THE STORY
I recently got back from a combination trip to see my new
grandson and a vacation.
I wanted a good picture of my grandson. To get it, I took a
lot of pictures of him. Some of the pictures were pretty awful, but eventually,
that process lead to getting a good photo of him (see photo above).
Afterwards, I went vacationing and toured some old houses. There
were old oil portraits of people on the walls.
They may have looked fancy—even a bit regal—but I’d rather have the simple
snapshots of my grandchild than any of those old paintings.
In the business world, we have the option of building two
types of planning processes—either one like the process used to create fancy
oil paintings (like the ones I saw in the old houses) or like the process used
to create digital snapshots (like the ones I took of my grandson).
The painting process may create something worthy to display
on a wall for generations, but it is usually time consuming, costly and
inflexible. Those don’t sound like good qualities for a strategic plan.
Conversely, taking digital snapshots is quick, inexpensive,
and flexible. It may produce a few duds, but eventually you get some good
photos in a very efficient way. Those qualities also sound good for strategic
planning.
The principle here is that the goal of strategic planning is
not to create perfect documents and statements to proudly display on walls and
bookshelves. The goal is to figure out how to move a company forward in an
efficient and timely manner. To do so, we can learn more from the process I
used to get a photo of my grandson than from the artists who made those old paintings
on the walls of those old houses.
The Problems With
Paintings
Oil paintings can look great on the wall and last for
generations. The artist of great paintings can achieve great fame. And that can
sound appealing. There is a certain appeal for planners to want to create plans
great enough to “hang on the wall” for generations and give the planner fame
and glory. But great plans should not be the desired endpoint; instead, the
desired endpoint should be great companies. The plans are just a means to that
greater end.
The important thing to remember is that you don’t need “perfect
oil portrait” plans in order to effectively and efficiently move a company
forward. In fact, the desire for this
perfection can actually be counterproductive.
One of the problems with oil paintings is that they take a
long time to create. Time is a precious resource in our fast-moving world. Time
lost in perfecting a plan can become advantage lost to faster competitors. A “good
enough” plan received in a timely manner is more valuable than “perfection”
which comes too late to be of any use. Is your planning process geared more
towards timely completion or excessiveness and grandeur?
Another problem with oil portraits are that they are posed. The
people being painted have to remain in a stiff, usually unnatural position in
an artificially positive environment. And
if the posing still doesn’t look good, the artist will alter reality to make
the painting more flattering than reality.
The end result may be great art, but not an accurate accounting of
reality.
Bad planning can fall into the same trap. The plan may try
to place the company in the best light rather than show the harsh reality of
the truth of what’s happening out in the marketplace. The most positive
assumptions can be used. The plan may try to please the egos of the leadership
rather than tell the truth they do not want to hear. Wrong strategic decisions
are made, because judgment is clouded by unnatural flattery in the “posed”
strategic plan.
Sometimes the flattering distortions are the result of
trying to hit unrealistically high profit numbers with the plan. The only way
to fit these numbers into the plan is by surrounding them with unrealistically
optimistic scenarios, since you cannot get there just by incrementally tweaking
the harsh reality.
The result is that the plan becomes a failure and the numbers
are never achieved, because the plan was never achievable once reality overcame
the false optimism posed in the assumptions.
It would have been better to paint the real picture and show that the
desired profit numbers were not achievable. Then, you would be aware that
radical change was necessary and you could take steps in advance to avoid the
inevitable failure of the flattery approach.
Finally, oil paintings have to problem of being hard to modify
once the paint has dried. We live in a dynamic world. Adjustments are inevitable. Is your planning process hard to modify once
the ink has dried? If the world changes
shortly after the plan is put into play, do you have to wait a year until the
next planning cycle to make adjustments?
The Benefits of
Snapshots
Digital snapshots avoid a lot of the problems we saw with
the painting approach. They are fast and
easy to create. They capture reality
rather than an artist’s distorted vision of flattery. They provide rapid
feedback of what is happening. And it is easy to keep taking snapshots so that
your latest picture is accurately telling you what is happening NOW.
What does a snapshot oriented planning process look
like? First, it gets out of the portrait
studio inside the corporate offices and goes out into the marketplace to
capture reality where money is changing hands. And it doesn’t care what camera
the snapshots come from. It gathers impressions from social media, customers,
competitors and a variety of other sources, so that the information is not a
one-sided bias of “corporate-think.”
Second, snapshot planning is very experimental. When I was
taking snapshots of my grandson, I tried all sorts of approaches to getting his
picture. Some of these experiments did
not work. But some picture-taking
experiments were great. The planning
analogy is to do a lot of small experiments. Test hypotheses to see how well
they fly out in the marketplace. The results of a test can often provide far
better guidance for strategic decisions than having internal executives guess
about what will happen in the real world.
Try things on a small scale. The disaster at JCPenney was
not that CEO Ron Johnson tried something different. The disaster was that he
did a full rollout before testing it. There
was little downside risk to my taking a bad snapshot of my grandson, so I could
afford to try a lot of things before finding what worked. Set up your tests in a similar manner, so
that you do not risk much and can pull the plug early if it doesn’t work. That
approach would have saved JCPenney a fortune.
Being flexible and experimental does not mean that your
planning becomes random. This is not a process of just clicking a camera
continually in random directions until you get a good shot. No, there still
must be a focus to where you point the camera.
Winning strategies need to position your company in a place
where is can bring a competitive advantage. There may be very few places where
you can create that kind of advantage. Random acts are not the best way to find
these places. First you need to understand the marketplace, what you bring to
bear on the marketplace, and what others can do. This preparatory work helps
you to know the general space where you are most likely positioned to succeed. Then
you get flexible and experiment within that space.
The emotional connection between me and my snapshots was the
fact that I wanted a record of my grandchild. Random photos of anything, or of
other babies, would not have worked. I
needed to point my camera in the general direction of my grandson in order to
get a satisfactory photo. In the same way, your plan needs to know the focal
point. This provides guidance for the experimentation.
Plans are not the endpoint, but a means to a greater end—the
long-term improvement of the business. Therefore, rather than wasting time
perfecting the plan, focus your effort on building a tool which quickly and
effectively points to where success is most likely, so that you can win the
race to finding the fortune that such a place offers.
You rarely see oil portraits of the young and
unaccomplished. Instead, most portraits are of older people after they have
made their great accomplishments. They
look backward at past successes rather than towards where future success will
come. Planning processes which are too focused on the successes of the past (like
oil paintings) will hang on too long to obsolete strategies and miss out on
winning the battle for next big thing.
