Great project managers facilitate SMALL choices

Jeroen De Flander Oct 2015

If strategy is a decision pattern, strategy execution is enabling people to create a decision pattern. Strategy execution is helping people make small choices in line with a big choice. This notion requires a big shift in the way we think about execution. As a project manager looking at strategy execution, we should imagine a decision tree, rather than an action plan. Decision patterns are at the core of successful strategy journeys, not to-do lists. To improve execution speed and accuracy, we should shift our energy from asking people to make action plans to helping them make better decisions.

4am Friday morning in a suburb of a large city. Lisa got out of bed. She always did at this early hour. The routine came with the job. Lisa worked as a mail carrier for the national mail company. On an average day, she made hundreds of mail drops to the city’s apartment blocks and businesses. Lisa loved her job. And she was proud to be working in this industry with its long history. But more and more people used email and other communication channels to connect. She knew that the business – and therefore her job – was in danger.

While Lisa grabbed breakfast, her thoughts wandered to last week’s meeting. One of the executives had come over to the sorting center to talk about the future of the organization. Lisa understood that her company was doing ok, but that it would need to do better to secure its future. More specifically, she understood that efficiency had to improve from 6 to 5 seconds per mail item and customer satisfaction from 75 to 80 percent. “I can do that”, she had thought to herself after the meeting.

That Friday, on her 46th drop, an old lady opened her front door and waved Lisa over to talk. “Greater client satisfaction,” thought Lisa, “but my delivery speed will reduce if I stop.” She was paralyzed. “What should I do?” The choice seemed insignificant in comparison to all the other things this big organization needed to do to succeed. But it was her responsibility. And she wanted to do the right thing.

Now, think for a moment. What advice would you give Lisa? She saw 5 options:

1. To focus on efficiency, hurry to the next mailbox and pretend she didn’t see the woman;
2. To focus on efficiency, but to acknowledge the old lady with a wave while walking to the next mailbox;
3. To focus on efficiency, but spend a few minutes on small talk;
4. To focus on quality and take all the time that’s needed;
5. To focus on quality and try to sell the old lady something.

You’ve probably realized that the right answer isn’t so straight-forward. When you focus on quality, you lose out on efficiency… and when you focus on efficiency, you lose out on quality. In short, the strategy message delivered by the executive makes Lisa’s decision pretty difficult. Not difficult because of the efficiency-quality trade-off – trade-offs you’ll find in every good strategy – but because of the missing prioritization information. Many employees face the same challenge as Lisa on a daily basis. How do I balance two contradictory strategy elements and still take the right decision?

Strategy, a choice pattern

Professor Henry Mintzberg is an internationally renowned academic. He wrote more than 150 articles and 15 books on business and management. One of Mintzberg’s insights, “Strategy is a pattern in a stream of decisions,” helps us to better understand how decisions relate to strategy. A long time ago, I learned this phrase by heart, but it took me five years to really grasp the point of it. The trick I use to understand Mintzberg’s cryptic statement is to approach decisions in two steps. First, there’s the overall decision – the big choice – that guides all other decisions. To make a big choice, we need to decide who we focus on – our target client segment – and we need to decide how we offer unique value to the customers in our chosen segment. That’s basic strategy stuff. But by formulating it this way, it helps us to better understand the second part, the day-to-day decisions – the small choices – that get us closer to the finish line. When these small choices are in line with the big choice, you get a Mintzberg Pattern.

The Mintzberg Pattern is crucial to understanding successful strategy journeys. When we think and talk about strategy journeys, we think and talk about people and the decisions they take. Successful strategy journeys follow a Mintzberg Pattern, small choices that are in line with a big choice, like wagons that follow the train engine to its destination. At first sight, from a strategist’s point of view, the big decision seems like the tough one. But that’s not quite right. Yes, defining a strategy is hard, but the power of small decisions – the day-to-day choices of all employees on the execution road – cannot be underestimated. If Lisa takes the wrong decision, the overall impact on the company is very limited (and surely less impactful than making the wrong strategy choice). But if 10,000 colleagues make wrong judgements about quality and cost on a daily basis, then these small decisions aren’t so small anymore. Small decisions do have a big impact on the success rate of strategy journeys, not because of their individual size or importance, but because of their sheer number and exponential force.

Most of us don’t pay attention to these small decisions. And that’s mainly because we find it difficult to grasp the logarithmic effect of wrong small choices. (How much worse can it be if a few more people make a wrong decision?). Consider the challenge given to high school student Britney Gallivan of Pomona, California, described in the box below.

The most powerful force in the universe according to Einstein

If you fold a piece of paper in half 50 times, how thick would the end result be? Most of us would imagine the end result to look like a stack as big as a large phone book. We visualize 50 pieces of paper lying on top of each other. But the answer might surprise you. Gallivan decided to test it. She knew she needed a big piece of paper. After some searching, she found a 0.75-mile roll of toilet paper. With her parents, she rolled out the jumbo paper, marked the halfway point, and folded it once. It took a while because it was a long way to the end of the paper. Then she folded the paper a second time, then again and again. After 7 hours, she folded her paper for the 11th time into a skinny slab of around 31.5 inches wide and 15.75 inches high and posed for photos. In the end, she was able to fold the paper 12 times. If she could have folded it 17 times, the final stack would be taller than your average house. Three more folds and that sheet of paper would be a quarter of the way up the Burj Khalifa, the largest tower in the world. Ten more folds and it would have crossed the outer limits of the atmosphere. Another 20 and it would be about 60 million miles high, about two-thirds the distance to the Sun.

“The world was a great place when I made the twelfth fold,” Gallivan wrote when documenting her experiment. She also explained the phenomenal exponential force of repetitive small actions, known as a ‘geometrical expansion’. This is an important lesson for us. Taking into account the sheer number and exponential force, small decisions become SMALL. And successful project managers have SMALL decisions on their radar.

Michael Porter’s surprising NO

One of the most valuable lessons I learned from my discussions with Michael Porter is the importance of ‘no’ in strategy. “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do,” he likes to say. Let’s take a closer look. At the start of each strategy journey, companies decide on their client offer. Over time, they tend to add new product features and services to their initial portfolio, trying to broaden their customer base and tap into new profit pools. This scope creep is hard to resist. We all know the arguments – our shareholders demand top-line growth, our customers want it, the marginal cost for adding a product feature is minimal, our competitors are doing the same.

But the scope creep, while understandable, is dangerous. By diluting the underlying strategy trade-offs, by adding water to wine, we lose our initial choice – our strategy. The dilution can happen on the why side of the choice. “While our focus is on small companies, this large company is so interesting. Let’s service it too and see how it goes” is an example of a typical reflection. And on the how side, it often sounds like “Let’s offer a bit more service than we planned, just like our major competitor.” But, by trying to be all things to all people, companies dilute their strategy. And very quickly, there’s no strategy left.

At the end of a strategy exercise, the strategist has selected a core client segment and identified the distinct activities to offer unique value (the ‘yes’). Inherent in this choice is a whole list of things that the company isn’t going to do – customers that don’t fit the chosen segment, activities that the company won’t do (the ‘no’). Successful strategists capture these noes and make them very explicit. Their instrument? The List of Noes. Each strategy should arrive at the start of the execution journey with a clear List of Noes. This list provides an answer to questions like: Which clients are we going to make unhappy? Which service aren’t we going to deliver? Which product features aren’t we going to add? What internal expenditure aren’t we going to make?

A list of noes is an essential element of a company’s strategy journey. It’s something to promote, to put in the sales window, not something to apologize for and hide away. “I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do,” Steve Jobs said. If you find promoting the noes difficult, think about the following: some like water, some like wine, few like drinking a mix of both. We can’t be all things to all people. If we try, we end up nowhere on our journey. Successful strategists make a choice – who and how – and decide to stick with that choice. They fight against choice dilution. Successful strategists proudly make and defend a List of Noes.

A clear ‘no’ at the strategy level also reduces the option list for small choices (and therefore improves decision making). Let’s see if we can reduce Lisa’s options. To do so, we need to find a few noes at strategy level. Imagine we have a chat with her CEO. She tells us, “In order to get our company to the next level, we need to boost our customer orientation. We cannot accept employee behavior that goes against our clients. We exist because of our clients and should treat them that way. (No = we never forget the customer comes first). It doesn’t mean we all have to sell. Our mail delivery people, for example, shouldn’t. It would make our supply chain too complex. (No = we don’t make our supply chain complex). But they do have to be customer-oriented. That’s what service is all about. And a smile doesn’t cost money or time or complex processes. It’s an attitude.” If we translate this to Lisa’s context, we could say to her that “Clients should never be ignored” and “Sales isn’t part of your job.” Knowing this, Lisa can strike out her first and last option. Only three left.

Decision intent

Let’s see if we can further facilitate Lisa’s decision process. While the List of Noes is crucial to sharpen the big choice and eliminate some options, it doesn’t eliminate all the options. Imagine we talk to the mail carrier’s CEO again. She says, “In order to survive in our industry, we need to tap into new profit pools. This demands a new client attitude. But if we don’t keep our costs under control, we won’t be in the game at all. So we need even more efficiency.”

Reading between the lines, it’s safe to say that efficiency comes first. Without efficiency gains, there’s no money left to invest. From here, it’s a small step to formulate prioritization information for Lisa. We could say, “When in doubt, focus on efficiency first.” But let’s be more ambitious. Let’s try to put the decision aid into a context Lisa knows best… her job. To do so, we should take a closer look at what efficiency means for a mail carrier. We learn that each carrier has a specific time to make each drop, 5 seconds in Lisa’s case. And a clear daily deadline – to finish the mail round without overtime. Knowing this, we could formulate the prioritization information as “When in doubt, make sure you finish your daily round on time.” (Efficiency first in the context of Lisa’s job). If Lisa can increase client satisfaction within these limits, even better. So why not say, “Be friendly to your customers – smile, say hello, have a chat – but keep an eye on your watch. Always make sure you finish your round on time.” (Be friendly, engage with your customers, but don’t have a coffee with every person you run into. Your customers might love you, but our company will go bankrupt).

Successful project managers provide colleagues with prioritization information – a Decision Intent – in a context that fits their jobs. We point out the right decisions, without knowing exactly what forks in the road travellers will encounter on their journey.

We know now that daily choices, as in Lisa’s mailbox dilemma, are an expression of the company’s strategy – the big choice. We also know that successful strategy journeys can be recognized by their decision pattern – small choices in line with the big choice. The first might look like nothing compared to the second – not worthy of a strategist’s time – but if we think about Britney Gallivan’s paper-folding challenge, it puts small decisions in a different light. To take the execution shortcut, we have to enable travellers to take day-to-day decisions that fit the Mintzberg Pattern.