Unchallenged assumption #7 Categorical organisation of strategy
A slide pack featuring five strategic pillars has become a trope in the enterprise. It should be called out for what it is - bad practice that does harm. Here's why.
In the introductory post for this series, I shared the idea of unchallenged assumptions in organisations that had become so accepted as the way work is done that they become tough to challenge, even when doing so would be very impactful:
The unchallenged assumptions I had identified were:
Categorical organisation of strategy.
There are others, and I encourage you to share your examples in the comments, but these were the most prevalent ones I’ve experienced.
Categorical organisation of strategy
When senior leadership communicates their priorities, a pervasive pattern is often described as ‘strategic pillars’. In practice, these pillars organize categories and collect related concepts to be executed.
In practice, this can collect relatively disconnected activities that reflect many goals. The degree of direction on which of these goals is most important is not as straightforward as the leader has intimated, and the teams are left to hash it out amongst themselves, leading to politics being the most common way to resolve.
I wrote about this previously in this post:
The assumption
The assumption is that the pillars provide adequate specificity for people to be aligned in a direction. The reality is this approach rarely does.
It persists as an approach because of its prevalence. Each leader observed other leaders communicating like this and, as a result, believes that this is how priorities are communicated. The feeling of organisation through vaguely compelling themes that everything is organised under gives the feeling of legitimacy.
It’s not uncommon to see five or so themes listed as the “strategic” pillars that could encapsulate every business activity.
“We will focus on Revenue, Customers, New Product, Governance, and Security” is a great way to appear stately without making a single decision!
“We will focus on Revenue, Customers, New Product, Governance, and Security” is a great way to appear stately without making a single decision!
The other issue with this approach is that it usually forms a categorisation of the work that will take place. This can create unnecessary siloes for related activities, which are now presumed to be under one pillar or another. This can create unnecessary inefficiency as dependencies can unintentionally become dependent on an entire category of work rather than the more specific items they might need to wait on. Visibility may be reduced to stifle the correction of these issues. I cover these issues in more detail in this post:
The alternatives
Strategic direction can be articulated and elaborated on in many ways. Providing context such as the purpose of the organisation, the ‘vision’, the mission, the goals, the logic or rationale supporting the selection of the goals, the current performance and desired performance of the organisation. By vision, I mean a concrete description of a possible future.
Elaborating on these can help provide some specifics people could use to inform decisions. (that is a concrete potential future richly realised to help people see the organisation’s potential multiple steps into the future.
I have written about providing context extensively:
Through experimentation and surveying teams, I've found that the most impactful context can be providing a combination of ‘What’ in terms of specific immediate goals and their connection to longer-term goals, being specific about how we will measure progress, and also sharing the ‘Why’—the logic behind the selection of these goals and the relationships between each goal and the long-term goals.
By specific, I mean identifying what we believe are the best leading indicators of actual progress for the near-term goals and lagging indicators that verify the state we believe, based on current information, is required to achieve a standard that fulfils the needs of our customers and our business model.
Using these to measure progress towards achieving these goals as evidence of whether the goals are being achieved or not. Setting goals and associated agreed-upon ways to measure progress towards those goals is actionable information that can support alignment, coordinated action, and, most importantly, course correction toward a successful result based on actual progress.
It is possible to make such a network of information presentable, understandable, and consumable for teams. While the tools to derive the appropriate goals and measures may be complicated and have a learning curve, the effort to ‘flatten’ these and reduce them to the essence of the decisions and choices made is relatively straightforward.
Those who want to be involved in those decisions will learn to use the more complicated tools with you. Those who would like the certainty of the decisions so they can confidently make the decisions they need to in their domain will engage with the distilled communication of these decisions.
So often, organisations leave their people in situations that create unnecessary uncertainty, reducing their confidence in making decisions that could support positive progress relevant to their responsibilities. Rolling out the tired five pillars strategy template is a sure-fire path to that place of uncertainty!
This was the final post in this series for now. I am sure there are more unchallenged assumptions to be identified. Share your experiences communicating using strategic pillars and what worked or didn’t. You might have used alternative approaches to strategic pillars—what have you tried?
Hi Daniel, I'm not sure that I agree with this post.
"Strategic Pillars" group related concepts together. They may or may not be the same thing as categories.
You say: "The assumption is that the pillars provide adequate specificity for people to be aligned in a direction." I'm not sure on this. The strategic pillars provide a high level direction. They are not meant to provide specificity. Alignment is complex. In the sense that you and I can be highly aligned on the need for good strategy, also aligned on what makes for good strategy but quite unaligned on how to achieve a good strategy. Direction and alignment are not the same thing.
However, I do completely agree that having high level pillars, themes or concepts is not strategy. I don't think it does harm but it is important to differentiate between a high level direction or strategic pillar and the actual job of doing strategy.
Where I think you are trying to go with this post is an illustration of strategy through a network of causal loops. So I agree with where you are going with this post but I think i disagree with your starting position. In the sense that it is not the strategic pillars that is the problem, but it is what goes around them.
That's true - strategic pillars in theory could be treated as themes and it stops there.
In practice, in my experience it rarely does and there's little awareness of the problems doing so introduces, so rarely anyone monitoring to detect and prevent this issue.
Its a good call out that I could make this distinction - making a note of this for the next edit.
In my experience you can flatten and summarise goals as almost effectively as you use 'pillars' and by doing so acknowledge that there is a network of means that will support these ends.