There are a variety of roadblocks for translating strategy into action that most of us have seen first hand:
- Employee’s don’t buy into the strategic priorities, so they disengage
- There is only superficial cross-functional communication, collaboration & sharing of goals, plans, targets, and decisions
- There is usually no agreed and/or documented accountability for projects and metrics
- And when there is agreement on accountability, there are few repercussions for not delivering or under-delivering performance.
These roadblocks get bigger as organizations become more highly-matrixed, out-sourced, geographically (and time-zone) dispersed, and networked.
A CEO we know at a $5B public company is adopting a foundational approach to change all of this – simply by addressing the way people in the company’s ecosystem speak to each other.
Based on “Speech Act Theory,” a theory that says talking is tantamount to doing, and that most of what we say is intended to get things done (rather than simply describe how things are), our CEO wants to bring some rigor to what we say (our utterances) in order to bring rigor (including accountability) to our actions.
The essence of the work of John Searle, Charles Spinoza and Fernando Flores -- for our CEO’s purposes -- boils down to this: Requests & Promises. That’s all there is in forwarding business execution. The request is the catalyst of action; the promise is the “fundamental unit of interaction” in business.
Managing requests and promises is essential for accountability, and the hard part can be adhering to a framework of requests and promises that is auditable and measurable. Sull and Spinoza give a “promise-based management” lifecycle framework that goes through 3 phases of a conversation for commitment:
1. Achieving a meeting of minds
2. Making it happen
3. Closing the loop
The aim is to have conversations for commitment that include “what-by-when” requests (“I want you to do x by Friday”), offers (“If you do, I’ll pay your bonus”), counteroffers (“I can’t do it by Friday, what about Monday?”), commitments/promises (“okay, I’ll have it done by Monday”), and refusals – rather than conversations for assertion (“Wouldn’t it be great to get this done? Who’s going to do it? It may be possible to get it done by Friday. This is your job, you know.”).
One way to document these requests & promises is in the enterprise planning process (one of the cornerstones of extended performance management). A corporate request comes from a financial and operational model that has been debated, negotiated, and agreed upon by senior leadership and forms the basis of the annual operating plan (including Capex budget, workforce plan, SG&A budget, etc.). A field-driven forecast (of revenue, expense, and operational drivers) is, in essence, a promise to deliver on the plan or a refusal to deliver on the plan. It is essential to document and communicate assumptions along with the plan & forecast, in order to track the offers and counteroffers of the organization. For example, “I will deliver my sales revenue for the month, so long as the new version of our product is released according to schedule.” In this way, if a number is missed, there is corporate understanding of what happened.
Have a look at the article below (it’s $6.50 to download).
*This title was taken from the excellent article on Promise-Based Management by Donald Sull of the London Business School and Charles Spinosa of Vision Consulting in the April 2007 edition of the Harvard Business Review.
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