You have just exited a town hall with your entire organization where you delivered the first phase roll-out of your strategic plan. You are feeling particularly good, and your executive team is pumped. Everyone agrees the meeting went extremely well with plenty of valuable feedback, and aside from one oddball poke at the strategy, there were good questions, and high engagement from the in-person crowd, and the people that joined remotely.
You are confident in executing the strategic plan this time around because you and your team have planned extensive ongoing communication around the plan and know that you have the resources needed to get it done. But as you relax at home that evening something isn’t sitting quite right. What did that one person mean when they said it’s all good until Softyware offers 24/7 drone delivery?
Could they be right? It’s been a year since I heard about Amazon’s interest in Softyware and could drone delivery be real? It seems so out there. Why am I even thinking about this?
You are not alone if you have ever had that sickening feeling of missing something important in a major plan or decision. Positive momentum in developing a plan creates excitement around the possibilities, and teams can get caught up in single perspective planning creating blind spots.
Red Lobster rolled out all you can eat snow crab for $22.99 thinking that no one would sit for 6 hours and eat crab – they did, and the company lost millions and $400M in market capitalization as a result. Blackberry went from dominant to irrelevant in the cell phone market because they stuck to their guns regarding a full keyboard versus a touchscreen. Did they actually survey customers preferences based on a touchscreen that works really well, versus what was available at the time?
Critically vetting your strategy, plans and decisions is a requirement to run a business so every company does this to some extent. However, the more complex the environment you work in, the more important critical analysis becomes, and with exponential technology change and instant information, today’s environment is complex for every business.
Here are three methods for you to employ increasing levels of critical analysis to your planning.
1. Appoint a Devil’s Advocate: In a previous article we discussed the dangers of group think (Alignment Versus Group Think – Avoid the False Harmony Trap) and how you can avoid it. In the list of actions, we suggested appointing a devil’s advocate to present strong contrarian views. This is something you can implement in your next planning meeting.
2. Assign Roles to All Team Members: Use a process like De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats and have each team member wear a different colored hat that defines the perspective for their participation.
- Yellow: Optimism – Benefits & Potential
- Blue: Organizing and Process
- Red: Feelings, Intuition and Emotion
- Green: Creativity – Possibilities & Alternatives
- Black: Judgement and Skepticism – Risks & Problems
- White: The Facts – Information & Data
3. Red Teaming: Red Teaming is a formal process that takes the devil’s advocate and role assignment approaches to a much higher level (What is Red Teaming).
A red team is separate from the planning team and is tasked with critically evaluating the plan. The red team assumes the role of adversarial thinkers and challenges the underlying assumptions, premises, and strategic choices in the plan. By adopting a contrarian perspective, red teams identify potential flaws, biases, and alternative approaches that may have been overlooked during the plan development phase.
Although they take a critical and contrarian view to the plan, red teams need to be creative, and need to engage planning team members to ensure accuracy in their understanding and assumptions. Assembling a red team is a significant commitment and requires a full understanding of the process to be effective, but it can be a capability that separates your organization and ensures its survival.
Regardless of the size or aspirations of your organization, employing critical analysis of your strategic and other critical plans should be high on your to-do list. Connect with us and we can help from the simplest implementation up to full red teaming Connect With Sage & Summit.
Additional Sources:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/victoriavouloumanos/people-are-sharing-famous-companies-that-went-bankrupt
