Is Your Strategy a Word Salad?
Using a Framework For Collective Thinking Will Rock Your Ability to Lead
Frameworks, however flawed, are critical tools for leaders. Having a system to help you think clearly, segment activities, and create priorities, will help you create momentum and scale thinking through those you lead. It will help you achieve better strategic and tactical outcomes. The higher up you go in an organization, the more important it is to be able to share ideas and structure thinking in a memorable way.
Useful Frameworks
A useful framework will serve to order the thinking of your teams in ways that will align them, promote project confidence, and elicit intrinsically motivated, authentic commitment. It will reduce the collective cognitive load associated with strategy and prioritization and allow your teams and the people on them to spend more time creating and working toward your shared strategic goals. Analogies, metaphors, and contextual models, in the form of a framework, help us scale our leadership through others. When teams are using the same language and shared context, through metaphors, outcomes will improve.
Language and the context that we create, shape everything that people, in groups, do together. We lead, as Chalmers Brother’s writes in his popular series, through conversations. It is through powerful conversations that things get done. If you don’t share metaphors and models with your teams that are “sticky,” you will have a hard time getting things done when you are not in the room. A useful framework will allow you to tell stories from history consistent with the model. It should explain, retrospectively, what worked and what might have worked better. More importantly, the framework will help you create metaphors and structure thinking in a way that will help your people and your teams adapt in the future.
“Metaphor is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects.” (adapted) — Lackoff & Johnson
Humility and Genius
It is important to know and to communicate humility to your team around whatever frameworks you decide to implement. There is no perfect framework, no ideal model, and no metaphor that will answer every question or solve every problem. If there were, we wouldn’t need the creative genius of the people we lead.
The point is to achieve better outcomes together. We need ways to explain what we objectively see, to the humans that we are leading, in a subjective context that resonates. Creativity is unpredictable and requires a subjective approach.
A useful framework will help you better merge the subjective with the objective.
Your team should also know that you are maintaining a growth mindset and are willing to adapt or completely change your frameworks if they are not helping you achieve better outcomes. As George Box famously said:
“Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.” — George Edward Pelham Box
When you don’t have a framework or use one that is grossly incomplete, it strains your team, and leads to confusion, apathy, waste, and frustration.
Leading without a framework is like leading with a word salad.
Unstructured thinking leads to completely unstructured results. While a lack of structure may be what an individual artist needs to create, it doesn’t work when trying to coordinate groups of people to be creative in accomplishing a collective goal. I’ve worked on teams without a clear framework for thinking, which evolved in a misguided strategy with catastrophic results. This is much more common than it should be.
Leadership
Leadership is required to unlock the creativity of teams. If you care about innovation and unleashing the creativity of the people that you lead (including yourself), leverage a framework that makes sense to you. It will help you scale. If you are looking for a tested, but imperfect framework to rock your ability to lead, check out The Momentum Framework.
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References:
Chalmers Brothers (2004), Language and the Pursuit of Happiness
Lackoff & Johnson (2003), Metaphors We Live By
Kenneth O. Stanley (2015), Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned
Carol Dweck (2007), Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
George E.P. Box (1987), Prediction Corrected Visual Predictive Checks for Diagnosing Nonlinear Mixed-Effects Models
Sean Flaherty (2021), The Momentum Framework
Sean Flaherty (2020), The Leadership Flip
