Throw your strategist out of the window

Mel Gibson’s film Braveheart has been criticised for a number of inaccuracies.

I do hope one of them wasn’t that scene where King Edward ‘Longshanks’ throws a strategist out of the castle window. 

You may remember that Edward and his son the Prince are discussing the advance of Wallace’s army into Northern England when the king is interrupted by the Prince’s friend.

Asking icily who he is the friend replies that he is skilled in the arts of war and military tactics. Whereupon Longshanks takes him by the arm, seeming to ask his advice and steers him over the window sill and a 100 foot drop to the courtyard beneath. Anyone who has needed a practitioner and found themselves trapped with a talkative theorist will sympathise.

While we are in the holiday season it seemed a good opportunity to draw up a candidate list of roles who can politely be shown the window.

There are I would suggest a few more candidates for defenestration before you pick on the hapless strategist:

Time management experts

Ever since Edward Deming, business has obsessed over process. We have rowers and car 1 racing teams shaving 100ths of second off race.  That works when you are trying to do things fast. It is less effective if you are trying to do things well.  Especially if a significant part of your output is the development of ideas. How long do good ideas take? Don’t ask someone who measures you by the hour. Or even hour parts. If we were really serious about time management we would ban the use of social media during work time and non-related work emails. But we don’t so how productive IS your team? Window.

Procurement 

And if you have procurement nearby you might take their elbow as well and move them towards the light. Procurement used to preoccupy itself with forcing the overall costs of a product down and running a bidding auction for the cheapest. But then the bidders started to use inferior components so procurement got inside the product. Being told that you have to deliver to budget but with procurement also specifying the cost per hour of the people working on the project with no regard for the objectives of the project. Well that is a recipe for a race to the bottom or massive fraud in inflating other costs in order to employ the right people to do the job. Cost based accounting is a terrible way to manage a business if your business involves ideas.  Talent matters - and that is hard to quantify.

Human Resources

That takes us neatly to HR, a vital function in terms of compliance and governance not to mention recruitment. But they are responsible for identifying skills and making sure those skills are deployed. Tricky to do when particular in the junior ranks internships have taken the place of training. Which amounts to skills acquisition by association. Do you have the right skills in your organisation? Do you have a way to measure their deployment? I thought not. An amusing fast check when you do annual reviews is to ask your employees to write their job descriptions. Almost without exception they won’t be doing the job you are paying them to do.  Partly because they focus on what they enjoy and where their strengths are.  Partly because we need to deploy so many skills it’s easy to cherry pick unless they are marked closely.

The strategist

Which leaves me with the strategist. The reason why we have so many strategists these days is that despite their propensity to theorise they are the best people to identify the key ideas that can drive the business and to motivate the rest of the team to shape those ideas through to implementation. By all means show them the window to focus their minds. They can’t ‘make’ anything. However, they will help your company to make what it does better.  For the time being  you should keep them inside.

All other suggestions gratefully received.

By John Griffiths, the barefoot insighter.

He runs his research and planning consultancy Planning Above and Beyond.  He is a published author whose next book Waggledancers is about how to move ideas through your organisation to make the most of them.