The One In, One Out Rule
Why implementing strategy can't be about the things you need to start doing without addressing things you can stop doing.
As a leader, core to your job is defining the strategy to take your organization from where it is today to where it needs to be in the future. Time, money and effort are devoted to the task of identifying the right path forward, trade offs are made, alignment across the leadership team is built. And then it’s time to put the plan into action. And that’s where things start to stumble.
"90% of Strategy Execution Fails"
- Robert S. Kaplan & David P. Norton,
The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action
We’ve been there before. All hands meetings where the annual plan is reviewed, training sessions where new approaches are shared, off sites with management teams where your vision for the future and how to get there is the focus. And afterwards nothing seems to change. Why is it that after all that effort, all that time, all the head nodding does the strategy seem to fail? In our experience we’ve found that much of it comes down to inertia.
In science, inertia is the tendency of things to remain on their current trajectory – either moving or at rest - unless acted upon by a significant enough outside force. Getting a ping pong ball to change direction is easy. A cannon ball? Not so much. The same is true of people. People with a lot of time on their hands, those who aren’t overwhelmed by everything they have to do, are able to change and adapt much more easily than those who are overtaxed as it is. And in organizations where time is scarce, everyone has a lot on their plate, and speed matters, change does not come easily.
So, when you share your new strategy and explain all the things people up and down the line need to learn and start doing, they do the only thing that they can: they stick to what they already know.
This focus on sticking to what we know is a big part of why organizations of all types, sizes and states of development find that strategic initiatives simply fail to deliver as expected. The greatest strategies have a habit of amounting to little more than thinking on the page because a strategy cannot make itself happen. For a strategic intent to turn into organizational action, strategy needs to come to life at the individual level. And for that to happen we can’t ask people to simply do more. We need to help people do different.
There’s a personal organizing technique (one that I don’t pretend to subscribe to) called “the one in, one out rule”. The basic idea is that if you bring something new into your home – a shirt, a vase, a car – then a similar item needs to be shown the door. Applied to the implementation of strategy, the one in, one out rule would suggest that if we are to ask individuals to do something new, we need to also allow them to stop doing something old. But, let’s be honest: how often do you tell people what they can stop doing when asking them to do something new? Even if you and your company only take on strategic initiatives once a year, it doesn’t take long for the jobs that everyone has to do to become an overwhelming mix of competing priorities, legacy activities and idealized tasks that no one has time for.
The result is the one we’ve all seen. Faced with overwhelming and unclear direction, everyone retreats to what they know. And in a year’s time, when you and your leadership team look back and conclude that the strategy failed, the cycle starts again. And. Still. Nothing. Changes.
In starting Mixtape Partners, we recognized that the problem with strategy is usually not the strategy. It’s in turning strategy into action. If strategy is not developed from the start with a clear sense of how it can become real, of what changes will need to take place, of what your teams will be able to stop doing and not just what needs to be done, then the chances of success will remain low. But, if, on the other hand, the strategy you craft is designed from the start to not just be good in theory but good in practice – for everyone – the equation gets flipped on its head.
And while we believe that tools like Balanced Scorecards are great for creating dashboards for management, in practice the best way to make strategy happen as a leader is to roll up your sleeves and help individuals, teams and whole organizations figure out how to make it so. In our lives as consultants, CMOs, leaders and managers, we’ve seen great strategies fail to get any traction for a multitude of reasons. But making it hard for people and teams to work with it is a guaranteed path to the status quo.
Which gets us to the real question every leader should be asking themselves when the new strategy is being devised: