January 17, 2012 | Groupaya

Gut Check on Working Strategically

by Eugene Eric Kim

About a year ago, Stanford Business School professor Bob Sutton, blogged one of my favorite rants. He wrote:

Big hairy goals don’t mean much without thousands of small wins. My colleague Jeff Pfeffer and I have argued for years that implementation, not strategy, is what usually separates winners from losers in most industries, and generally explains the difference between success and failure in most organizational change efforts, sales campaigns and so on.

Atul Gawande drives this point home even further in his remarkable book on high-performance medicine, Better. He opens his book by explaining that every year, two million people in the U.S. get an infection while visiting hospitals, and 90,000 of those people die. Doctors have known the stunningly simple solution to this problem for 150 years: wash your hands. There are strict guidelines for how to wash your hands and how often, yet according to Gawande, almost no one follows them.

Having a good strategy doesn’t mean much if you’re not implementing it well. Knowing this has strongly influenced how I work with clients. Developing strategy is not enough. You need to help clients work strategically.

Two weeks into 2012, I and my colleagues at Groupaya are experiencing first-hand how difficult it is to work strategically. Last year, we spent several months developing our 2012 goals and strategy. I’m confident that our goals and strategy are good and that we’re strongly aligned around them. And yet last week, we realized that we’re not even a month into the new year and that we’re already doing a mediocre job of implementing our strategy. We’ve been okay at doing what we said we were going to do, but we’ve been poor at not doing what we said we wouldn’t do.

Realizing this has been a great gut check, and although we need to improve, it’s not time to panic. Working strategically is hard, and it requires… well, hard work. If 90,000 Americans die every year because doctors don’t wash their hands frequently enough, we can forgive ourselves (at least a little bit) for not working as effectively as we could be.

That said, there are structural things that we’ve done that have helped us a lot. For starters, we had a good strategic planning process, one that resulted in a good strategy and strong collective ownership.

We also talk about our goals relentlessly, almost religiously. We have a standing weekly meeting to discuss our goals as a team, we have a dashboard that tracks our progress, and we mention our goals often in the context of our every day work.

Finally, we’ve created space for ourselves to assess and reflect on our progress. Without that space, it’s impossible to learn and to act on that learning.

With these structures in place, I feel confident that we have the support we need to implement our strategy effectively. Now we just need to do it!

January 4, 2012 | Insights

Five Good Lessons on Strategy

by Rebecca Petzel

As we mentioned a few months back, this past Fall, Groupaya engaged in our first strategic planning process. Given our obsession with learning, it should come as no surprise that this process helped evolve both our thinking about who we are and what makes good strategy work.

For me personally, it was particularly interesting stepping in to the facilitative role for my two mentors, Eugene and Kristin, while also participating as a valued stakeholder in the planning process. Seeing as one of our goals for 2012 is to share learning aggressively, I’d like to post a few things I am taking from the experience.

1. The gift of space

Eugene and Kristin are both strategic thinkers. They did not start Groupaya blindly. However amidst all the craziness of a start-up (balancing client work, setting up operations, etc.), they were not setting aside time to concretely articulate Groupaya’s mission, vision, strategies, and goals.

So this Fall, we started an experiment where I became Groupaya’s strategy consultant. Eugene and Kristin did not need my assistance to tell them what makes good strategy and how. They needed someone accountable for holding and creating the space to activate the team around higher level strategic questions. It was a timely reminder that sometimes the greatest gift a good consultant or experience designer can offer is the gift of space.

2. Don’t underestimate conversation

As important as space is, my intention for the strategy process was to concretely articulate our vision, mission, values, strategies, roadmap, and operating principles. Rather than try to accomplish all of this in a few marathon sessions, we chose a process that was more realistic for our small and taxed team, breaking the work into six smaller meetings over a three month period.

The benefit of this approach was that it emphasized iteration. An unintended side effect was that I sometimes got visibly anxious when one of our three-hour sessions was clearly not going to result in the outcome I’d designed towards. In one particularly tense moment, Eugene turned to me and said “Rebecca, I know we are not going to finish the roadmap as you planned, but this conversation is important, and we need to have it. This is what needs to happen.”

And of course, he was right. In the months since those intense strategy conversations, I have seen the benefits of those complex conversations unfold. This is the advantage of being a strategy consultant who sticks around to complete the work: You can see what work has the greatest impact. And in the end, those tough conversations that sent us off schedule also ended up having had the greatest impact on our work.

3. The power of shared artifacts

The advantage of doing the work in a longer, iterative process is that it allows time to sit with the results, think through their implications, and integrate your learning before making related decisions. A disadvantage is that your team can get lost in the process. I’ve seen teams get lost and uncomfortable in two-day strategy meetings, so you can imagine the challenge with a three-month process.

Our extended process helped illuminate the necessity of good shared artifacts in group process — artifacts that remind you of the important conversations you had, emotions evoked, and decisions made and that help move conversations forward. In particular, your team will get lost in an extended process without a shared roadmap indicating where you are in the process and how all the work is interrelated.

It was a great reminder that no matter what your strategy process looks like, you can never pay too much attention to creating clear roadmaps and artifacts that track the progress of your work collectively.

4. Talking about language is annoying, but important

One of the toughest times in any strategy process (for me) is working through the different mental models around strategy. Do we need a vision, mission, and values? Or vision, purpose, and principles? What is the difference between a vision and a mission? How are values part of a strategy? What’s the difference between a mission and a goal?

Working through these unspoken assumptions is frankly my least enjoyable part of the work. That said, I’m a bit obsessed with having these conversations early and often, especially as you make your strategy thinking more of an inclusive and activating process (as opposed to a roadmapping exercise for leadership alone). Simply having the conversations can shift the team in to a strategic mindset, get people thinking hard about why we do what we do, bring more intentionality to the work, and ultimately build your capacity to do this work collectively.

So if you, like me, are a little tired of saying, “Well, what is a good mission anyway?”, my advice is to persevere and lean into these uncomfortable conversations sooner rather than later, as it will help align and unleash the potential of your team. And, of course, remember point three around shared artifacts: A clear artifact outlining the relationship between the different components of a strategy will make the conversation far more effective.

5. The importance of good goals

In Groupaya’s process, these language conversations were most tense and most powerful when we were norming around how to frame our goals. Both Kristin and Eugene wrote interesting blog posts on the topic of good goals (here and here) as a result of this work. I’ll just take this opportunity to re-articulate that you can not underestimate the power of good goals. If this is all that you achieve out of your next strategy process, you’ve hit gold.

That’s it for now. I can’t resist ending my first post of 2012 with wishes for a learningful new year, and sharing my commitment to continue to share tidbits with my colleagues here at Groupaya.

Till then,

January 2, 2012 | Groupaya

2012 Goals and Strategy

by Eugene Eric Kim

We spent a good part of last year discussing our goals and aspirations — who we wanted to be, what we wanted to accomplish, and how we wanted to do those things. As we started aligning around a big picture, Rebecca led us through a more formal planning process to think through our goals and strategy for 2012. We’d like to share what we came up with, and we’d love to hear your thoughts.

Vision and Mission

All of our thinking starts with our big picture vision for a world that is alive.

A world that is alive is a world that is humane, just, and sustainable…

… where groups are open, high-performing, and always improving…

… where individuals are healthy, curious, courageous, connected, and fulfilled.

Groupaya’s mission is to help groups — be they teams, organizations, networks, or nations – work together more skillfully to create their desired future.

We think we’re unique in a lot of ways. For starters, while our vision of the world is far-reaching and soulful, our orientation is around activation, action, and learning-by-doing. Our path to achieving the unimaginable is to start moving.

We’ve worked with traditional organizations — both large and small — and we’ve worked with grassroots communities. This diversity of experience has helped us understand some fundamental truths about groups and group work, and it’s also made us realize how much we still don’t know. We have to constantly challenge our assumptions and seek wisdom from others to do our best work. Our success, ultimately, is dictated by how effective we are at learning with others and acting on what we learn.

Having a learning orientation isn’t enough. We think it’s critical to share what we learn as broadly as possible. By acting, we impact groups directly, and we learn in the process. By sharing that learning, we have the potential to impact the world in much bigger ways.

On the surface, we are a consulting firm. Ultimately, we want to be a place where people — be they clients or peers — go to learn how to work more skillfully with groups.

Goals and Strategy

We want to be great consultants, and we want to share our learnings widely and usefully, but we also want to build a great organization. It’s not enough to help groups be good at working together to create their future more skillfully. We have to be good at doing those things ourselves. Groupaya needs to be a shining example of a high-performance, soulful, learning organization.

In this vein, our focus for 2012 is to build our capacity as an organization and to start building the capacity of our network, our community. We have three goals:

Do meaningful, sustainable, and learningful client work
Share our learning, both internally and externally
Create space for renewal, learning, and play

Meaningful, Sustainable, Learningful Client Work

We have been extremely fortunate to work on some amazing, important, and innovative projects over the years with people whose values strongly align with ours. That’s only made us hungrier. We don’t want to sit on our laurels and simply do work that’s safe. We want to do meaningful, learningful (a Rebecca word that I love) work.

(If you have such a project, we want to hear from you! Don’t be shy!)

These projects need to sustain us without overwhelming us. Our goal is to devote 40 percent of our working hours to client work, while bringing in enough revenue to sustain ourselves and slowly grow.

Sharing our Learnings Internally and Externally

I’ve worked closely with Kristin for two years now, and I talk with her just about every day. As you might imagine, I’ve learned a ton from her. And yet, what I’ve learned so far has only scratched the surface of what I want to learn from her.

We have much to share as an organization, but we need to start by being good at sharing within our own organization. Plus, we’re small, so we have no excuse! We’ve already developed some great tools and processes, and we plan on improving these throughout the year.

I’m personally really excited about this. It’s one thing to help clients with their knowledge sharing practices, it’s another thing to do it with your own group. We’re using some simple tools internally with some light customizations here and there, but our secret sauce so far has been around our processes and practices.

One of those processes is our weekly brown bag, which we started last year and plan to continue more regularly this year. The intent is to share knowledge internally, but we advertise and do these brown bags openly so that they act as a way to share our knowledge externally as well.

In this vein, we also plan on leveraging this web site and blog in our efforts to share knowledge externally. The goal is less about building an audience and more about building our muscles in public: practicing regular, useful synthesis and communicating with our network. We want to tell both our stories and the stories of our community.

Despite our focus on content over distribution, in the three months our web site has been up, we’ve had over a thousand unique visitors from all over the world, 43 percent of whom visited more than once. We’ve noticed a growing number of people sharing our content over Twitter and other social networking sites, and we hope that trend grows this year. (And if you’re one of those who have shared, thank you!)

Finally, as I noted earlier, I truly believe that we have a unique philosophy and approach to how we do our work, which we’re calling “The Groupaya Way.” It’s a philosophy that’s evolved from our experiences and that’s been strongly influenced by our peers — all of you!

We want to articulate that approach and continue to refine it openly and with our community. This will help us be better at what we do, and it will also help our clients and peers better understand us.

Most importantly, it will help us build the capacity of our network. At our core, we are a networked organization, and we draw heavily from our community to punch above our weight. As our projects get bigger and harder, it’s critical that we not only build our own capacity, but the capacity of our peers as well. We hope articulating The Groupaya Way helps us do that.

Space for Renewal, Learning, Play

This is my favorite goal, and it will be the hardest one for us to achieve successfully. When you’re action-oriented, it’s very easy to spend all of your time, well, doing stuff. But it’s not necessarily healthy nor good for business nor good for the world.

In order to learn, you need space to reflect. In order to innovate, you need space to play. In order to help the world, you need to be whole.

We’re committed to making and holding this space for each other. We’ve already started putting some structures into place. Kristin designed an amazing personal development process, and we will hold each other accountable for meeting our personal goals. We’re also monitoring each other’s time closely.

If we’re successful, we’ll be healthier and happier, and we’ll do more, better work.

Feedback

A lot of our goals and strategy are about community — all of you. We hope you’ll stay engaged with us as we pursue these goals. As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts as well!

Wishing you all a happy, healthy, New Year!

November 4, 2011 | Insights

Good Goals and Strategy

by Eugene Eric Kim

As you can tell from Kristin’s recent post, we’ve all been thinking about how to set effective goals, due largely to our own internal goal prioritization process. I recently completed a detox diet that happened to coincide with this process, and I realized that it offered some lessons on what makes a good goal and a good strategy.

First, some background. About five years ago, I found myself in an unhealthy cycle of working way too much, eating poorly, and not exercising — the unholy triumvirate! I wanted to do something to break the cycle, and I decided that I’d try a detox diet. I did some research, I talked to a lot of friends, and I finally settled on the following plan:

Two weeks
No meat
No refined carbs
No drugs (i.e. caffeine or alcohol)

My goal was to reset my behavior and get back to a more healthy lifestyle. And it worked! Not only did my body feel great during the process, I was surprised to discover how good my brain felt. During those two weeks, I found my mind was exceptionally clear and sharp. Going through the process also shifted my behaviors back to a more healthy lifestyle.

It was not without pitfalls, however. It takes work to eat healthfully. You have to eat, shop, and cook more often. You’re hungry more often, and I get cranky when I’m hungry. The diet also took a toll on my social life, which I realized largely revolves around eating and drinking things that are not that good for you.

So here I was, five years later, embarking on the same diet, much to the same effect. Here are some lessons on strategy and goal-setting from this process:

Strategy and goals are not the same thing. My strategy for getting back to my goal of a more healthy lifestyle was to do a two-week detox. In a lot of ways, my choice of diet was arbitrary. I could have done a more extreme (e.g. vegan) or a less extreme (e.g. pesceterian) version and probably have achieved the same thing. However…

Aspire, but be realistic. I originally thought I’d try the raw food diet, but when I researched it, I realized that it was totally unrealistic for me. Not only would it require more work than I had time for, I probably would have become a hungry, raging lunatic.

Set measurable goals, but don’t overthink the metrics. You should be able to clearly say yes or no to whether or not you achieved a goal, but an overreliance on metrics can actually deter you from accomplishing what you actually want to achieve. I identified some indicators (both objective and subjective) around how I felt during the diet and my lifestyle afterward, but they did not include weight or conditioning targets, because I didn’t feel they were pertinent to my goal. Those types of metrics might have shifted my behavior away from my goal by encouraging me to do things like eat less rather than eat better.

Be open to surprises. I wasn’t sure how I would feel during or after the diet. Although I expected to be healthier, I didn’t know if I would actually feel better. I was surprised by how quickly I felt the impact, and I was awed by the impact on my thinking.

October 27, 2011 | Insights

Goals as a Liberating Force

by Kristin Cobble

I recently had a conversation with a leader who was frustrated with the ability of his people to set goals and to prioritize their time. It is a complaint I have heard often over the years.

In many companies today, executive teams are in the habit of setting stretch goals that require everyone to constantly work at a sprint pace. Leaders want their organization to aim for the stars. They need results. Fast. Some even hope for innovation.

Yet people are exhausted. There is no more down time. No more time for renewal. No time for play, experimenting, and true innovation. There seems to only be time for working harder.

How do we set goals that are bold enough to yield innovation, yet realistic enough to be motivating? How do we set goals that are not so bold as to create cynicism, yet not so realistic as to be uninspiring?

Ideally, an organization would start with some scenario thinking, exploring several plausible but very different futures that could emerge over time. Imagining yourself in these futures, you can brainstorm goals and strategies that would enable you to succeed there. Then you can come back to the present and identify the top two or three goals for your organization. Keep them simple. Make them sticky.

Next, for each goal, distinguish three levels of aspiration:

The BAM (Bare A** Minimum) Goal must be reached for employees to retain their jobs.

The Stretch Goal requires employees to learn and grow to succeed, but it is attainable, and if it is achieved, they will get their bonus.

The Breakthrough Goal is beyond stretch; it cannot be achieved through working harder or faster. It can only be achieved through significant innovation, through a fundamental re-thinking of some aspect of the value chain.

When organizations develop meaningful stretch goals, plans can be made, targets hit, and commitments kept. Burnout is avoided. When organizations commit to breakthrough goals with a “no penalty clause” if they aren’t achieved, then they create an environment in which everyone has the freedom to truly experiment and play. Work becomes more exciting and less exhausting. You might even see some innovation. You might even have some fun!

What is the breakthrough goal that would bring your organization alive if it were given permission to freely explore it without repercussions?