Culture eats strategy for breakfast seems to mean different things to different people.

Some folks believe it means that you have to choose between culture and strategy, and you should choose culture.  This seems daft to me.  I understand that this view might seem attractive if you don’t know how to create strategy but I don’t like it.  Why wouldn’t I want both?  

Some folks believe a more extreme version of this, which is that if your culture is antithetical to your strategy, then your strategy won’t succeed because your culture will destroy (eat) it.  I can sort of see how that might happen, but again it feels like you’ve really screwed up on the strategy and/or the culture if you find yourself in this boat.

I’d rather believe that culture eats strategy for breakfast in the same way that a normal human eats breakfast for breakfast. 

Strategy is fuel for your culture to go to work on. If you want to do great things, build a good strategy and let your culture feast on it in order to deliver your greatness.  No false dichotomy necessary.  

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” is a quote often attributed to the great Peter Drucker, although I can’t find any evidence that he actually said it.

What are the false dichotomies that wind you up?

This week, Anne and I ran a successful track at the London QCon tech conference and so presenting is on our minds. 

Giving talks at international conferences is challenging but isn't what most of us do every day (thankfully). Presenting internally is a lot more common and has very different failure modes. In particular, I’ve both given and received lots of internal presentations where the presenter has become the victim of a Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack.

What do I mean by a DoS attack? Getting pulled by your audience into talking about things you don’t want to talk about; audience members adding more work to your plate; or even micromanaging you. The more senior the audience, the easier it is to fall foul of these. 

There are lots of possible reasons for this to happen but the most common one is a speaker inadvertently initiating a Denial-of-Service attack on themselves.  

How? Well, think of the audience.  Put yourself in the shoes of your boss, sitting watching you.  

Management wants to see competence. If I am the manager, I want to know that the person I’ve delegated ownership to is discharging that responsibility effectively. That means

• having a good grasp of what is important and what isn’t

• being able to present that in such a way that I believe they are in control

• showing that they care (preferably more than I do)

• showing that they are analysing what is working and what isn’t, predicting the future and doing something about it

• not brushing anything under the carpet.

I don’t require perfection, but I do want to see thought.  

The two most common ways of DoSing oneself are

• lack of clear structure in the presentation so the audience is forced to take control or they just feel their time is being wasted

• lack of visibility into the thinking that would show the presenter actively owning the subject.

One tip to help with this is to use DNA as you present information:

1. Data – show you are looking at objective information

2. Narrative – explain your interpretation of what you are seeing (separately from Data so the audience can draw their own conclusions and also see your thinking)

3. Actions – show you are managing the situation – don’t wait to be told what to do.

If you only present the data, you are requiring the audience to do all of the work on what it means and what to do.  You are encouraging them to micromanage you.

If you only present the actions you aren’t exposing any of your thinking so if the audience has different ideas or biases from you, there is no common ground to work from on deciding where to go.  You aren’t helping them to trust you because you aren’t giving them a basis for trust.

By separating out each of these and presenting them, you do all the hard graft for the audience and make it easy for them to agree with you.  Even if they disagree, they are able to do so constructively because you’ve framed the conversation such that if they infer different things from the data they can state that clearly or give you additional information to shape your actions.  

By doing the hard work and presenting it, you show them that you care, can be trusted and make it easy for them to just say yes.

Leadership isn't about why where we are today is wrong.  It isn't about what we aren't doing.  It is a positive statement about the future. 

"We are taking this hill."

Not - we aren't taking all of these other lesser hills.

Not - the hill we are on at the moment is a bit shit.

Negative statements tend to be undirectional.  If you don’t like where you are, you could go anywhere.  

Positive statements tend to be directional so are infinitely superior for alignment. 

*****

Example: Brexit

One of the reasons that Brexit has been bad for Britain is that the Brexit campaign was negative.  There was a clear statement that Brexiters didn’t want the EU.  There was not a clear statement of what they wanted instead.  As a result, after deciding definitively to not be part of the EU, no one is really clear what the plan is now.

Was Boris a leader?  Emphatic Yes - The country voted to go along with Brexit.

Was he an effective leader?  Again yes.  He got Brexit done.

Was he a great leader?  Nope.  No vision, not positive.  History doesn’t look like it will remember this kindly.

*****

You may need to reference a negative situation in order to provide clarity on what is good and what isn't.  You might need to acknowledge a negative situation in order to gain credibility that you understand the state of things.  But you will fail as a leader if you don’t have a positive message of something you want to achieve.  

Negative messages can be compelling and people might follow you but at best in the short term.  If you can phrase your message in a positive way, it will be a lot more effective because once you put a negative image in people’s mind, it stays there and actually anchors people to the thing you are trying to get away from.

So wherever possible, stick to a positive that you want folks to have in their mind that will direct their energy.  

"We are taking this hill because it is worth taking"

Choose the vision you want your folk to have in their heads when you are not in the room.