Strategic Planning Analogy #571: Creators Vs. Craftsmen

THE STORY

Back in the early 1970s, pianist and composer Claude Bolling had the original idea of recording an album that was a mixture of classical and jazz music. It was to feature Bolling on piano accompanied by someone on flute (with drums in the background).

Bolling was fortunate to get Jean-Pierre Rampal to play the flute part. Rampal was considered to be one of the very best (if not THE very best) classical flute players of his generation.

Bolling showed Rampal the basic music and asked Rampal to do some jazz improvisation around it, like bending the notes or modifying the rhythm. It was reported that Rampal was a gasp at the suggestion and replied something like this:

“I am the world’s greatest flautist and will play your music to perfection. But I do not improvise. If you want me to play in such a manner, you will have to write it into the music.”

So Bolling meticulously incorporated “improvisation” into the musical score. Rampal played it as written and it sounded like improvisation, even though it was anything but.

The album was released in 1976, called “Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano Trio.” It topped the charts for about two years and stayed on the Billboard sales list for 530 weeks (nearly 10 years). It became one of the largest selling albums ever released on a classical music label. Little did most people know that the great jazz parts on flute were not improvisations, but just excellent technical reproductions of a musical score.

THE ANALOGY
You’d think that all great musicians would be great creative artists. After all, what is more creative than music? Well nothing could be further from the truth. Jean-Pierre Rampal was not creative with his flute. He could only play what was put in front of him.

Yes, Rampal was the best at playing the classical flute, but that does not make him creative. It just meant he was a great craftsman. He mastered the craft of playing the flute. That was an excellent skill..but it was not creativity.

Compare Rampal to Ian Anderson, the flute player in the band Jethro Tull. Anderson may not have had the same level of technical craftsman skills as Rampal, but he had extreme levels of creativity. Anderson can get creative sounds out of a flute that virtually no one had done before him. Anderson also wrote all the original music he performed. Anderson was a true creator.

I’ve known many musicians over the years. Many of them are great at their craft, but only a few are what I would consider to be musically creative.

The same is true in cooking. There are people who are excellent at the craft of cooking and can prepare great meals. However, all they can do is follow a recipe. Yes, they follow it to perfection, but they have no aptitude for creativity in the kitchen. Others, can go into the kitchen without a recipe, look at the ingredients in front of them and invent a marvelous new dish from their creative mind. This second type of cook is harder to find.

The point here is that we should never assume that just because someone can do a job at high levels of perfection that they are naturally creative. He or she might just be a great craftsman. Creativity is something very different and the most creative ones may not have the best skills at performance.

This is especially true in the world of business. Top performers in their fields—like operations, sales, accounting, and personnel—may have excellent skills in their particular craft, but in all likelihood, they are not the most creative ones in their organizations.  

Part of the strategic planning process requires creativity. If you load up the strategic planning team with your top performers, you may only end up with a bunch of craftsmen…great people, but not the ones that can invent a truly creative strategy. They could all be like Jean-Pierre Rampal, ready to execute with perfection, but waiting for a creative Claude Bolling to put the notes in front of them. 

Make sure you look beyond excellence at a craft and enlist some of the more creative ones in your organization to help with strategy.

THE PRINCIPLE
The principle here is that the complete strategic planning process requires a variety of skills. Therefore, you need to seek out a variety of people to work on the process. Otherwise, you may not get all the skills you need.

One of those skills is creativity. Your most creative ones are not necessarily your best performers. They may just be great craftsmen.

Instead, the truly creative ones may be hidden in your organization. They may not even look like your best performers. Rather than wearing formal apparel like the craftsman Rampal did when performing, they may wear shabbier clothing like the creative Ian Anderson did when performing.

The most creative ones may be among your youngest employees, without much experience. After all, your most seasoned employees may be so wrapped up in the status quo that they cannot see anything new or different. Instead, it may be the fresh face that is most likely to question the status quo and see a different way to approach the business.

Indeed, the employees at the top with the most experience are probably the ones with the most to lose if the status quo (which they have perfected as a craft) is replaced by something new (and requires new skills to execute). Therefore, if you load up your strategic process with only older, experienced people, you may end up with the opposite of creativity—resistance to change and barriers to new ideas.

No, it is the younger group that has more of a vested interest in the future and may be closer to understanding what the next generation of customers want.

As Gary Hamel says in his book, “Leading the Revolution”, if you want a revolutionary new strategy, you have to have revolutionaries on the team. Or, in Hamel’s words:

“Most companies are not led by visionaries; they’re led by administrators. No offense, but your CEO is probably more ruling-class than revolutionary. So don’t sit there staring at the corporate tower hoping to be blinded by a flash of entrepreneurial brilliance. Administrators possess an exaggerated confidence in great execution, believing this is all you need to succeed in a discontinuous world. They are accountants, not seers.”

If your corporate tower is full of craftsman administrators, you may need to look outside the tower to find your creative revolutionaries. They may be out there in some remote outpost far from corporate headquarters. They may not even be employees. Wherever they are, find them and put them on the team. The level of creativity in your strategy depends upon it.

This is not to say that unconventional creative young people are all you need to do strategy. No, you need both the Claude Bollings and the Jean-Pierre Rampals to create success.

My point is that you need a variety of skillsets to pull off a great strategy, and the skillset of revolutionary creativity may be the hardest to find. They are probably not the person in the office next door. They may not even have an office or cubicle at headquarters. In all likelihood, you probably don’t even know their names.

Therefore, if you do not take pro-active effort to seek them out, they will not be found. And that will be to your great loss.

Don’t think you can avoid the hard work of finding the creatives by hiring one of the big strategic consulting firms. My experience in working with them is that the big consulting firms probably have even fewer creative types than you do. These big consulting firms may be the most skilled craftsmen at running the process, but I wouldn’t rely on them for the big, new idea. That’s your responsibility.

Take your responsibility seriously and seek out the right mix for your strategic team.

SUMMARY
It is a mistake to load up your strategy team with only your top performers. Top performers may only be great at their particular craft. They may be lousy at out-of-the-box creativity. The truly creative revolutionaries are probably hidden in your organization. If you do not take the time to seek them out, you will miss out on their insights. That will probably result in a poor strategy. And no matter how good your top performers are at executing their craft, great execution of a poor strategy rarely leads to success.

FINAL THOUGHTS
I received an autographed copy of Leading the Revolution directly from Gary Hamel. To reciprocate, I gave him a copy of my book Fast Forward. Hamel just threw my book into a pile of old boxes, presumably to be tossed out. I guess he was not seeking to hear new voices to help with the revolution. So much for practicing what he preaches. Don’t do the same. Please put the ideas of this blog into practice.

Strategic Planning Analogy #489: Feeling the Weather

THE STORY

Weathermen on TV don’t seem to think it is enough to merely give us the outdoor temperature.  They don’t seem to think that ordinary temperatures accurately reflect how we FEEL. So on particularly hot days, they weathercasters talk about the “Heat Index.” The heat index temperature is usually higher than the actual temperature, because it takes into account things like the humidity, which can make it FEEL even hotter.

In a similar fashion, when it gets especially cold, the weathercasters use something call the “Wind Chill Factor” to restate the temperature as colder than the actual temperature. This is because high winds can make cold temperatures FEEL even colder.

Well, my experience is that when it gets especially hot or cold, most people seek shelter indoors where it is more comfortable. People naturally flock to the warmth of indoor heat when it is cold outside or indoor air conditioning when it is hot outside.

So, if the weathercasters are REALLY interested in giving us the temperature we FEEL on these extreme days, they should give us the room temperature…because that is where most people will be found and that will be the temperature most people will be feeling.

THE ANALOGY

Weathermen are correct in noticing that the temperature reported on a thermometer does not always reflect how people feel. But I think they miss the even bigger difference in temperatures between being inside versus outside. That’s where the real difference in feelings occurs.

A similar situation takes place in the business world. Businesses have all kinds of reports and dashboards to report all kind of numbers. These reports and dashboards are like thermometers. They report the “temperature” of what is happening outside in the marketplace where business is taking place.

The problem is too many executives spend too much time indoors, inside the comfort and security of the headquarters building. These executives do not FEEL the realities of what is going on out there “in the real world.” They are protected from the intense competitive climate on the outside.  Things feel a lot better inside the headquarters where bad news is often softened and “Yes Men” make the executives feel like everything is grand.

Yes, the reports and dashboards may reflect real temperatures. But unless one can penetrate the false feelings of headquarters comfort and get the executives to really FEEL how things are going on in the real world, they will not make the right strategic decisions.

THE PRINCIPLE

The principle here is that merely seeing the numbers of business is usually not enough.  You have to get executives to actually “feel” the numbers.

Feelings are Important

Why? First of all, business is very complex. There are so many moving parts that any single number doesn’t tell the full story. And if you have a whole stack of numbers, you are often no further ahead because it can be hard to see how all the individual numbers fit together.  It’s like having all the individual pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, but no idea of what the picture looks like when all the pieces go together. At that point, the puzzle pieces may as well all be colored black for all the insight they provide.

Our modern technology can pump out thousands upon thousands of data points every hour. But that doesn’t mean we are necessarily any smarter about what’s going on. Drowning in “big data” doesn’t make us more intelligent. True knowledge requires more than just piles of numbers. It requires context and insight.

Context and insight help us to see the big picture—to actually feel what is going on, to know what is truly important, and to see into the future—beyond the reach of measurement tools.  Unless you can feel the big picture, you cannot create the big picture strategy or make the right strategy decisions.

The second reason while feelings are important is because people are emotional beings. They make decisions based on both reason and emotion.  Our customers are emotional beings, our employees are emotional beings, our partners are emotional beings, and our competitors are emotional beings. All of their emotional feelings impact what happens outside in the marketplace.  If our leaders do not have a proper feeling for how all those emotions are playing out in the marketplace, they will make the wrong decision.

Our leaders are also emotional beings.  Their feelings affect their decisions.  If their feelings are wrongly biased by spending too much time insulated inside headquarters, their feelings will steer them in the wrong direction.

What Should We Do to Move From Numbers to Feelings

So how do we make sure that our leaders are feeling the big picture in the proper context?  I have five suggestions.

1. Elevate the Art of Interpetation.  The gathering of “big data” numbers is only relevant when those numbers can be interpreted and put into context.  We need to be able to put a heat index or wind chill factor on the numbers to get them to reflect how things really feel. 

Just having a warehouse full of paint will not get you a great painting.  You need to add the artist who can create the picture out of the paint.  Similarly, just having a data warehouse full of numbers will not let you see the big picture of what is going on in the marketplace.  You need to add the analytical “artist” who can convert the data into the beautiful picture of what is going on.

Therefore, we need to elevate the importance of interpretation of data to the same level (if not more) than that of the gathering of the data.  Ask yourself…how much time and money has gone into building you data-gathering activities?  And then compare that to how much time and money is going into the interpretation and conversion of that data into a picture that allows executives to feel the big picture of what is going on.  Is it in balance?  Are you warehousing paint or are you creating paintings?

2. Get the Executives to Go Outside.  If the weathercasters really want us to know what it feels like outside, they should just tell us to go outside and feel it.  There is often no substitute for actual first-hand experience in the elements. If you really want to know how things feel, go feel it yourself.

Have top executives go on sales calls.  Have them go to the store or website and actually have to try to buy your product.  Make them have to actually use your product in real life situations.  Then have them buy and use the competition.  Watch how real customers interact with your product or service out in real-world situations at their homes or place of business.  Eat lunch with regular employees in the regular cafeteria.  I talk more about getting out in the field here.

3. Listen to the Outside Voices.  If all your executives listen to is each other, then they will only feel the temperature inside the corporation. To feel the outside temperature, you have to listen to the people who are living outside in the real world. That includes the employees in the field, customers and other key partners.

Modern technology makes it easy to hear the voice of the field and the voice of the customer.  But how much of these voices are being heard by the top executives?  Just telling an executive sales are down is one thing.  Having them hear the rantings of the dissatisfied customers who stopped purchasing is quite another.  It provides a context for how to fix the situation.

Have executives listen in on the complaint line.  Have them read the comments spoken in twitter and other digital sources.  Have them see survey comments.

4. Tear Down the Insulation.  If you want the temperature inside the headquarters to feel more like the outside temperature, then you need to tear down the insulation which keeps the outside “truth” from reaching executives. Employees need to feel that comfortable in speaking the truth when talking to top executives.  It needs to be okay to speak up when the conventional wisdom inside the headquarters appears to be out of sync with what is happening outside.

5. Make Strategic Planning More About Painting Pictures.  Finally, I am getting more and more concerned about the fact that modern strategic planning departments are turning into data organizers rather than picture painters.  They manage budgets and deviations from plans, but are not providing the types of insights which change how an executive feels about what needs to get done. I see more job specifications in strategic planning asking for CPAs than I see requests for great storytellers.  If your strategists cannot paint pictures with compelling stories, then you are back to merely having piles of data (and wondering why budgets are not being met).

SUMMARY

If executives are insulated from the harsh realities of the marketplace, they will have the wrong impressions of what is going on (and make the wrong decisions). Just giving them piles of data from the outside is not enough.  Strategists need to make sure context is placed around the data so that executives can actually feel what is happening in the real world. It needs to strike a chord deep within their emotions.  To help in this process, combine the context-making with plans to force executives to spend more time interacting with the real word and the people in it.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Maybe the best way to keep executives from hiding in headquarters offices is to eliminate headquarters offices.  There are many companies which do this.