When working with leadership groups to develop strategies, I notice that they often struggle with saying “no.” It is very easy for a strategy to become a list of loosely connected initiatives, each completely feasible, but together demanding far more attention and resources than the organization can possibly muster.
Why is this? In their book, Simple: Conquering the Crisis of Complexity authors Alan Siegel and Irene Etzkorn quote John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design, who says: “More is safety.”
I think that very simply explains the problem. Rather than focusing narrowly on a well-integrated strategy, groups feel safer with a collection of initiatives, hoping that one or more will somehow stick.
Maeda, speaking on product design, goes on to say “at the point of desire, you want more, but at the point of daily use, you want less.” The same is true in strategy development. In this case, the planning session is the ‘point of desire.’ The power of simplicity becomes clear only when you become a user – or in the case of strategy, when you begin to implement.
For instance, I observed a strategic planning session a while ago at a manufacturing company. Their product, once considered a niche product with good margins, was rapidly becoming a commodity and their entire customer population was under enormous economic pressure. Their market was crumbling under them. In their planning session, they decided to try three parallel strategies – reducing operating costs in the hope of saving their margins, developing a new product and service offering to leverage their “better customer knowledge,” and investigating new market niches.
There is nothing wrong with any of these strategies, but together they were bound to fail. There was not enough intellectual or financial capital to push all three of the strategies forward. But the leadership was unwilling to pick, and now the company is gone.
The power of simplicity in strategy comes from the focus of resources and the ability to align the efforts of the organization across multiple fronts. Simplicity, then, is a highly desired characteristic of strategy, but it has to be fought for because it feels unsafe in the planning phase.
Just like in our personal lives, choosing can be hard. But making tough choices is especially hard in corporate environments. Group decision making multiplies the fear factor, and resistance to conflict sometimes makes it easier to let all opinions win.
