Lessons in Chaos & Order

Introduction

At Silver Fern , navigating the tension between chaos and order has been a significant learning experience. Long hours met with frustration and minimal traction accompanied by fatigue, burnout, and apathy – working hard, with great intentions, but still struggling to be maximally performant. Fortunately, with a bit of self-awareness, excellent coaching, consultation, and a few good books, we found – clarity. This is what we've learned (so far)...

In the early days of Silver Fern, we saw ourselves wrongly conflating systems and processes with red tape and bureaucracy, perceiving a focused strategy and systematized business process as impediments to our value creation. Our entrepreneurial urge to innovate outside of form and structure informed our play style — opting for a jazz band over an orchestra. Incidentally, creating value and scaling value is not the same thing. Convincing one person to buy your product differs considerably from distributing said product to a thousand, hundred, or even ten more clients. We found some amalgamation of product-market fit but struggled to meet our expectations of service and growth.

We kept pushing our snowball uphill. No leverage, just brute force. Our so-called "freedom" had taken the form of indomitable chaos.

What were we missing?

Strategy

I can't remember where I read it, but "culture eats strategy for breakfast" has always resonated with me. I'm the culture guy – the first to beat the drum of our core values, galvanize the team around our shared vision, and foster connectedness within our organization. The quip's caveat, however, is that it presupposes there's a strategy to eat. Assuming there's no strategy, culture dies the slow death of starvation, withering away into a skeletal remnant of what it once was. A malnourished figure, wandering aimlessly through the corridors of the company...

Okay, maybe I'm getting carried away. I digress, but you get my point.

We were great at casting and selling the vision, painting a grandiose picture of the future of Silver Fern and our workplace. All compass, no map. Strutting onward with zero plan, head-first into tactical execution with little consideration of how. What is the best way to accomplish this vision? Easiest route? How can we be most effective? Our strategy took the form of a shotgun approach, implicitly believing if we sprayed enough scattershot, we'd eventually hit something, right? Wrong. What we needed was a clear and focused strategic directive. Something simple, candid, and decisive. We felt the pain of our misinformed definition of strategy playing out and realized what we actually possessed was wishful thinking, a tactical frenzy masquerading around as strategy. All froth, little coffee. Never tackling the complexities of what it meant to develop and maintain a great strategy (see my last post on A Smart Bear). We didn't understand the significance of justifying and spelling out our decisions. For the first time, we employed logical thought tools and engaged in the due diligence necessary to spell out a real strategic direction.

Modeled after Tesla's strategy , this became the first layer of our macro strategy. Simple by design.

• Build fancy tools for large, enterprise growers.
• Use that money to build tools for smaller growers.
• Use that money to productize tools.
• While doing the above, build services for all growers.

After weeks of deliberation (and an 8,000+ word manifesto to boot), we finally settled on a strategy MVP (minimal viable product). I say MVP because we're still testing out our strategic hypothesis. We see it as an iterative process.

Only once we had done the work to define a real strategy could we be maximally confident in our focused pursuit without distraction.

We've retired our shotgun and now hunt with a high-powered sniper rifle.

"The successful person places more attention on doing the right thing rather than doing things right. Focus is not just about effort but about ensuring that the effort is spent on the right activities." - Peter Drucker

Unlike our vision, we realized a great strategy is dynamic. We may pursue a particular strategy only to find that executing it is tactically problematic. Therefore, strategy is subject to change with clear thinking if we 1) have new information, 2) have new insights, or 3) are proved wrong.

How do you perpetuate a strategic review? How do you empower this strategy to inform your day-to-day operations?

Systems & Processes

In the words of Taylor, "It's me, hi, I'm the problem".

I've always needed to be more organized. My life is chock-full of last-minute decisions, misplaced artifacts, and ill-advised ideas. "Let's wing it" is the only creed I live by. As a young boy on vacation, I remember cringing as my mother exclaimed she "couldn't wait to get home so we could get back into routine." Hoisting my sail and riding the winds of change is how I like it. Unfocused and untethered to any social construct, or the like, that tries to buckle me in – a life marked by chaos (and admittedly, some fun).

Insert Silver Fern into the equation... need I say more?

Identifying a clear strategy was only step one to squelching the chaos and lack of focus that ruled us. If we were serious about fixing our problem, we desperately needed some guard rails. Solidified structure in the form of organizational design, systems, and processes to ensure the perpetuation of our newly minted strategy and the tactical execution informed by it. After all, what's rocket fuel combustion without a chamber? We'd never have the propulsion we desired unless we subjected ourselves and our team to created order.

We needed a foundation to build upon before we installed any systems, processes, or operating systems, including, but not limited to, things like org charts, roles, job descriptions, business units with mandates, functions, social contracts, success criteria(s), etc. All informed by our stated vision, strategy, culture and values. To have a team truly empowered with agency in decision-making, we needed a clear framework and explicit context informing those decisions. The goal was to stay 'highly aligned, loosely coupled' to provide 'context, not control.' How else could we enforce true accountability? Everyone (including founders) with well-defined limits and a clear understanding of their role in accomplishing our vision.

We're just getting started, and it's our goal to continue systematizing the predictability in our business by integrating tools (Agile Scrum, EOS?, ScalingUp?, etc.) that ensure maximum alignment and focus throughout the organization. A true team, not just in name, but in function... but that's a post for a different time. ??

Conclusion

Admittedly, documenting this in words feels rather trite, even slightly embarrassing. We're reviewing basic Business 101 principles here. My apologies if you've made it this far, only to realize the lack of profundity in the content. I've covered seemingly obvious topics that we just didn't grasp very well. But as they say, you haven't truly learned something until you can explain it to someone else. So here I am. This exercise in writing may have been more for me than you.

In closing, I'd like to make one final point. I believe the best leaders are disruptive. Change catalysts. Chaos creators. They push the envelope on innovation and new ideas, bringing healthy doses of chaos to the order. This attitude is at the core of the entrepreneurial spirit. However, the critical point is that they bring chaos to the order. Our mistake was ignorantly believing the mirage of order we perceived was real. For the process of creative destruction to take place, you first need something to deconstruct.

We're learning a part of this creative destruction is an oscillation forward. It's not linear. Fast growth you're unprepared for. You might get the culture right and some product-market fit and grow a bit. But then you grow past your capabilities, and you have to go back and revisit base assumptions, deconstruct, and make tweaks to be effective at a new level. Enhancing those capabilities puts you back in growth mode, then, you grow too fast again and have to build new capabilities again. You can see this when you look backward. Doesn't always feel like it's happening in the moment. In the moment it pretty much always feels like a potentially fatal crisis.

I would love to hear from others. Does this resonate with you? How often do you review or adjust your business strategy? What internal tools and systems have you found to help your business grow and scale?

We typically write an annual letter if you're interested in reading more. Drop a comment if you'd like to be added to our mailing list (or if you'd like a link to our strategy 'manifesto').

Onward and upward,

Adam

If you're so inclined...

Resources

• Scaling Up: A Gazelles Company founded by Verne Harnish (systems, strategy, tools)
• Strategic Coach founded by Dan Sullivan (business philosophy, mental framework, tools)
• EOS Worldwide founded by Gino Wickman (systems, tactics, tools)
• A Smart Bear founded by Jason Cohen (strategy, clear thinking)
• Pinnacle Business Guides (strategy, tools, systems)