Strategic integration makes space for the unruly

From the outside, the task of strategic integration appears even; leaders and teams each make their own unique contributions to the responsiveness of an organisation through their combined actions and insights. Yet when we consider why organisations as a whole fail to embrace an integrated approach to strategy, it is the hierarchies and fixed plans that originate with leaders that are most often in the way

When leaders and teams truly share a strategy, their plans and insights genuinely inform one another. Leaders share plans with service and support teams, who adapt these in their everyday interactions with users or each other. In turn, these teams relay their insights on what is working back to leaders, providing critical information on what needs to be scaled, improved, or discarded. In this way, a strategy can become a single and continuous flow of intelligence that cohere's an organisation's work and enlarges its impact.

Moving from ideal representation to material instantiation, one of the first things that needs to be addressed is an obvious power imbalance between central leaders and distributed teams. It is leaders who hold the greatest knowledge of an organisation as well as the delegated authority to direct its work over the long-term. As such, it is these leaders who are responsible for creating an environment where integration can easily occur. Unfortunately, these same leaders tend to parlay their knowledge and rights into a proprietorial view of strategy the sets in motion 'command and control' planning cycles, as opposed to 'share and learn' ones.

I was invited to facilitate a small design experiment for a client around envisaging a different kind of retail store. To succeed, I needed to complete a design sprint (which is one way to run an experiment) and to foreshadow its three likely outcomes (persevere, pivot, or repeat) so the organisation's leaders could incorporate whichever outcome arose into the store's master plan. I hoped the sprint would demonstrate to these leaders the value of using prototypes with customers to test high-risk assumptions and amend plans based on whatever is learned.

I ran the sprint with a wonderfully skilled multidisciplinary team, who had already been working on the project for a number of months before I joined in. Together, we conceived, materialised, and tested critical store design elements with customers in five days. The results were a mixed bag, with some high-risk assumptions being validated and some invalidated (pretty standard fare for a design sprint). However, when these mixed results were communicated to senior leaders, it turned out that the master plan had little room to accommodate such insights 'from below'. It had been framed rather rigidly, as a waterfall of lock-stepped activities, effectively treating the outcomes of any experiments as if they were entirely predictable and would be relentlessly affirming.

I was not wholly surprised by this situation. Before facilitating the sprint, I asked what would happen to the master plan if the sprint invalidated certain high-risk assumptions relating to the store's proposition, physical layout, and revenue model. I was met with uncomfortable silence. What was left unsaid was that reality would not be allowed to derail the plan. Yet there is nothing natural or inevitable about a situation where leaders ignore their teams to deliver their plans.

This experience taught me that the work of strategic integration can only come about through the design and deployment of a system, rather than being left to the heroic efforts of single leaders who are collaborative by disposition. Above all, every leader must make room in their documents, meetings, and manners for their teams to repeatedly and explicitly influence their plans. The only alternative is to consult their teams ad hoc after all serious decisions have been made elsewhere and then ignore or reprimand them when they ask pointed questions or expose glaring faults. Those leaders insecure enough to perpetuate this kind of consultation theatre will soon find themselves directing teams diminished by subtle resentment or open hostility.

In the case shared above, I was ultimately an outsider placed inside a planning system that tended to minimise what I had to say on behalf of the design team—despite the fact that such minimisation would increase the risks to which the organisation as a whole was exposed. Either new design elements would need to be designed and tested again, which would take time, or the organisation would find itself going live with store elements that had already been shown to be unworkable. The team immediately set about uncovering new design elements while the leaders tried to flex the inflexible plan.

I concluded my involvement by commending both the design and leadership teams on being brave enough to run a design experiment despite these obvious constraints. Yet I also insisted that the leaders work to reshape those planning systems within their control to account for the unruly results of these kinds of experiments. To their credit, they provided air cover for the design team and continued to adjust the plan (alongside other colleague advocating for agile development approaches), and meeting with limited success. A year later, the store was launched and received an award for its innovative design and fit-out. Thus, the story ends on a bittersweet note: leaders could make meaningful changes within their units, but the organisation as a whole never moved away from a traditional approach to formulating and implementing strategy. So much more is possible.