Mergers of teams, business units and whole companies often trigger questions about organizational identity.  Yet, such situations are not the only times organizations and companies question who they are and what they stand for.  New leadership, significant regulatory changes, an examination of values of sustainability or the triple bottom line, declining market share or profitability can all trigger executives to step back and ask big questions of identity and purpose. The need to strengthen brand strategy or branding campaigns can also highlight fractures in shared identity.

In a recently completed project with a non-profit organization, we asked the question: “Who are we together?” and the client reached its answer in a uniquely soulful way: by listening to each other.  I’ve led quite a few processes that help organizations find clarity of direction and a strategy for how to achieve their objectives. This situation was unique.  There was not enough social cohesion in this organization to allow leaders to chart a new course in the normal way.  There was conflict, lack of clear roles, and a history of false starts in finding a new direction.

This organization needed to build trust – trust in leadership as well as trust in their decision-making processes. In the process of finding a new identity and future direction, many organizations conduct inventories of assets or skills. This is not a bad thing to do; we did it in this case, too.  But, we went beyond merely cataloging shared values and assets. We got people talking about them. And about what mattered to them as individuals.

We designed a series of conversations to begin to build trust within small groups of individuals.  These groups reported out their conversations to the wider organization. One of the common comments from the small groups was how good it was to talk among themselves in a thoughtful and supportive way. We gradually increased the number of people in each conversation. As the groups got larger, we changed the structure of the conversation to make sure that all voices were heard equally and that groups learned how to synthesize the essence of their own talking and listening. By the time the process was complete, leaders were able to synthesize the reflections of all who participated.

We didn’t start the conversation with “What should we do together?” Instead we started with the question “Who are you?” We asked people to share their own personal perspectives in response to some distinctive questions. This personal piece was an important building block. Then we moved into the question “Who are we together?” After these two questions had been satisfied, we asked “What do we want to do together? What is our shared work?”

In his book, Community: The Structure of Belonging, author and consultant Peter Block says that the “small group is the unit of transformation.” In this instance, listening together in small groups has led to a powerful outcome that will guide one organization for some time to come.

“A path without heart is never enjoyable. You have to work hard even to take it. On the other hand, a path with heart is easy; it does not make you work at liking it.”
-    Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan

Employee loyalty and enthusiasm are two of the greatest strategic assets of any organization. Strategy design that reflects the path of the heart can build loyalty, engagement and commitment.

The following elements can help organizations bring out the best in their people as they go about strategy design.

• Collaborative Engagement – Creating opportunities for engagement, dialogue and input from all levels of the organization is essential to creating understanding of and support for strategic plans. It is also the primary way to tap the genius within the organization to find its own solutions.  While a consensus model is an unrealistic way to make decisions in most organizations, gathering broad input efficiently makes participants feel heard and valued and strengthens the outcome. Co-constructing strategy with those who must implement it builds the most powerful commitment.

• Build On What’s Already Working – Focusing the organization on what’s working creates hope and a foundation upon which to build new strengths. What do clients or customers already really appreciate about and want from the organization? What’s the opportunity to leverage existing strengths and capacities for further growth? What are the nascent initiatives that are working that can be amplified?

• Integrate Social and Environmental Values — Strategy processes that reflect higher values create companies that attract top talent. “Recruitment and retention consultancies like Kenexa, Hewitt Associates, Robert Half, and Towers Perrin have published figures demonstrating a link between environmentally friendly workplaces and engaged employees,” writes Andree Iffrig, author of Find Your Voice at Work: The Power of Storytelling in the Workplace (Limegrass 2007). Environmental and social values pave the path with heart that employees want to walk.

What are the best practices that make strategy work in an organization?

When the strategy is clear to everyone. The strategy needs to be simple enough for anyone in the company to understand. Fostering clarity involves the following:

• Avoid top-down approaches. Many organizations suffer from planning that goes on at the most senior level of the organization and doesn’t integrate wisdom from “the front lines.” Top-down planning also suffers as a result of a lack of understanding and buy-in. The most effective approach is one that combines top-down and bottom up approaches.

• Numbers aren’t the whole story. Strategies that are about hitting particular financial targets alone aren’t really strategies. Financial targets are goals that we want the strategies to deliver.  A strategy is the mobilization of company-wide efforts needed to create the desired outcomes. Financial targets are the “what.” Strategies are the “how.”

• Create shared language. The language of the executive office is often financial, but that doesn’t “translate” very well in other parts of the organization. Using planning tools that create shared language in all departments and levels of the organization helps make the strategy clear.

When the strategy is resilient. One common critique of strategy processes is that they create plans that are quickly obsolete. Resilient strategies are based on organizational strengths and assets that have long-term strategic potential. This involves the following:

• Avoid strategies that are “borrowed” from other companies. Some companies try to copy what they see working for their competitors or peers in their industry.  While great ideas can often be picked up from others, successful strategy is based on the unique assets and strengths of each organization.

• Base strategic plans on long-term opportunities, not short-term trends. A very common practice in organizations is to mistake tactical strategies for strategic planning. A short-term market opportunity then replaces organizational mission and strategy. Without balancing short-term and long-term, the organization short-changes itself on profitability and risks creating a culture driven from one crisis to another.

When the strategy is fully implemented. Many organizations create reasonable strategies that are not fully implemented. When this happens, one of the following may be occurring:

• Invite people into agreement with the strategy. If the strategy process has not sufficiently included the perspectives of those who will execute the strategy, the outcome will likely have opponents. Strategy processes that integrate differing views ultimately create stronger outcomes.

• Translate the strategy to day to day work. For many, the intuitive process of figuring out what strategy means for their work is fun and challenging. For others, it’s impossible.  Creating measurable action steps, and in some cases, metrics and financial targets is a critical step in strategy implementation.

• Role model at the executive level and follow through. In order to give the strategy a chance, there has to be managerial commitment and follow-through. If the strategy was developed without their buy-in or if the strategy is not robust enough, managers will become fearful that it doesn’t address the reality of today’s challenges.  If no one seems to get the strategy, they may become frustrated and conclude the strategy “doesn’t work.”

Bring up the terms “technical change” and “adaptive change” and many leaders will nod in recognition. Most can recognize when they are in technical or adaptive territory.  More often than not, however, leaders fail to match their leadership approach to the type of change that is needed.

As defined by Ron Haifitz in “The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World,” technical change is the type that can be solved within the current expertise and capability of the organization.  Adaptive change calls for solutions that are not within the current capability of the organization (or leaders). As Haifitz describes it an adaptive situation is “a gap between aspirations and operational capacity that cannot be closed by the expertise and procedures currently in place.”

My recent work with both for-profit and non-profit leaders show them reacting to the perceived urgency of an adaptive challenge by rushing to formulate an answer to the challenge by themselves and then seeking to enroll others in their solution.  This misses two very important aspects of responding to adaptive situations: the opportunity for an innovative solution based on the collective wisdom of the organization, and fostering broad engagement in the selected approach among those who will execute it. It also ends up isolating the leader and making him or her the focus of conflict and resistance.  For such leaders the resistance can start to feel personal.

Leading in adaptive situations challenges leaders to invite others into decision-making at the very time they may be least willing to trust the outcome to others.  “I’m surrounded by people who only know how to do what I tell them to do,” complains one executive.  Yet, failure to open solution development to others may mean falling short of the demands of the adaptive challenge itself.  Following are a few suggestions for leaders facing an adaptive situation:

Qualify the Urgency – The need for a solution may indeed be urgent, but realize that the conditions that create the adaptive situation have been forming over a long period of time. Resist the urge to panic. Create the space for others to be creative. Consider breaking the adaptive challenge down into smaller parts, and take them on one at a time.

Lead by Framing the Challenge – Leaders play an extremely powerful role in providing the insight to accurately name or frame the adaptive challenge.  Focus on diagnosing and articulating the challenge rather than jumping to solutions.

Explore Multiple Solutions – Panic and lack of trust in the wisdom of the collective can cause leaders to lock down on one solution before exploring other alternatives. Set a goal to explore at least two if not three alternatives.

Don’t Go Alone — Don’t try to facilitate the engagement process by yourself. The temptation to try to control the outcome may be too great, or – because of your own power in the organization — participants may feel they need to give you the answer you want instead of fully exploring all options. Use internal or external facilitators to design group processes to define and explore alternatives.

By Kathleen Hosfeld

It was in the 1960s that management guru Peter Drucker first said that “Marketing is the whole company seen from the point of view of the customer.” Half a century later, we have another chance to catch on.

In a recent article released by McKinsey Quarterly, titled “We’re All Marketers Now” authors Tom French, Laura LaBerge and Paul Magill describe the growing realization that marketing is “everyone’s job.”

Drucker may have first published on the subject, but it has been reinforced recently in research on purpose-based businesses conducted by Raj Sisodia, who noticed that some companies outperformed others financially but seemed to spend less on marketing.  In an earlier article, I took issue with that statement, clarifying that they spent less money on advertising and promotion – not marketing per se. How do they outperform other companies if they don’t spend as much on push forms of marketing? Answer: Through living out a purpose that fosters good will from customers and other stakeholders. In these companies marketing didn’t go away. It became focused on relationship and the customer experience. As a result, it became everyone’s job.

Social Media is Not Driving Transformation

In a recent discussion forum, one of my contacts asserted that “social media is driving” significant changes in marketing. I disagree, social media is the enabler, not the cause.  Customers want engagement with the people and companies with which they do business. They want to trust the people with whom they work. A desire for, no, an expectation of engagement is driving the transformation of marketing.

Engagement is a word we have previously heard mainly in HR circles, centered on employees. Increasingly, however, engagement is the word used to describe successful marketing relationships that shape customer experiences. Delivering customer experiences requires the cross-functional coordination that previously was only used to service very large corporate business to business accounts.

Today, however, those who want to deliver world-class experiences are working across organizational silos to make sure customer touch-points deliver the experience and reinforce the brand.

As described in the McKinsey article, this approach requires a new level of organizational alignment and conflict resolution, including adaptive financial systems that can respond rapidly as needs arise.

The authors say that the major barrier to creating engagement is organizational rather than conceptual. Delivering superior customer experience means building processes to create internal engagement and alignment, cross-functional collaboration, and the ability to dialogue internally as well as externally with customers and other stakeholders. These capacities enable companies to design and execute superior customer experiences and, ultimately, value to all parties.

The McKinsey article: “We’re All Marketers Now”

We’re interested in your thoughts, and the customer experiences you’d like to deliver.

Executive and leaders interested in exploring the benefits of organizational purpose and purpose-informed strategy will find our workshop an inspiring introduction and orientation.

Building on the insights of such books as Firms of Endearment and It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For, this retreat/worship explores the business case for purpose-based leadership and strategy as well as the key aspects of integrating purpose into organizational planning, operations and culture.

For additional information and details, please visit our workshop page.

Noted green business journalist Joel Makower caused quite a stir when he published this article in May: “Green Marketing Is Over. Let’s Move On.” What Makower fails to do, as comments pointed out, is define what he means by “green marketing.”  This makes the article somewhat confusing because many of the things he points to as working are also marketing issues. Turns out that he’s describing green marketing communications, not the full marketing discipline. With this clarification, this article provides substance to the position we’ve taken on green marketing for several years.

I welcome the demise of obsession with green marketing communications.   No one is ever going to scale sustainability by trying to get people to buy green for green’s sake.  As I’ve discussed in previous articles, the people who will buy green for green’s sake are the innovator’s and early adopters of the industry. Everyone else buys for other reasons, primarily the utility of the product or service.

It’s my hope that as people recognize the limitations of so-called “green marketing,” they will rediscover the other 3-4 “P”s of marketing (depending on how you count them), will discover the value of strategy as a place to embed sustainability values into the core business rather than bolting them on through features-benefits descriptions.  According to Makower’s article, this *is* what’s working.  Let’s get to it!

“To listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.”

Mark Nepo

By Kathleen Hosfeld

Increasingly marketing must be about dialogue. In a recent article about the changing nature of marketing in the “Twenty-Tweens” (our current age),  I described three different forms of communication – information sharing, persuasion and dialogue. Information sharing and persuasion are the two forms most people associate with marketing. But the nature of business, the demands of customers and stakeholders are quickly outstripping the capacity of information sharing and persuasion alone to respond.

What do we mean by dialogue? I’ve said that it’s the type of conversation where two or more parties bring together information out of which something new is created.

Poet David Whyte has talked about this type of communication in terms of what it means to be a leader today. In a video on his website he talks about the conversational nature of reality:

“The conversational nature of reality has to do with the fact that whatever you want to happen will not happen. A *version* of it will happen. Some aspects of it will happen. You will be surprised also and quite often gladdened that what you wanted to happen in the beginning actually didn’t happen and something else occurred. Also it’s true that whatever society, or life or your partner or your children want from you will also not happen. They also will have to join the conversation.”

Whyte’s speaking engagements with companies on the conversational nature of reality have to do with what kind of leadership stance one can take in response to this dynamic. Who do we need to be as leaders to participate in the conversational nature of reality?

The same question faces organizations. What kind of stance do we need to take with our customers and partners in order to thrive in the conversational nature of reality? Many companies who have been early pioneers of collaboration and co-creation will say there’s tremendous potential return on investment from engaging in dialogue. Marketing – including communications, product innovation and more – is at its best in dynamic collaboration with customers and other stakeholders. To tap that potential we need to start from a place of strong core of identity and purpose, and then have the skills and tools to support dialogue as it scales through the organization.

The scale of dialogue takes place on a continuum of complexity. On the left side of the X axis we have dialogues one-to-one; on the right side we have dialogues one-to-thousands or even millions. On the left side of the continuum we rely on interpersonal skills and good facilitation of conversations to get to the shared creation. On the right side, we need technology platforms (crowd sourcing, social media and corporate social platforms) to support true two-way “conversation” on a mass scale.

All along the continuum, we need to be able to relax our grip on our own ideas and be open to what we can “create together.” In his video, Whyte takes issue with what he calls the “strategic” approach, by which I think he means predetermining a set of actions and getting too attached to them in ways that ignore the conversational nature of reality. I would say that the type of strategy – marketing and organizational — that actually works today is one that takes the conversational nature of reality into account. It is not static. It is not a fixed plan. Rather it’s a framework that includes a strong purpose and identity and that creates a container – much like a greenhouse – where the seeds sown in dialogue can take root and grow.

A decade after Margaret Wheatley’s landmark book, what have we learned from biology, chemistry and physics about purpose and strategy

By Kathleen Hosfeld
As we approached the year 2000, Margaret Wheatley published an updated and revised edition of “Leadership and the New Science,” in which she explored themes from contemporary science and their implications for organizational life.

She wrote in a time when economic volatility seemed to be accelerating, and organizational life felt more and more chaotic and uncontrollable. How can we achieve a new sense of order in organizational life, she asked, without actual control over the infinite variables that threaten to upset the status quo every day?

Wheatley’s book never strayed into advice about management practice; but she suggested two things were essential for organizations to adapt to changing conditions and to thrive over time: a “clear center” and freely flowing communication.  My interpretation of her “clear center” is a clear and compelling purpose that draws and holds the parts of the organization together.

A decade later, our experience of economic reality continues to be volatile. Yet, the dynamics of the ordered universe continue to suggest forms and patterns that help organizations hold together in times of difficulty and thrive in times of abundance.

Purpose Has Changed
The idea of the clear center – a purpose – has continued to evolve. In 1999, if you’d asked about a company’s purpose the response would have been “to make a profit.” While that’s still often the case, an increasing number of firms see their purpose as a statement of how they would like to make the world a better place. They see their purpose as something that gives meaning to their work, and can actually drive better financial performance.

Purpose is also the foundation of strategy. Purpose and strategy working together are less a static plan than a framework of identity that allows a company to renew itself over time. Strategy adapts to changing conditions; purpose is what gives a firm internal continuity over time.  This is like what biologists called autopoiesis – the ability of a system to renew or regenerate over time.

Business Relationships Have Changed
While this sounds like a lot of self-focused organizational naval gazing, Wheatley also points out that organisms (and organizations) “survive only as we learn how to participate in a web of relationships.”  This points to two other patterns in the ordered universe, that of differentiation and of interconnection, visible in flora, fauna, and star systems. We understand ourselves in comparison with others, those we serve, those with whom we partner and those with whom we compete. This too, is an area where perceptions have changed. It is much more common today to hear executives speak about stakeholders and community partners as integral to their enterprise and its success.

Communication Has Changed
One of the things that has changed significantly since 1999 is the proliferation of different tools for two-way communication that foster evolution, adaptation and renewal.  Social media, crowd-sourcing, and other collaborative innovation technology platforms all have the potential to feed adaptive change. These interactive communication tools create the potential for significantly more communication inside the organization, as well as between the organization and its external partners.

Change Has Changed
Wheatley’s new science view focuses on organizational change resulting from external stimulus. Yet, another impetus of change comes from within. It is not the sun, rain and soil that force an acorn to become a tree.  The acorn is a system whose purpose is to become a tree. It works together with the sun, rain and soil to become a tree. So, too, in organizations, purpose serves as the platform for strategy to respond to and work with external stimulus to unleash organizational potential.  Strategy design is like mapping the organizational genome, discovering what the organization is designed to become.

Strategy Has Changed
Strategy has moved from a fixed set of decisions about specific responses to the market, to a self-organizing capacity to respond relatively quickly to market opportunities in service of purpose.  One of the fallacies of early thinking about so-called “self-organizing” in organizations was that it just happened.  Like anything else in organizational life, we’ve learned that it takes intention and attention.  In the case of strategy design this can be a fairly robust exercise in both right brain contemplation and left-brain analysis. The point is it’s not all SWOT Analyses and Action Steps.

Businesses and other organizations who are embracing these great patterns and lessons from the created world, are finding that they just simply work better. Not only do they represent a more sustainable model of enterprise, they offer more meaning and a greater sense of legacy as well.

“Why does your company exist?” It’s a question every values-oriented brand or strategy consultant asks of clients when they begin work together.

If the answer comes back “to make money” we know that there’s a huge opportunity for unleashing the hidden potential of the firm. That opportunity lies in engaging the company with a purpose greater than money alone.

As I’ve said before, profit is important. It’s just generating profit is first level mastery. Once you’ve figured out that part of the game, the answer is “what’s next?” Service, gratitude and creating a better world — those present meatier and fulfilling challenges. They tap the potential producitivity of your best employees. Companies with a unique purpose out-perform
those who don’t according to Harvard Business Review blogger Bill Taylor, and the authors of “It’s not what you sell, it’s what you stand for.”

The book came out a while back, but Taylor provides a good update of what companies and organizations experience — and how they benefit — when they are “Different on purpose.” Check out the article here.

Looking for a resource to help you find that unique purpose and express it in your brand? Contact us.