Analogy #178: Sinking In Quicksand

THE STORY
Quicksand is an interesting substance. It’s basically just a sandy area supersaturated with water. At times, quicksand acts more like a solid, and at other times it acts more like a liquid.

If you accidentally walk into some quicksand, it will start to pull you down into it. A typical reaction when this happens is for people to start thrashing around in the quicksand to try to get out. The thinking is that if I can just keep shifting my weight from foot to foot, I will be able to eventually get a foot free.

All of this activity changes the chemical bonds between the sand and the water, causing the quicksand to act more like a liquid. The process has the technical name of liquefaction. The more liquid-like the quicksand, the less the resistance and the faster one sinks into it. So the irony is that the more you fight with the quicksand, the more the quicksand will win, pulling you down faster.

By contrast, if you make no movement at all, the chemical bonds between the sand and the water stay strong and the quicksand acts more like a solid. The natural buoyancy of your body will create a sense of equilibrium with the ground and you will stop sinking. In fact, you might even float up a little bit closer to the surface.

Therefore, the safest thing to do when confronted with quicksand is practically nothing. Slow, gentle, purposeful movement will get you safely out.

THE ANALOGY
Quicksand can be a symbol for all kinds of dangers and threats in the business place. It could represent an economic slowdown/recession, a new competitive threat, a changing consumer, or other such troubling events.

These events can make you feel trapped, as if you are in quicksand. Things seem out of your control and you feel like your business is starting to sink.

Just as with quicksand, one often starts to react quickly to this negative situation by thrashing around. The business undergoes a lot of activity in an attempt to break away from the negative environment “quicksand.” This could include actions like:

- Changing Advertising Agencies
- Firing the CMO
- Changing the Strategy
- Releasing a flurry of New Products
- Modifying the Business Model
- Reorganizing the Corporate Structure
- Bringing in Fresh Talent
- And so on….

Yet, as is so often the case with quicksand, the more you thrash around in a flurry of activity, the faster the business continues to sink. Although it goes against our natural instincts, we will see in this blog that often the best thing to do when your company hits a patch of quicksand is to do practically nothing.

THE PRINCIPLE
The principle here is that frequent change can often be more damaging than “staying the course.” Even in times of trouble, avoiding change can be one of your best moves. Especially in times of panic, change can be your worst enemy, because the change is not rooted in one’s core strategy. Instead, it tends to be disjointed and counter productive.

There are four basic ways in which too much change-based activity can draw you further into the quicksand, rather than lead you to safety. These are discussed below.

1. Dilution
It is difficult to stake out a distinct position in the marketplace that is ownable in the mind of the customer. Once your strategy helps you find and achieve your winnable point of distinction, hang onto it. It is the reason for someone to prefer you over the competition. Lose that point of distinction and you lose your advantage.

Often times, a lot of actions will stretch the company in areas beyond that point of distinction. For example, a luxury brand could panic and add line extensions at the lower end, or increase its distribution in more mass channels. This could dilute your point of distinction in luxury and class. You will be seen more as a mass brand, and your core customers could abandon you.

Or, you may have a strong brand name that you start slapping on a whole slew of new products that have little to do with the original product. You have diluted what that brand stood for, weakening its power of ownership in the marketplace. Instead of standing one thing well, you now are diluted to sorta meaning a number of things, none very well.

Often times, trying to stretch to become all things to all people makes you mean less of anything to anyone.

2. Confusion
With all of the communication “noise” out in the marketplace, it is very difficult to get your message across clearly. Compound that with the fact that your customer has a lot of other things on their mind and that you are probably not near the top of their list of priorities. So the noise coming at your audience is drowning you out while at the same time your customers are not all that attuned to listening for your message, either.

The net result is that it is hard to get a new message out clearly to the intended audience. If your new message is different from your old message, then it will not serve to reinforce and strengthen your communication. Instead, it will tend to confuse them.

They had one impression of you before, and now you are asking them to take on a different impression of what you stand for. Because the messages are conflicting, the end result is often confusion. And they are often not going to waste their precious time to resolve the confusion.

The same thing can apply to your own people. They may become confused about what the company stands for and become confused about what is expected from them. Rather than having clarity of purpose and determination about executing their role to its fullest, they hold back out of uncertainty.

Creating confusion during uncertain times will just draw you deeper into the quicksand.

3. Averaging
If you currently own a point of distinction, that is a good asset to hold onto. Your competition probably owns different points of distinction that are assets for them. In times of trouble, you may become jealous of some of the advantages your competition has due to their points of distinction. As a result, you may want to make changes that help you achieve some of the points of distinction of your competition.

The problem is that when you combine all of the points of distinction, you no longer become distinct at anything. You end up averaging to the middle. It’s like mixing all of the pretty colors of paint together. In the end, you end up with none of the pretty colors and only have an ugly gray mess.

Averages are not always the best place to be. For example, if a market is 50% men and 50% women, the “average” person would be half-male/half-female. That average person does not exist. Targeting that average is not as effective as being distinctively male or female.

Of course, if you attack a competitor’s point of distinction, they will vigorously fight back. In the end, you will probably not have taken away it away. But you will have probably weakened your own point of distinction through dilution and confusion.

4. Stalling
Any change in course eats up precious time. It takes time to get a new team up to speed. It takes time to convert to a new ad agency and get a new program in place. It takes time to even dream up what the change will be. It takes time to get the message out. It takes time for consumers to react.

In tough times, one cannot afford to waste time. It’s like being in a road race and spending all of your time at the pit stop. Sure, a pit stop can help you change your tires and get more fuel in the tank, but while you are in the pit row, your competitors continue to race. Too much time in preparation at the pit stop can cause you to lose the race. The pit stop becomes your pit of quicksand.

SUMMARY
In times of trouble, there can be pressure to embark on a slew of new activities and agendas. However, all of this activity can result in dilution, confusion, averaging and lost time. None of these results will help you get out the quicksand. They only help you to sink faster. The better route is to stay the course and reinforce whatever point of distinction you already have in the marketplace.

FINAL THOUGHTS
It’s true that sometimes one needs to change course. All strategies eventually become irrelevant. However, the time to change is not when times are tough and you feel most vulnerable. Rash decisions at a time of panic are rarely the best decisions. It is better to slowly evolve into the change while you are still on top. Think it through during calmer times. The better the fortress you build in the good times, the better you can weather the eventual storms.

Clarity

THE STORY
Sometimes I get jealous of people who have a clear vision of what they want to do in life. I have a friend who, at the age of 5, already knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life. He wanted to be an electrical engineer.

He spent most of his childhood fiddling around with electronic gadgets. When he went off to college, he got a bachelor’s, master’s and PhD degree—all in electrical engineering. Then he went and got a job at a large company in the field doing leading edge work in electrical engineering.

After awhile, he decided to become a professor of electrical engineering at a large, prestigious university. Now he teaches and does even more leading edge electrical engineering research at the university. He has lived a rich, full life doing exactly what he had clearly determined to do way back when he was 5 years old.

Me? I’m over 50 years old and I’m still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up.

THE ANALOGY
It’s nice when one has a clear vision of what they want to do with their life. It allows them to focus. They don’t have to waste time searching. They know their path in life. That’s why sometimes I wish I could just get a letter in the mail fully detailing the divinely inspired plan for my life.

This is also very important for businesses. It is much easier for a business to succeed if everyone involved clearly understands the life path of the corporation. It lets the company focus on success. That’s why I’m sure many CEOs wish they could just get a letter in the mail fully detailing the divinely inspired plan for their business.

My suspicion is that there are a lot more people like me than there are like my friend, who had a clear vision since early childhood. I also suspect that a lot of businesses struggle with this issue. Although strategic planning can do many things for a company, probably its most important benefit comes from bringing clarity of purpose to a business.

THE PRINCIPLE
The principle here is the importance of clarity to success. McKinsey and Company recently did a large study to determine what are the most important factors to success in business. They analyzed about 100,000 questionnaires to uncover the practices at 400 business units in 230 companies around the world.

McKinsey discovered that there were three factors which caused a dramatic improvement in performance. Nothing else came close in its impact. The three major factors all had to do with clarity:

1) Clarity of Goal (or as they put it, a compelling vision of change or direction);

2) Clarity of Path (an unencumbered internal process to reach the goal, or as McKinsey put it, an environment that encourages openness, trust and challenge—i.e., the right culture); and

3) Clarity of Expectations (or as McKinsey put it, clear roles for employees and clear understanding of who it accountable for what).

If you know where you are heading, you clear away the bureaucratic obstacles, and then let everyone know what is expected of them, then you have the highest potential for success.

Over the years, I have spoken with large numbers of people about strategy. A common problem I find is people fretting about trying to find the perfect strategy. They have narrowed down the list of options to a few choices, but they are having difficulties narrowing down the list to the single best alternative.

What I usually tell these people is that it is more important to just pick something and get a clear focus around it than to fuss and fret over whether you have made the absolute best choice. Usually, most anything on their short list has the potential for success if focused on. However, if you waver and go after too many options at the same time, you will probably fail. Picking which path is not as important as shedding the light of clarity on whatever path you pick.

Perhaps my friend could have also been successful if he had focused on a different career path. However, because he picked a path early in life, he was able to focus and succeed on the path that was chosen. If he had procrastinated about his future, he may have had no success at all.

The best way to tell if your strategic planning process is a success is not by the quality of the binders or the speeches. No, the best way to determine success is by the amount of clarity it brings to the organization. When you are done:

1) Does everyone clearly understand the goal?
2) Does everyone clearly understand their role and are willing to be held accountable to achieving it?
3) Is everyone so fixated on the larger picture that internal barriers and petty politics are gone and is replaced by openness and cooperation?

Strategy without clarity equals disaster. Strategy with clarity equals success.

I am reminded of an old episode of the TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation. Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Dr. Beverly Crusher are captured by the enemy. The enemy puts a device on them which has the side effect of letting them sense what is on each other’s mind. Captain Picard and Dr. Crusher eventually escape from the enemy. The problem is that they do not know where they are, so it is difficult to know which is the best escape path.

Being the leader that he is, Captain Picard makes a number of decisions as to the best way to go. Each time, he sounds very convincing about the correctness of his choices. However, eventually Dr. Crusher speaks up. She says that for all these years when she has heard Captain Picard give commands, she always though he was very certain of what was the right thing to do, because he always sounded so confident when giving the order. However, now that she was able to read his mind, she discovered that he often only has a vague notion of what is correct, and sometimes he is just guessing.

The captain replied that this is what leaders do. They struggle internally with tough decisions, but externally they give the confidence needed to rally the troops behind the decision. They make the commands clear and unwavering, to give the appearance of being the obvious best choice.

In many ways, this is what strategic planning should do. It needs to tackle some tough issues. However, once the tough decision-making is done, the process must clearly and confidently communicate the decision in a way which gets the troops focused on making it succeed.

The job is not over when the choice is made. One also needs to make sure it is understood and embraced.

In addition, one needs to clearly assign responsibilities, with individual consequences if not carried out. In other words, strategy should not just be stated as a nice thing and then hope that people will do something. Clear accountability needs to be spelled out. Perhaps individual accountability contracts need to be written out. Compensation needs to be tied to carrying out one’s portion of the strategy. Do not assume things will magically happen. Make it clear who is responsible for what.

Finally, one needs to incorporate corporate culture into the strategy, so that internal bureaucracy does not block the path to victory. Although there may be individual responsibilities, one cannot let individualism get in the way of the combined effort. Clear away anything in the culture which prohibits the cooperative effort needed to achieve success.

SUMMARY
Although strategic planning serves many functions, its most important function should be to provide clarity to an organization. Clarity has three aspects: clarity of goal, clarity of path and clarity of responsibility. Without this comprehensive clarity, strategy is little more than some interesting ideas that end up going nowhere.

FINAL THOUGHTS
Although you may never get that letter with the divinely inspired detailed plan for your business, you can write that letter for the rest of your business.