It's tsunami season - are you ready?

It's the busiest time of the year, what I like to call 'tsunami season' in a business cycle. The Q3 release is underway while we're gearing up for Q4 deal enablers to meet our year-end targets. One set of stakeholders' objectives is moving to close out the current year strong, while the other is preparing to launch a strategic initiative that may mean change to set next year up for even better success. Maintaining objectivity and balancing your focus on immediate and future tasks is crucial. If you focus too narrowly on the present, you might miss the signs of what's to come, and the energy you invest in the strategy might seem to disappear under the surface before it even takes off.?

Not everyone will grasp the vision immediately. Stakeholders may cherry-pick elements that align with their biases and disregard the rest. Sales teams must quickly understand the customer's and the business's value proposition. They need to understand the outcomes for each customer across their portfolio. If they can't see a path to making their numbers, their energy will shift, and the waters of objection will withdraw, adding power to the coming Tsunami.?

Great product design is a physical representation of a product strategy. Innovation without adoption is invention. Think about last year, shifts you could feel but not see created a tsunami of feedback that came roaring back. You scrambled for high ground, trying not to drown in the sea of objections to investment in an invention, doubting if you have the time or energy to rebuild a vision fast enough and do it all again.

Let's get ahead of the forces that generate the tsunami this year. Let's map them out. By doing so, we can proactively plan and prepare, gaining control in the face of impending challenges.??

Map customer outcomes to strategy. Map leaders and teams along the journey of delivering that strategy before the rollout. Map the objections and opportunities.

• Who inspires?
• Who's a cross-pollinator??
• Who are your builders?
• Who's comfortable with change, and who will resist it? Why?
• What is missing?
• Do your promised outcomes map to the customer's needed outcomes??
• Can you point back to the validation from customers??

During the Q1 rollout, overcommunicate.

Talk it out. Draw it out. Workshop it, whether in-person, hybrid, or remote. Cameras are on over and over at every level and every team. Everyone's voice is vital in this process.?

Check that you have the right mix of people. Who can constructively collaborate/deliberate for the best outcome? Which customer can you go to for feedback without a firm commitment? Does everyone understand how to leverage the diversity of the team? Do you have enough diversity and delivery-focused people on the team?

During workshops, it's essential to be observant and diligent. Do team members agree in the room but then act differently outside? Has someone who was initially supportive of strategic change suddenly become resistant? These could be signs that your team lacks psychological safety and the freedom to voice new perspectives without fear of retribution. Creating a psychologically safe culture is crucial for the team to feel valued and respected.

Keep the outcomes in mind. Be clear about what a pillar to delivering outcomes is and what gets built on top of that to make your market more resilient. Always refer back to the customer outcome—how you get there may evolve in each workshop, but the reason for doing so does not.?

If the customer outcomes look and sound like solution statements dressed as customer outcomes, leverage rapid prototyping to vet them again directly with customers and NOT the stakeholders in between.??

By understanding the landscape before the strategy rollout, you'll be better prepared to find higher ground when the Tsunami comes crashing in. You can build better structures, redirect that energy into something useful, and help the team find their part in the success. You can also build in support to withstand the obstructionism disguised as "feedback" that errors culture and puts strategy at risk.?

Be mindful of supporters who turn obstructionist and find out why fast. Go back to your map - did you miss something? Do they have a piece of insight you need, or did they lose sight of their success in the vision along the way?

After rollout

Whatever you do — Don't follow the shoreline when the water withdraws! After the year is closed and next year's strategy rolls out, sales teams need time to plan their success around it. The water returns to how you handled the rollout, and any opposing forces moving underneath the surface will determine with much force. Be prepared. Anticipate the challenges and be ready to withstand the force of the waves.?

Regarding strategy and product vision, the best products are constantly the hardest won after withstanding the Tsunami as a shared vision. Real change and innovation require contrary perspectives in a room, challenging assumptions, shining a light on biases, checking assumptions, and learning to play into each other's strengths. Your unique perspective is crucial to our success.?

Agreement is the hardest part of manifesting a product vision, as it is something leaders can secure investment in and build a company around.

Listen without being swayed, ask targeted questions to spark honest conversations between leaders, and remove the momentum of veiled threats in the undertow of obstructionism, also known as middle management. Change requires every level of the organization to work together toward shared outcomes. Forces of change create friction. The culture has to be resilient and psychologically safe for the team to work together rather than withdraw from sight— or be trapped in the politics of people-pleasing leaders with opposing views.?

Calling out, and moving teams away from, hours wasted in fear of losing power (FOLP) driven, coma-inducing, asynchronous status readouts and one-way feedback dumps masking as planning "workshops" or questioning the pontifications over ten people reviewing the latest PowerPoint edits as strategic alignment is critical to avoiding the undertow of analysis paralysis. This is my happy place. t creates safe spaces to work through misalignment, a level playing field for radical honesty and collaboration without veiled threats or HIPPO hijacking.?

My passion for removing the allure of the receding waters of doubt and obstructionism at this time of year has gotten me fired, and it's gotten me hired. Every success and a few failures have taught me everything I know about navigating the contentious departmental shifts between the end of Q3 this year and landing Q1 to set the tone for next year.?

Leveraging a straightforward, empathetic, and plain-language approach, custom-designed workshops accomplish key outcomes using proven techniques to foster constructive collaboration, build comfort with continuous improvement and productive failure, and stabilize teams to remove the brewing energy that fuels corporate Tsunami season.??

Note:?This article intends to draw parallels between opposing forces that run underneath a strategy and create waves that can range from disruptive to outright dangerous for the organization. I do not intend to make light of the lives impacted by an actual Tsunami.