Finding the flowers among the weeds by Lynda Gratton
Extract from Lessons Learned – Straight talk from the world’s top business
leaders - Making Strategy Work
50 Lessons (Harvard Business Press) £6.49
www.FiftyLessons.com
This is an old story. I guess I must have been about twenty-six years old, and
it was my very first year as a consultant. I was working for one of the big
consulting practices, and I remember we all went to Ireland to advise a
company about their long-term strategy.
Like any great consultants at that stage, what we did was to ask everybody to
get into a room, and then we said to them, “Let’s think about what this
organization could be like in ten years’ time.” Over the space of a day, we
filled up about fifty flip charts with all the things that they could do for
the future.
That was all great; we were really energetic, and there were lots of ideas.
Then, at the end of the day, we stood in the middle of the room and looked
around. There must have been two hundred things that we could do in the
future. And it struck me so forcibly then - and actually it’s been a huge
learning for me - that there just isn’t any reason to generate masses of
ideas like that. What you have to do is to know, of all the things that you
can really work on, what the one, two, or maybe three or four things are
that are really going to make a difference.
I guess for me it’s a bit like saying that the garden is full of weeds, and
some of the weeds are actually flowers, but how do you know which ones they
are? Of all the things that you can do, which are the four things that will
really make a difference to your organization? Thinking back on that, the
lesson for me was that you just have to focus. You absolutely have to focus.
There are so many things you can do, so you have to just focus on the three
or four things that will make a difference.
But how do you do that? Well, those three or four things have to be very
tightly aligned to what it is you’re trying to do as an organization. They
have to be aligned to your business strategy. They have to be big
things—things that, when employees look at them, they say, “I feel really
excited about that; I feel really engaged in that.” I guess for me, the
capacity to know what’s a weed and what’s a flower is really one of the most
important things I ever learned.
I’ve engaged with organizations many times in blue sky thinking, but what I
learned was that while having that many ideas was great, you had to find a
way of synthesizing and filtering them down. The question is, how do you do
that? I guess there are many ways, but the way that I learned to do it is by
setting up a three-by-three grid. On one axis, I asked the executives, “How
important do you think this is to the long-term success of this
organization: very important, important, or not particularly important?”
Then we went back to the same items, and I said, “Thinking about that item,
where are you now? Are you already doing that, have you started doing it, or
haven’t you even thought about it?”
What we then got was this wonderful matrix. In the top right-hand corner were
things that were very important for the long-term future but that people
weren’t doing anything about right now. We called those the areas of risk,
and I think that’s a great way of distilling from a large amount of data
right down to things that are important.
The reason they’re really important is that they are things that are important
to you for the future, but they are things that you are not doing now.
Takeaways
When looking to the future, avoid generating masses of ideas. Focus instead on
the handful of ideas that will make a true difference.
Doing this successfully requires focus. Align those key ideas with the
business strategy in a way that employees can become excited and engaged.
Identify those ideas that are important to the organization for the future,
but that you’re not working on now, as areas of risk.
