Tag: Strategy
When organizations are performing well, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. That’s the whole point of building teams: together we can accomplish more than if we work solo. But many organizations get stuck: suddenly, the whole becomes less than the sum of its parts! When this happens, it can be difficult to understand what’s going on: everyone can be working hard, and yet as a whole, the team just seems to be treading water.
When this happens, I’ve found a useful model for understanding what’s going on. I like to ask: is the organization stuck on vision, strategy, or tactics? The next time you have an important proposal to make, don’t wait until the big meeting to ask for support. Here’s how to gather feedback and build consensus beforehand, so you can make that big meeting into a non-event. Lately I’ve been working with our startups to establish their engineering strategies. One model I’ve found useful is to place their technical challenge on an innovation/execution spectrum.