Navigate the Swirl

CHAPTER 12Organizations Evolve at the Speed of Conversation

No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you're playing a solo game, you'll always lose out to a team.

—Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder

Brilliant strategy; no results.

That issue, I have discovered, is more common than many realize. Of course, not all strategies deserve the label “brilliant” or even “good,” but sometimes organizations do develop business strategies that by all accounts are clear and compelling, even urgent, only to find that implementing them is like having a conversation with a wall—it's one-sided, frustrating, and in the end, very little ultimately happens. Somewhere in the conversational space between business strategy and execution, the strategy seems to almost dissolve—forever dispersed in the confusing maelstrom of the Swirl.

I once worked with a diagnostics company in the life-sciences industry that had a very specific problem. They hired a large, well-known consulting company to work on a business strategy for them. This firm created a strategy, and by most accounts it was a good one. And this strategic document sat on a shelf—literally. Finally, the board began to put pressure on the CEO to implement the details of the strategy, but he was struggling. It was hard to get the leaders of his teams to take it seriously, to read it, to consider it, much less to implement it. He encountered resistance all the way down.

I was called in to work with his teams to try to build a bridge ...