Listening: A Strategy and Change Blog | Hosfeld & Associates

By Kathleen Hosfeld

An executive I’ll call Adam (not his real name) was frustrated with the company’s inability to get traction on its strategy. A thoughtful leader who’d spent part of his career in a consulting firm, Adam didn’t understand why his direct reports weren’t making more progress.  As we interviewed him and his executives, we discovered that their archetypal understanding of the company’s strategy was completely different.  The difference had profound implications for almost every aspect of the company’s operations – from planning to marketing to organizational structure and hiring.

Thinking about strategic archetypes was developed into a useful framework by professors Jeffrey Conant, Michael Mokwa, Rajan Varadarjan and Daryl O McKee (Texas A&M, Louisiana and Arizona State Universities). Hosfeld & Associates has used their research  with permission in the development of our online strategic assessment instrument, which allows us to type companies and their executives using these four archetypes:

• Prospector – The consummate innovator, able to anticipate and capitalize on trends, design breakthrough new products and services, highly agile and market oriented. Product and service innovators.
• Analyzer – Capable of innovation, but more likely to focus on market penetration for products or services with proven potential.  Strategic market developers.
• Defender – A niche or focused company that is highly selective about the products and services it offers.  Their strategic advantage in a reputation for quality and effective cost management.
• Reactor – Responds to the competitive movements of other companies. Opportunistic rather than strategic.

Each of these archetypes has its own approach to planning, research, products and service selection or innovation, promotion, pricing and organizational structure.

Like an organizational Meyers-Briggs, an archetype assessment gives executives an accessible vocabulary to identify strategic disconnects between the C Suite and the rest of the organization, and even within the executive team. Our client Adam consistently scored as an Analyzer and all of his direct reports as either Defenders or Reactors.  This helped Adam understand why he felt misunderstood, and sometimes lonely. It also gave him a means by which to articulate the specific areas where he needed to bring the organization into alignment around his vision.

The most important learning for Adam’s organization was that the Reactor type isn’t really a strategic alternative at all. It’s the archetype of no clear strategy. When too many people score in this category, it’s a sign that either there is no clear alignment around a strategy or that no one as yet understands the strategy. It’s a wake-up call for making conscious choices about which archetype best suits the assets and resources of the organization.

For many, a strategy is a series of financial goals the company must achieve. Archetypal language gives companies a more streamlined way to talk about how to start rowing together in the same direction towards those goals.

By Kathleen Hosfeld

Working with a series of nonprofits in 2010, it came home to me that when clients say they want to work on “communication,” they are categorizing activities by the tools used rather than their purpose. Activities that utilized a web site, email, social media, advertising, public relations, or media relations were all grouped as communications, and approached from the same perspective.  The perspective from which these organizations viewed communication was that of “getting the word out.”

“Getting the word out” – essentially one-way communication – is in fact only one method of communication. Although important, it is possibly the least powerful. We call this either information sharing or information broadcasting. It’ the kind that is conveyed in newsletters and websites.  The organization writes and publishes information; the recipient does not revise or shape what is sent or published. At times, the information is shared purely for “awareness.” A reader or recipient is a “consumer” of the information.

In dialogue, by contrast, information is exchanged, and typically something new is created by the parties to the dialogue. Each party brings pieces to the conversation, they put those pieces together, and a new whole emerges.  The information or feedback shared creates something new, beyond information exchange alone. This type of communication is the type that takes place in work groups, teams and in stakeholder engagement.

Communication that seeks to create cultural or behavioral change is a third type of communication, and it begins with a point of view about the change that is desired. Behavior change and cultural change are two distinctly different outcomes, but the element of persuasion is needed to generate both, and this distinguishes this type of communication from pure information sharing, which is more neutral in tone.  Fundraising and development in nonprofits uses persuasive communication.  Many nonprofits’ mission is to create social change, and they do this with a form of communication called social marketing (not the same as social media marketing).  When we call this marketing, we imply a commercial exchange or money. However, in common parlance people apply the term “marketing” to any type of communication that intends to persuade. In the case of behavior change, the persuasive speech must include a call to action that is specific and intentional.

One of the secrets to effective communication is to recognize the appropriate use of these three different forms. Organizations must recognize that exclusive reliance on “get the word out” communication only works in markets where the audience has no other choices. For most for-profit and non-profit organizations those days ended in the 1960s. If you have competitors or alternatives, your ability to use dialogue and persuasive speech is a critical competence.

Effective programs generally blend all three types of communication together.  Increasingly, organizations are using dialogue as a way to improve their persuasive capacity and to discover unmet needs of their constituents. By engaging stakeholders, customers or donors in dialogue, they better understand what the other needs for a positive exchange.  This underscores the most important component – the ultimate secret – of communications: listening.

Companies are moving beyond CSR to reinvent business models for business and social benefit

The current edition of Harvard Business Review features an article by Michael Porter and Mark R. Kramer describing the leading companies that are seeing opportunities for creating economic value by meeting social needs. Going beyond corporate social responsibility (CSR) approaches, which Porter describes as essentially public relations programs,  these companies are fundamentally reinventing business models as drivers of both economic and social value.

A BBC interview with Michael Porter concerning this article can be downloaded here.

The Harvard Business Review article is available here.