Strategy consultants and agencies often get a bad rap.
Sometimes they deserve it. But sometimes they don’t.
The cliché (and some stereotypes exist for a reason) is that consultants and agencies recommend strategies the business can’t implement. The proposed changes might be too complex, disruptive, expensive, or lengthy, making them impractical.
Sure, consultants often suggest a phased or a “crawl, walk, run” approach. Even then, management may not be fully on board, the team may not be excited about it, or it all seems so different that doubt about the strategy’s value creeps in.
You may have heard jokes based on this experience. One says marketing strategies are measured by the weight of the report (a variation says by how loud of a thump they make on a desk when dropped from a certain height). Another is that marketing leaders in companies have bookshelves lined with strategies that never got implemented.
Why does this happen? Marketing teams often complain that the consultant didn’t understand the realities of their situation (or even the assignment). Consultants and agencies claim the client “doesn’t get it” or “wasn’t ready for an optimal strategy.”
And there’s the word: optimal.
You see, in these situations, both sides are correct, and both are wrong.
The author of this optimal strategy probably didn’t understand the realities of the marketing team’s situation or history. And the marketing team probably wasn’t ready or able to execute the optimal strategy as constructed.
Here’s the thing: No strategy consultant or agency would develop a suboptimal strategy to account for the client’s current capabilities. After all, no client has ever gone to a consultant or agency and said, “Forget optimal. We’re not that talented. We need the just-good-enough plan.”
The mistake is in assuming that the optimal strategy is always better than “good enough.”
Sometimes it’s not.
Does culture really eat strategy for breakfast?
I worked with a marketing team of 30 people at a technology company not long ago. Most team members have been at the company for years and have developed a specific way of working together.
Two marketing leaders left recently, and two new leaders came in.
The new leaders wanted new processes, workflows, and measurement approaches to manage all the moving parts of their digital marketing. And they took a top-down approach to implement these changes.
Narrator: “It didn’t turn out well.”
When I reviewed their plan, I found it beautifully designed. It was right. The strategy was sound. It was optimal.
But the team couldn’t seem to execute on it.
Why? Well, it was so much change and such a different way of working that it simply overwhelmed the team.
Some people didn’t buy into the plan. Some bought in but didn’t feel empowered to make some of the required decisions. And some were so busy keeping things going that they couldn’t see themselves devoting time to learning an entirely new way of working.
It was a perfect example of the famous quote attributed to business guru Peter Drucker: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
Drucker didn’t say those exact words (though he said something relatively close). Regardless, that saying is often misconstrued to paint culture as an impediment to optimal strategy.
Drucker actually wrote (in a 1991 Wall Street Journal column called Don’t Change Corporate Culture — Use It!) that “culture — no matter how defined — is singularly persistent.” So, if you need to change something, “don’t change culture. Change habits.”
He believed that implementing strategy depended on making sure that the people involved would change their habits to accommodate it. And, as he wrote, “Changing behavior works only if it can be based on the existing ‘culture.’”
Story map your better plan
Developing the optimal strategic plan is important. Different people will have ideas about what “optimal” looks like. But shooting for the right plan — independent of limitations, current capabilities, or culture — is the best place to start.
But what comes next is the most important.
When you review the plan, map out what would work best. You might need to take it more slowly or remove elements to make it achievable.
You have to take the time and effort to understand how to improve the “optimal” plan by scaling it back, changing it, or molding it to your current situation.
In my book Content Marketing Strategy, I explain the story-mapping approach I’ve used to do this with my clients for years. It involves reviewing any optimal strategy and then working to find out what makes it realistic — and ultimately better — by reducing its optimization.
Here’s how it works, in a nutshell.
- Let yourself feel the uncertainty. It’s usually not the uncertainty of the “big hairy audacious goal’s” success that provokes anxiety — it’s the emotions that overwhelm people. Let yourself feel it. List all the things that scare you and could go wrong. Then, list those that could go right or spark joy. Then, acknowledge that the future is uncertain. You can’t control how you’ll feel, but you can control how you’ll react.
- Map everything out. Start with describing what success would look like. Then, ask yourself: “What needs to be true for that success to be realized?” Write it all down. It might still be overwhelming, but you’ll be surprised how settling this step can be.
- Prepare for different outcomes and contexts. Look at your list of what needs to be true and ask yourself what might get in the way. List everything. Then ask, “Which are the big things?” In other words, which things — if not settled — would wreck the foundation of the whole project?
Now that you’ve defined priorities (and not priorities), you can use them to make the plan more realistic, achievable, or believable for the teams affected.
When I ran this process for my technology company client, they compromised on some top-down new processes. Was it necessary to have a new fixed process for this thing that wasn’t really broken? It seemed optimal on paper, but the disruption might outweigh the benefit.
In de-optimizing the strategy, the team made it better. And it works well today.
People aren’t machines
Thinking of business as a machine that needs to be tuned is a metaphorical trap. Organizations are collections of people who perform best when nurtured.
Today’s marketing teams don’t thrive because they’ve been optimized with mechanical adjustments. They thrive when their success is cultivated through relationships and shared purpose.
Sometimes, you can (and should) opt out of optimization.
It’s your story. Tell it well
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute