The Road [Not] Taken

Aug 20, 2011

Just like there’s a well recognized grieving process, it seems to me that there’s a process for an organization that faces a strategic challenge. * At the beginning, an organization will be in denial that there is any problem. This is just good and properKuhnian cognitive dissonance- apparently it’s mandatory.

  • Then, when the organization finally accepts that there is a strategic challenge, it’s immediate response is todouble downand do everything that it’s already doing harder. This is just natural - after all, the leadership believes in the direction - that’s why the organization is taking it (And there’s always apparently slackness to remove from an organization, but taking it out introduces more -there’s a lower limit to inefficiency, in the same way there’s a lower limit to unemployment)
  • Generally, by the time a strategic challenge comes, doubling-down - doing the same stuff harder - means that the problem will get worse, because what the organization is doing is making things worse.
  • Eventually things get to a full blown crisis. By this stage, the politics in the organization are just crazy. At this point management must take a choice, and there’s a fork in the road:

Either

  • The risks of change are too great to survive, and the organization freezes up, goes into tumescence, and will eventually collapse

Or

  • There’s some sort of internal palace revolution (at least at the logical level, even if not at the personnel level). The organization hunkers down and prepares a new strategy in secret - which is real risky, because it will have to be socialized in and outside the organization to get buy in. If it works, we go back to the beginning again. Other wise we fall back to the first road.

As far as I can tell, this applies to all sorts of things. Land wars in foreign countries, for instance. Large IT companies (Microsoft used to be pretty adept at the internal palace revolution, but it sure don’t look like it any more). And volunteer standards organizations too. And volunteer standards organizations too.

In fact, Ken Rubin and I were talking about this notion of organizations doubling down, and he pointed out that there’s a third option for some organizations: The road not taken.