A SWOT analysis is an examines strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Its use as the basis for organizational strategic planning is concerning. It is not that those factors are unimportant. It is that SWOT analyses were designed to be used by businesses when examining the potential for new products and services in competitive markets. In this context, spending time evaluating the merits of the new venture and potential risks and rewards makes perfect sense. I do not believe it makes sense as the basis for evaluating public organizations as a whole.
I was involved once in the strategic plan development for a community hospital located in the city I served as manager. Individuals representing major institutions and employers in the community were invited to be part of teams assigned to work on distinct plan components. Our facilitator was well known in the state at that time for his work with organizations pursuing strategic planning. He asked us to identify potential partnership opportunities the hospital might pursue over the next five or ten years.
I raised an objection to this task. How can we known what opportunities might present themselves during the time frame for which the hospital is planning? Wouldn't it prove more beneficial if we identified the criteria that must be met to consider pursuing any potential partnership? This alternative approach was accepted and we set to work listing those criteria. The facilitator later told me that he had never had this route taken in any of the other similar sessions he had led.
BHAGs -- big, hairy, audacious goals -- is another matter. Let me be clear: there is nothing wrong with pursuing great dreams. When James Collins and Jerry Porras coined the term in Built to Last, they had in mind tasks such as putting the first man on the moon. That is a great dream that produced incredible results, at the costs of human lives, it should be noted. I'm not sure if it was hairy, but it was certainly big and audacious.
Perhaps because "BHAG" is the management-speak equivalent of an earworm, however, organization executives have come to believe they need BHAGs, too. Thinking outside the box is often to be encouraged. For public and nonprofit organizations, however, there are often political, fiscal, operational, and reputational constraints that comprise a somewhat larger box.
The sessions I facilitate encourage the identification of big ideas. Often, they also include an exercise to determine where the organization fits along continuums of five parameters of organizational culture. Three of these are directly related to pursuing big ideas and would likely apply to BHAGs as well. Tolerance for risk, whether innovation is approached incrementally or boldly, and attitudes toward collaboration will all affect to what extent a big idea will be given the resources necessary to achieve success.
A speaker at a conference I attended many years ago offered a bold suggestion for how Michigan cities might approach some of the challenges of the unwieldly structure of local government in the state, particularly with regard to annexation of land from adjoining townships. Cities should reconstitute themselves as villages, whose residents are also township residents. In that way, property adjoined to villages would remain parts of the townships and those townships would benefit from the growth that followed.
This was certainly a big idea, although I would not go so far as to say it was a BHAG. I am not aware that any city has taken steps in that direction. Their cultures and local politics present obstacles to that kind of innovation, regardless of the possible merits.
I have a second concern with BHAGs. Goals big enough to qualify as hairy and audacious are likely to prove unmanageable. Big ideas, particularly those that fit an organization's cultural constraints and its vision for the future, will require goals that fit SMART criteria.
SMART goals, as originally conceived, are specific, measurable, assignable, realistic, and time-bound. In short, these criteria were intended to reduce a big idea to reasonable steps. Steps in turn are reduced to tasks. Metrics provide a way to determine when a project's desired outcome are within reach.
The SMART criteria are an example of a concept -- a good one, in this case -- that has found its utility compromised somewhat by careless use. In some iterations, the acronym has been interpreted differently. Achievable or attainable is sometime substituted for assignable. Aren't they the same as specific? Are we no longer concerned with the need to identify a point person responsible for getting the job done? Realistic sometimes becomes relevant. What does that even mean in the context of goal setting?
Management fads, similar to those typical of popular culture, have a tendency to go out of style. For a while, every executive had a copy of "Good to Great" on the bookshelf. Some had probably even read it. I cannot recall the last time I heard anyone refer to zero-based budgeting. Management by objectives, management by wandering around, and more were supposed to propel all of us to ever greater success.
What happened? First of all, change is hard. As a general rule, people do not like to leave their comfort zones. It takes exceptional leadership skill to radically alter the way an organization does business.
Most organizations do not have exceptional leaders. If they did, those individuals would no longer be seen as exceptional. Instead, the best that the majority of organizations can hope for is to hire executives and managers who are reasonably competent and who will not create more problems than they solve. These individuals, for all their talents related to the jobs for which they are hired, might lack the insight necessary to distinguish a useful practice from the latest fad.
There is a more subtle explanation for why management innovations fail, apart from the fact that some of them are just not designed to work in real-world situations. Organizations are not living, breathing entities in and of themselves. They are, at best, legal and social constructs. They offer a convenient way to think about the fact that they are groups of individuals, each of whom has his or her own way of understanding what role to play and how they fit into the bigger picture of what the organization is trying to accomplish.
A good way to understand this is to reflect on the challenge of getting some employees to return to the office after having worked remotely during the COVID pandemic. Among those who did return, quiet quitting has become a way of protesting company expectations that differ from individual desires. These trends demonstrate an independent streak in employees. They appear to occupy a space somewhere between traditional employment relationships and those of temp workers and independent contractors.
The significance for tools and techniques used for strategic planning is in recognizing that the organization's culture, the story it tells about itself, is really a collection of the stories told by all the people who work there. Those of us who are local government executives are professional nomads. Each new organization we serve involves an assimilation process during which anecdotes are shared by these people to explain how things really work there.
This dynamic is missing from planning efforts driven by SWOT analyses. They miss the richness of the lived experiences of the people who comprise the organization. It is worse for those public organizations who undertake community-based planning initiatives. Bringing in stakeholder representatives with only a passing familiarity with the organization might help with buy-in for strategies and goals. It will not necessarily contribute to the overall success of the organization. It might just muddy the waters.
I provided an overview of my approach to strategic planning to the members of the city's governing body as I began my most recent facilitation. I told them not to expect to see flip chart pages taped to the walls to which they would be affixing colored dots. There was a collective sigh of relief. It seemed that many had participated in such exercises in the past and found them wanting.
Individual's histories, values, ideas, dreams, and desires cannot be easily summed up and prioritized in a session lasting a few hours. What participants say is qualitative data that demand thoughtful analysis. Careful, active listening is required when participants speak. Time is needed afterward to review notes and to read between the lines. That data can then be used by executives and administrators to design ways of making big ideas real and charting a course that will bring them to fruition.
Following the latest management fad, to the extent that it fails to gather this same data, cannot be guaranteed to produce the change that strategic planning efforts seek. The alternative is not complicated. Storytelling is a part of what makes us human. It comes naturally to us. It is how we share culture and communicate what matters to us. Most of the time, a facilitator is not required to ask the right questions, to listen, and to help others hear. When it is, care should be taken to understand the methodology to be used and what it is intended to accomplish.
It is reasonable to ask at this point whether the Storylines methodology might be just another fad. Maybe, but I don't think so. My reason for this belief is that participants control the narrative. My main job is to ask the questions that will get them talking to one another. I don't see that going out of style. If anything, when so much of what passes for conversation is mediated through electronic technology, it is more important than ever.