Beware of these management strategies and change myths in your 2025 planning

At this time of the year, thoughts turn to strategy and change. A new year brings new hope – new aspirations and initiatives.

But don’t get seduced. A lot can go wrong.

Roger Martin, the former dean of the Rotman School of Management, recently warned about the five deadliest strategy myths:

• A list of initiatives is a strategy: This is a near-universal myth, he believes – preparing a list of initiatives has arguably become the dominant form of so-called strategy found on the planet. But that falls short of real strategy. “The fatal shortcoming with a list of initiatives is that it is focused on the things you control and not on the one terribly important thing that you can’t: Customers. That is the tricky thing, the hard thing,” he writes on his blog. Strategy involves treading beyond a list of obvious initiatives and instead investing in a set of activities that compels customers to act as you wish.
• You can prove your strategy is correct: If you are rigorous enough with your analysis, many strategists contend, you can prove in advance that your strategy is correct. That leads to not doing anything new or different unless you can prove it is certain to work. “Since nobody can ever – even in the best circumstances – prove anything about the future involving humans interacting in markets, companies will steer away from doing anything that deviates from the status quo,” he writes. A related myth is that it is useful to spend time and effort on forecasting revenues from the new strategy. You can’t forecast the future behaviour of something over which you have no control. Such forecasts are a waste of time – a calming pacifier for adults, he argues.
• Analytically strong people are better strategists: There has never been any demonstration of validity to this view. “The best strategists realize that their analytical prowess is a shortcoming to be overcome,” he insists. “The key to being a great strategist is imagination – not analysis.”
• Strategy is a zero-sum game: The widespread belief is that if you succeed you have to crush your competitor. He argues the opposite: you can succeed by offering customers value in certain areas while competitors can focus on different areas to delight people. More companies will prosper through serving their targeted customers better. This approach gets companies out of doing the easy thing – duplicating their competitors’ approach.
• Strategy is formulated at the top and then executed below: He argues what we call execution is actually doing strategy at levels other than the very top of the company. It’s grappling with the reality of the uncertainty, competition and constraints the new course of action has thrust the organization into. Choices will be made – strategic choices. Subscribing to the myth, on the other hand, he says “lets crappy strategy – analytical exercises that generate lists of initiatives – off the hook by blaming the crappiness on execution.” It also is deeply insulting to the rest of the organization, judging them incapable of doing strategy since that is exclusively reserved for top management.

In similar fashion, change consultant Greg Satell recently tackled three myths pervading that field:

• Create a sense of urgency around change: That may work for a conventional project, galvanizing people to act, but for something that’s truly transformational, he argues it’s a sure path to failure. “The problem is that if a change is important and has real potential to impact what people believe and what they do, there will always be those who will hate it and they will work to undermine it in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive,” he writes on the Human-Centered Change and Innovation Blog. Starting with a “big bang” can create disruption and feed into the atmosphere of fear and loathing that opponents of change want to create. It’s better to empower small groups who believe in the change to work away at it in one area of the company or one aspect of the work before going all out.
• Start with a quick, easy win: This is intended to build momentum and establish credibility. But if the win isn’t meaningful, it will do little to drive change forward. “In fact, touting a meaningless and irrelevant pseudo-accomplishment can make change leaders look out-of-touch and impractical,” he warns. Look instead for a “keystone change,” something that represents a concrete and tangible goal, involves multiple stakeholders, and paves the way for additional change in the future. That builds traction.
• Prepare a stakeholder map: This is meant to help you understand the forces at play, indicating various players and their level of enthusiasm as well as influence over the change. The result is an impressive PowerPoint deck but he insists slicing and dicing people 18 different ways isn’t going to do much more than confuse the situation. Instead, he urges you to find and work with the 25 per cent of people who will enthusiastically buy into the change and make it happen. “Scientific research suggests that the tipping point for change is only a 25-per-cent minority. Once a quarter of the people involved become committed to change, the rest will largely go along,” he says. You don’t manage change, but empower it by enabling those who believe in it to show it can work and then bringing in others who can bring in others still. You don’t need a clever slogan to bring change about, he adds; you need a network.

If strategy and change are in the air this season, consider those contrarian views before going ahead.

Cannonballs

• Mr. Satell argues reading is thinking and with that in mind has a thoughtful list of best books for 2024 on his own blog, led by Max Bennett’s A Brief History Of Intelligence.
• It’s important for managers to realize we never leave the sixth grade, says Korn Ferry chief executive officer Gary Burnison. The basic desire to belong and to be liked – ultimately to trust and be trusted – is the same now as when we were in the sixth grade. Leaders therefore must tap the power of connectivity and trust.
• A challenge for the new year from Toronto consultant Donald Cooper: To get in touch with what life’s really like for your employees, commit to living for just two weeks on the average wage or salary of your front-line staff.

Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.