Why your strategy workshop is a waste of time and money

Sing it like you mean it — even at the millionth time

Organisations love a strategy offsite workshop.

The executive committee, and some of the senior management groups, gather together over coffee and biscuits and talk about the plans for the year ahead. There are funny videos and a few moments of seriousness, but largely a box gets ticked and everyone goes away happy that they’ve done the important task of thinking about the future of the company.

Sadly though — research shows that these strategy sessions are largely pointless, because that strategy fails to be understood and implemented at operational level. All that positive thinking falls apart when it comes time to shifting the broader company’s mindset of the future.

Even in high-performing companies with “clearly articulated public strategies,” only 29% of their employees can correctly identify their company’s strategy out of six choices.

Managers are notoriously bad at strategy communication, getting buy-in and ultimately the implementation of the plan for a number of reasons.

1. It’s too complicated: Too often the strategy is just too complicated and over-engineered for normal people to know what to do next. What might sound great at the breakaway session comes across as just a whole bunch of additional work to your employees. Resistance to the new strategy is immediate and pervasive.
2. It’s not compelling: Strategy that is delivered, point-by-point via a PowerPoint presentation doesn’t inspire anyone into action. Who’s going to get excited about detail? To sell a vision you need to paint a picture of what’s possible.Most managers struggle to tell a good story to their children — so getting other adults to believe their big idea of the future is going to be a tough ask.
3. It’s not believable: A vision of the future needs to be something people that people consciously believe to be possible. Telling your employees that you are going to build the world’s best company is nonsense and everybody knows it. So using phrases that are just implausible should be discouraged at all costs. Don’t bullshit people — give them an achievable and believable goal to work towards. Just because your boss like your outrageous ambition doesn’t mean that it makes practical sense.
4. You need to say it a million times: All too often we’ve worked with CEOs who say things like; ‘but I told the staff for an hour, why can’t they get it?’ In that hour most of the staff were probably thinking about last night’s football or the fight they had with their husbands that morning. You need to think of yourself as Mike Jagger — you have to sing ‘I can’t get no satisfaction’ with as much gusto the millionth time as you did the first.
5. Too much ‘white male’: The problem of excessive ‘white male’ — especially in South Africa is real. ‘White males’ don’t really live in the real world. Most have never even walked in the street outside of the office building that they occupy on a daily based — so getting buy-in of a strategy that they think is important into the minds of the rest of the company, who do live in the real world, is difficult. There is a misalignment of perspective. We suggest that strategy then is co-created with the input of multiple perspectives. This can be tricky to co-ordinate, but that’s ultimately where the help of a good facilitator comes in.

When done properly, strategy is the most powerful way to unlock the future value of an organisation, but it is a process that is so often done poorly.

As strategy practitioners, we at Ko Lab Consulting have spent a lot of time fine-tuning our unique process that we offer to clients to help them vastly improve their strategy efforts and deliver the financial returns that they hope for from their businesses. So far our results have been really impressive.

Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones would never go on the road without their trusted producers and roadies — so don’t think that you need to go it alone.