We’re one week into a brand-new decade. I hate to burst your bubble so quickly, but the Strategic Plan you so carefully crafted over the past couple of months is already obsolete.
The sad fact is that you and your team spent hours (or days… or weeks) off-site to stay on-target. You got everybody up to speed and down to business, high on marker fumes but low on energy, consumed gallons of legal addictive stimulants to fuel your mind-numbing brainstorms, and filled a Staples-full of post-it notes, flip charts, and legal pads with unattainable aspirations and lowest-common concessions.
We love the strategic planning process because it lets us live in organizational Narnia. We can maintain the illusion that we are in control of events, and if things start going south we can beat a path back to the wardrobe. Armed with only a map, a calendar, and our combined imaginations we can pretend that the course we chart will be the path we will take. It almost never is.
No battle plan survives contact with the enemy. Helmuth von Moltke
Reality generally refuses to be constrained by the strategist’s assumptions. You can’t avoid being ambushed by reality, but you can minimize the damage through flexibility. In this post (and the two that follow) we’ll break some common pitfalls into three categories: perception, progress, and people.
Perception. When the Allies invaded Normandy in 1944 they were stunned by the terrain they found. Aerial reconnaissance showed flat fields bounded by what looked like bushes… no real threat. In reality, fields were protected by parallel rows of nearly impenetrable vegetation on raised berms. The foliage from both rows met overhead and obscured the roadways beneath. The troops had no training and no equipment for such a scenario… so they improvised. Enterprising GI’s welded salvaged steel beams to the front of Sherman tanks (appropriately dubbed “Rhinos”) to plow through the hedgerows. The Allies progressed one field at a time in weeks instead of days, inexorably pushing Nazi forces back across the Siegfried line.
The pre-invasion perception, based on careful observation and intense analysis, was that “bushes are no threat.” But they were. Both the analysts and the planners were some of the smartest people on the planet, just like your leadership team. But they got it wrong.
When perception fails, uncertainty prevails from the planners all the way to the Privates. The way forward is nearly impossible for some leaders to swallow: let those closest to the problem devise immediate solutions. The grunts on the ground in France did not wait for headquarters to figure it out; they improvised. Those in command granted flexibility to implement spontaneous solutions that allowed the army to reach its ultimate objectives… more creatively than the planners had imagined. Those steel beams the GI’s welded to their tanks came from the anti-tank barriers the Germans had positioned along the beaches.
It’s the arrogance of knowledge and position that keeps some leadership teams from granting flexibility to those they lead. They hate to think that four years at West Point (or Harvard… or Fuller) were wasted, or that they had climbed the ranks for nothing. If you want to win, you’ll have to realize that some strategies will develop in the moment, at the edges or your organization, through the grunts, clerks, volunteers, leaders, and coaches who are closest to your ministry’s front lines.
Part 1 of 3
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Excellent! I’m a big proponent of making attainable goals toward a destination, but inviting the men and women in the trenches (the groups) to formulate their own strategic plan of action to “git-r-dun.”
There’s nothing like inspiring others to act and take responsibility for their actions.
Now if we can only communicate this effectively, we’ll have some seriously busy small groups who are successfully extending God’s kingdom to people who’ve yet to see it exists.