Climb! Implementing strategy in an uncertain world

This is part 5 of a 5-part series on strategy and implementation. You can find the rest of the series at the links below. Enjoy!

Strategy and Mountaineering: Part 1 (From Oxford to Denali)

Strategy and Mountaineering: Part 2 (Find your Mountain)

Strategy and Mountaineering: Part 3 (Build Your Team)

Strategy and Mountaineering: Part 4 (Trust your Team, and Send it Hard)

For 30 minutes, we trundled through the skies in a ski-equipped bush plane, soaring with an anxiety-inducing proximity to the surrounding snowy peaks, the propeller buzz drowning all noise to static. We felt static too, imbibed with a pregnant inactivity; the calm before the storm. As we touched down onto the snowy landing strip at Denali basecamp, slotted between imposing ridgelines under the watchful shadow of the 14,000-foot Mount Hunter, we all felt the dual excitement and fear that comes with the commencement of a difficult expedition. It was time to step off.

Start walking

The first steps toward a new objective are exciting. The crunch of snow underfoot. The tug of the rope gently pulling the team forward. The palpable energy that comes with a change in focus and environment. But it’s also where the stakes become higher and mistakes start to have material impact.

Each implementation team member is like the leader on a rope team – it’s their responsibility to guide the rest of their functional area toward the objective. They need to own and direct the micro-decisions within their team and overcome the specific obstacles they encounter, and do so within the overall route that is being charted.

One team will be first up the mountain, assessing the macro environment and charting the overall route toward the objective. This team should be the one with the most relevant expertise or functional alignment for the challenges that are expected in each phase, and the rest of the organization should follow their lead. As implementation moves forward, the team in the lead should change to suit the challenges – anticipated or not – that are most pressing in each moment, even if this requires a rapid swap of the lead team to respond to emergent opportunities and obstacles.

For example, at the start of a strategic initiative involving a new product line, the product development team will likely be in the lead, building out the new offerings that will underpin the company’s desired strategic positioning. As the product portfolio gets finalized, the supply chain, sales, and finance teams (perhaps among others) will successively take ownership of macro route finding, changing as the terrain the company is traversing becomes more functionally defined by production, sales, and profitability. As these shifts happen, teams that were formerly in the lead fall back into a support role – providing input and helping to direct decision-making but ultimately deferring to what the military would term “the main effort.”

Choosing the right team to take lead at the right time will help the company maximize success in each implementation phase and overcome the obstacles encountered along the way.

This doesn’t mean one team is dragging the others along – on the contrary the process requires close coordination, discussion, and decision-making between the different elements. Each team is still making forward progress in their area, even if they aren’t the organization’s lead team at that moment, and therefore all teams must stay synchronized to avoid errors that affect others.

Stay in step with each other

This is especially challenging on a glacier, where members of the rope team have to stay 30 feet away from each other for safety, and different rope teams might be as much as half a mile apart. To overcome this physical distance, there are three types of check-in that mountaineers will employ to keep communication flowing: hourly breaks, assessment meetings, and end of day reviews.

Regular check-ins, meetings to assess an unexpected situation, and end-of-phase reviews are essential tools on the mountain, as well as for companies trying to implement complex strategic initiatives.

On the mountain, rest breaks every hour or so allow the teams to come together and discuss what they are seeing, what’s changed, and how the group is going to approach the next hour’s activity. In the office, this is likely a synch meeting run every week or so. These pauses need to allow coordination both within and between teams, meaning at least two different regular synch meetings should be run. Leaving these meetings, everyone should have a granular sense of where the team plans to go in the next interval period and what everyone’s individual responsibilities are within the plan.

Unexpected situations will arise along the way, and the team will need to convene to assess and plan a response. This can occur both at the rope team (functional team) level or at the expedition (implementation team) level, depending on the severity and range of impact. The outcome of this meeting should be general acceptance of a plan of attack, an understanding of the plan and responsibilities, and a projected new route once the obstacle is overcome.

Last, end-of-phase coordination is essential. On the mountain, each day is its own phase. In camp each evening, it’s important to have a longer discussion with the whole team assembled to assess where the organization has gotten; take stock of how much time, food (i.e. capital), and individual energy is left; project what the environment is likely to look like going forward; and out of these formulate a specific plan for the next phase. Phase boundaries in a strategic implementation are up to the planning team to designate, but should in general occur at least once per quarter to ensure the best high level coordination.

Even still, direct coordination can only go so far. Trust and decision-making in a dynamic and uncertain environment needs to permeate as far down the organizational hierarchy as possible; since the unexpected is the rule, rapid and diligent action in response to situational changes by every member of the company is often the difference-maker in maximizing success.

Re-plan on the fly

As implementation begins, so increases complexity. As Prussian military leader Helmuth von Moltke is often paraphrased, no plan survives first contact with the enemy.

(Author’s note: The longer quote is worth a read, and succinctly explains the crux of my thesis in this fifth part. I particularly like the final sentence in the excerpt: "everything depends on penetrating the uncertainty of veiled situations to evaluate the facts, clarify the unknown, to make decisions rapidly, and then to carry them out with strength and constancy.")

In other words, as soon as you’ve launched a strategic initiative, expect to continually re-evaluate the plan.

That was certainly the environment I encountered last summer teaching a NOLS backpacking course in Eastern Alaska’s Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, where we got shut down before we even really had a chance to start.

We knew going in that our most formidable obstacle would be the Jacksina, a raging glacier-fed monster that the map had the audacity to title a “creek.” It was no creek, but it did seem navigable – at first. Our plan was predicated upon getting across; the alternative was to lose access to 60 percent of the area we planned to travel through on our month-long course. We had identified a crossing we thought would work by ferrying students and gear across in the light-weight inflatable rafts (called packrafts) we had brought for this purpose. But Alaskan rivers are fickle, especially in the middle of the hottest summer ever on record in Alaska.

We had done everything right. We scouted and found a crossing point. We tested the crossing twice, first with an instructor (Richmond) paddling himself across, then crossing with a backpack in the raft with him. Everything was going smoothly. Until Emma (my other co-instructor) and Richmond attempted to cross in the same raft – a necessary test to make sure it was safe to ferry our students. That’s when things went sideways. The raft’s self-bailer didn’t function correctly in the speed of the channel with the weight of two people. The raft began filling with water, turned sidelong to the current, and flipped, throwing my colleagues into the rushing river.

I was deflated, watching my two fellow instructors float away. Our students watched in stunned silence, their anxiety about the prospect of getting in the same inflatable raft to cross the river was palpable even from 100 yards away. Without a word, the three instructors had the same thought at the same moment: “Well, I guess we have to change everything.” After they returned to dry land – as an experience packrafter, the self-rescue was fairly routine for Richmond – we came together and decided to throw out the old plan and revise it on the fly to account for our inability to cross the river.

It’s unlikely your business will have to change strategic plans so drastically; even in the expeditionary environment this degree of shift is uncommon. However, it does illustrate an important point:

As situations change and assumptions are disproven, nothing in the original plan is sacred.

Existential reassessment can even be a valuable tool for cutting through the chaff and revealing the core of which goals are truly essential. With NOLS, our momentary failure was a timely reminder that student outcomes (and safety) are the only measures of success that must be met – all others are important, but ultimately negotiable.

None of this is to say that teams should shift course at the drop of a hat. We spent two days trying to cross the Jacksina. The day before we changed course, we had found what we thought was a good crossing. We decided to spend the night and let the water level recede as upstream melting slowed when the sun went down, reducing risk during the attempt. Defying all expectations, the wild Jacksina rose six inches overnight, flooding our camp and forcing an emergency 4am relocation to higher ground. Our workable crossing from the previous day was now impassible. Though discouraged, we were hoping we could find another crossing point, knowing that sticking to the original plan was still the best option.

It was only after our safest available crossing method failed multiple times that we resigned ourselves to changing the plan.

Be deliberate when thinking about changing any part of the plan, but don’t cling to an unworkable plan once the underlying assumptions fall apart.

In the end, the point is not to “fail fast” nor to “move fast and break things.” It’s to “assess the obstacles you encounter and determine the best way to achieve the organization’s intent.” Sometimes this will mean radically departing from the plan. More often it means making smaller adjustments to implementation activities so you can mitigate an obstacle’s impact.

Teams should constantly be reassessing the assumptions that underpin planning and implementation actions. As these change, (or are better understood), and as obstacles are encountered, the team needs to re-analyze the plan, the environment, and the team’s capabilities to adjust implementation in response. And when a requirement to change becomes clear, it should be enacted with purpose. In the backwoods of eastern Alaska, this meant scaling back our ambitions and focusing on crafting transformative experiences for our student group.

As we fundamentally re-wrote the course on the fly, we never contacted the Alaska branch. The NOLS culture combined with the tools, information, and dynamics of our instructor team gave us comfort in our ability to react decisively in real time to the challenges we were facing. Running solo is not always advisable – indeed we called the branch later in the course when we encountered a problem with which we were out of our depth. But by being able to act immediately and independently when we needed to, we were able to make good decisions at the right moment to maximize our success.

Trust the implementers to make decisions and take actions that will maximize success.

Weaving this independence into team structures, culture, and capabilities should be the goal for every strategy implementation. Teams should be given a wide berth to make decisions and act without stifling oversight from above. Only when coordinated action or outside input is necessary should the company consider bringing decision-making up the hierarchy.

For example, if the best practice manufacturing process for a strategically important new product will increase the cost basis above an acceptable level, the supply chain, finance, commercial, and product teams will all need to provide input on options, and the decision is therefore best made by a senior leader who can synthesize and balance this diverse (and potentially divergent) input. However, if the best practice manufacturing process only marginally increases cost within acceptable limits, the decision of whether the cost increase is worth the improved manufacturing quality or process reliability should be taken by the supply chain team negotiating with the manufacturer.

I encountered this consideration weekly while running product development for M-KOPA Solar.

In a dynamic environment, the ground level is where success happens – it’s in the micro-decisions and micro-implementations that naturally arise when the environment becomes better known. But it only works with capable and empowered teams that fully understand and support the strategic goals. Even if teams are well-structured for implementation, without a clear definition of the objective, the goals, and the success criteria they won’t know what to optimize. And absent the right people, tools, and culture, the implementing teams won’t have the capability or trust required to implement well.

As long as on-the-ground decisions are made in good faith and diligently implemented by informed and capable people optimizing to maximize success, you are doing things right.

The next expedition

The metallic reverberations from Denali’s summit marker had barely faded when we began our trek back to camp, and the resulting silence complemented well the buzz of accomplishment surging through all of us. The road to the top had been a fight every step of the way. We’d overcome apocalyptic weather predictions, a tight timeline, hypothermia coming into camp 4, several episodes of altitude sickness, near-debilitating exhaustion on summit day, and nearly 14,000 feet of elevation gain. Along the way, we’d managed to collect good data for Dave’s research, take epic photos for our sponsors, and enjoy each other’s company. The last thing to do was to get home safely. We were in the home stretch.

We raced to get off the mountain, to more forgiving environs, where we could enjoy our achievement with cold beer and less stress. We rolled into base camp just after 5pm on June 2, nearly missing the last plane of the day and racing against time to arrange our gear for the flight so we didn’t have to spend another night on the mountain. Less than 48 hours after standing on the apex of North America, we were on a plane back to Talkeetna, the gentile static of the propeller blades this time dissipating the feelings of stress, the continuous environmental analysis, and the preoccupied problem solving that are persistently running in the background during an expedition.

The skis had barely lifted off the glacial runway when we all had the same thought: What mountain is next?