Technology will disrupt all our businesses in the next 5 years, and play a key role in changing how people work together. We used the pilot of our Leading the Big Conversation workshop to explore what it means for different organisations.

Leaders often talk about the need to align people behind goals and the challenge of doing so, and yet frequently adopt conventional top down approaches focused on “key messages” that just don’t work when change is so rapid and people expect more adult to adult approaches. A more impactful approach that resonates needs to relate to the way people naturally communicate. Organisations need to use conversational approaches that include core narratives and weave discussion about everyday challenges into more strategic conversations about higher purpose and longer-term goals.

For example TUI Travel, BAE Systems, Vodafone and TNT Express have all transformed understanding of strategy by inviting teams to discuss their priorities and actions in the context of a bigger picture. Ernst Young, Rolls Royce, RBS, Aviva, Cisco, Lilly and Royal Dutch Shell are all publicly talking about their use of narrative to help give people greater contextual understanding, to share goals and to improve collaboration.

Strategic conversations

A strategic conversation connects people to an organizational narrative. It is a conversation in which people talk about what they do in the context of a bigger picture; one that enables them to explore purpose, strategy, dilemmas, problems and solutions. It is a meaningful exchange that gives the opportunity to challenge and to think through what a team, or a group of people from different teams, aims to achieve in the context of bigger goals, and the best way to do so.

A strategic conversation is an intervention that prompts people to talk about forces for change, leadership intentions and their own intentions in response to local issues and challenges. Having conversations like these moves an organisation in the direction it aims to go. The theory underpinning this approach comes from social constructionism and, in particular, the work of David Cooperrider considered the father of Appreciative Inquiry – an approach to change that sees organisations as human living systems where asking questions and encouraging focused conversations which are not prescribed can help raise energy and change.

Different approaches work better in different situations and for different organisations, but here are 10 core principles that underpin any approach to help colleagues have more meaningful strategic conversations.

1. Provide clarity of purpose and vision

An organisation needs to be able to tell its stakeholders and its people what it stands for. For example:

• Disney’s vision is to make people happy
• Twitter wants to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.

These are more than marketing devised straplines to differentiate. These statements capture at a deeper level why an organisation exists: what it is for. This is important to give meaning to the people who work there for whom this purpose should be explicit and something that gets talked about constantly. For customers and other stakeholders, the purpose may be more implicit, but nevertheless it is important to confirm why the organisation is relevant for them.

The purpose needs to drive the business and sit at the heart of every strategic conversation. Even though it may not get mentioned in the course of the conversation, it still acts as a guiding light against which proposals, ideas, activities, behaviours and plans can always be tested by the simple question: is this aligned with our purpose?

 

Other famous statements include:

Nike: “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.”

Google: To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful

Amazon: “Our vision is to be earth’s most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.”

2. Develop shared goals at top

This sounds like a statement of the obvious but the reality is that many organisations talk about wanting to align people behind their vision or purpose while leaders do not themselves share a set of common goals, or are not seen to.

Unless the top team can develop and convey commitment to coherent goals that they all share, and are seen to share, it is futile to expect other people, starting with their direct teams, to do so. The strategic conversation process must always include the top team for if there is any sense that there is a lack of shared goals from the top, energy and commitment for the process will drain away.

In larger businesses, this extends to the wider leadership cadre – typically the direct reports to the executive committee. Winning the buy-in of this group to the value of the conversation process, and providing them with the confidence and skills to lead their own conversations, is critical. For example, BAE Systems encouraged all members of its senior group to attend conversations led by their leaders before leading their own. In this way, the top group not only worked through a better and shared understanding of their strategic aims but also learned the value of a process that encouraged open dialogue and the exploration of how different teams support the strategy.

3. Encourage a focus on strengths and celebrate what the organisation does well

Our brains respond positively when we are told what we are good at and we focus on things that we do well. This builds self-esteem and releases dopamine in the brain that reduces threat and makes it easier for us to collaborate and create. Important elements in strategic conversations are current strengths, and historical successes, and it is the appreciation of these that carries an emotional punch for people.

Many will overlook the importance of this. They will avoid, for example, historical brands or reference to past (e.g. pre-merger) organisations. This is a mistake – even if brands or companies may no longer trade, their legacy may mean a lot to the people who still work in the business. Erasing them from the story just damages the impact of the narrative; celebrating past successes acknowledges what they meant to people and displays a sensitivity to, and confidence in, the history of the organisation.

Focusing on current strengths allows people to think about how we can build on them and is more likely to raise energy. Typically, conversations at work tend to focus almost exclusively on the issues and problems to address. The power of a positive focus can be demonstrated by making relatively minor shifts in the style in which conversations are led. For example, starting with some of the things that have gone well in recent weeks; key achievements of the business or people in it; positive customer or other feedback, etc.

4. Build conversation skills and curiosity

Good strategic conversations are really an enquiry into why things are the way they are and how they can be better. The kinds of questions to stimulate these can include:

• What are we here to achieve?
• What do we believe in?
• What works and what does not?
• Why does it or why doesn’t it work?
• What can we learn from that?
• How can we change the way we work?
• How will we know if we are getting better?
• What would our customer say if he or she was here?

What is implicit in this approach is the assumption that we all have a perspective on the world that is relevant and we each have an equal right to express that perspective. Sceptics may discount this because some people bring more to the team and its work than others. Of course, they do. But it is still the case that every person in the organisation shapes how it works and what it achieves. A spirit of enquiry helps all members to contribute to an exploration of what can be better and the team needs to ask itself these questions to reach alignment and that “aha” moment to connect what’s important day to day with the strategy and purpose

5. Focus on the Future

Strategic conversations need to focus on where we are going. They may and often do begin with where we have come from, what makes us proud and what are our successes. But a strategic conversation is primarily future focused – it is about where we want to get to and how are we going to get there.

The pace of change today often makes this difficult because people and teams need to react to what is happening around them as new competitors appear, customers defect, and new initiatives are launched. But a strategic conversation needs to be more proactive and to look at the things teams can do to influence events and to take more control of their environment.

For one recent client, this was at the heart of their strategic conversations and drove the process from the top down with the desire to look at the things that people could take control of and influence to ensure their work patterns and outcomes supported the achievement of the longer-terms aims of the business.

6. Adopt an external perspective

One of the great challenges a strategic conversation brings is its focus on the external and internal organisational drivers for change. Typically, these are

• The needs or actions of customers, competitors, or regulators,
• The outcome of social or technological trends
• The impact of organizational change

Normally they are a combination of all the above. A good strategic conversation builds peoples’ awareness of these opportunities and challenges that lie well outside the team and provides a platform for people to reflect on them, perhaps to vent and then to think about options for supporting the response to them.

This is important not only because it acts as a reminder of how change is always necessary but also because it is the hallmark of a healthy organisation – and the ability to be able to monitor the external environment and make changes is what makes organisations sustainable. Increasingly the need to do this at local levels, quickly, marks out the higher performing organisations from the ones that get left behind.

7. Tolerate ambiguity and build resilience

We all crave certainty but modern businesses operate in a climate of huge uncertainty. We do not know if we will win that next contract or not, what resources we may have, when we will have a change of leader and who it will be, what political, environmental or technological forces will shape the economy and our livelihood, and so on.

Building resilience involves acknowledging that change happens and that it is not always good; indeed, it involves cultivating the expectation that life will always present us with challenges. Leaders face the choice of being open about these challenges or not, and they often choose not to for fear that such discussion will be unsettling or de-motivating.

In my experience people respond positively to invitations to discuss the implications of what a future decision may mean for the business, even though the people involved lack the power to influence the decision. The reality is that people talk about this all the time and strategic conversations provide the opportunity to talk openly about uncertainty and responding to it. And during conversations about the impact of change a clear purpose is helpful to keep people focused on what they want and what they are there to do.

For example HM Revenue and Customs over the years has transformed its estate reducing the number of offices. Although this uncertainty hung over the business it encouraged its local leaders to get involved in conversations about what the future may hold for them. They were not “comfortable” conversations but they were important. They helped people express their feelings and more importantly they helped them exercise some control over the way they managed and responded to change. It enabled people to think and talk about their personal concerns and to talk about how to lead their teams to maintain service to the taxpayer during uncertainty.

8. Be clear on outcomes and share responsibility

Strategic conversations are an opportunity for people to focus on the outcomes of their work that move the business forward in the right direction, and identify what does not. Clarity of outcomes makes it easier for teams to work smarter and to build trust based on achievement and delivery.

But strategic conversations are also about sharing responsibility for outcomes. On a pragmatic day-to-day basis, more and more uncertainty permeates our working lives. The future is less predictable and keeping people focused depends less on telling people what to do and more on working with them on what needs to be achieved. A strategic conversation is an opportunity to acknowledge uncertainty and share responsibility for managing it throughout the business. It is a mistake to think that as a leader or manager one can shoulder the entire burden. A strategic conversation shares responsibility and asks the team to think about what can be resolved and what needs to remain unclear.

9. Encourage discovery and emergent thinking

But equally, and alongside, the need for clarity of outcomes, strategic conversations provide an opportunity to explore new ideas and thinking about what teams and individuals can do to achieve outcomes in new ways.

To gain this insight and to create new ways of working a strategic conversation can help and encourage people to discover the direction of travel for themselves in a way that makes sense for them. It’s essentially about letting go but in the context of a clear framework.

This can be challenging for managers and the people who work for them, and it is one of the reasons why leading a strategic conversation is normally best done after people have participated in one themselves and have experienced the role they need to play as a conversation leader by being a participant first.

10. Build relationships

We need social relationships at work and outside, and neuroscience is demonstrating that these needs are as basic as our need for food and water (see for instance Matt Lieberman’s “superpower” talk at the RSA). When we are threatened, we want to connect more to groups. Global competition, digital transformation, changing work patterns, rising customer expectations and disruptive competition are all creating huge “threats” across industry.

We need to help people connect over strategic conversations that enable them to tackle these challenging problems together and to share perspectives to enrich their own and to come up with more informed action plans. These conversations help us to connect with each other at meaningful levels to build relationships that are important for our own health and for the good of our organizations.

Strategic conversations are here to stay. We no longer have the luxury to manage people in traditional ways. Success depends upon our ability to empower people, which requires a different level of awareness of the big picture and buy in to strategic priorities and common goals.

Introduction

This article aims to help people think through the scope of the conversation they may want to have to define Purpose for their organisation, or part of it. It provides a guideline for helping to think about the most appropriate way to frame the inquiry. It also provides links to other resources, articles and books that may be helpful.

This follows an earlier post that addressed why being clear about organisational Purpose is important: the Importance of Connecting People to Purpose.

Individual vs. Organisational Purpose

This is about organizational as opposed to personal purpose. For an exploration of the latter, the article in Harvard Business Review by Nick Craig and Scott Snook is a good place to start. They provide a process for helping individuals, working with trusted colleagues or friends, to ask themselves some fundamental questions from which to draw insights. For a perspective on how individual and organizational purpose can be combined Dan Pontefract provides some good stories and approaches in his work on the Purpose Effect.

Creating your process

In order to generate a relevant, inspiring and sustainable Purpose it is critical that the design and ownership of the process sits with the group who’s Purpose is the focus of the work. Hence the first phase in the generic process below involves contracting with this team, before the discovery and engagement work.

The team will want to focus on questions like what data to collect, who to involve, what questions to ask people, how to bring data together, how to communicate outcomes and so on. They also need to think about and shape the subsequent stages to ensure high levels of ownership for this and the eventual outcome.

Step1: Contracting

Step 2: Discovery

Step 3: Engagement

The process iterates backwards and forwards, and the players in different stages need to interact if not overlap. Put more simply, key influencers need to play a role in all phases.

 

Contracting

The first phase involves contracting with leadership at an appropriate level for the Purpose Inquiry. This might be the Board of a Corporation, the executive leadership of a transformation project, the functional team in a support role, the lead team of a project bid, etc. Key outcomes include clarity about the reasons why this will help the business – the business and benefits case looking at hard results such as financial gains and soft benefits such as improved reputation with customers. This is also an opportunity to brainstorm the North Star that works for this team and to outline who and how to involve others in this work.

What is important during Contracting

It is critical to get the right group of people together which essentially means the leadership. Contracting is not just between this group and an internal or external facilitator, but also between these team members as they agree what they want, and between this team and the rest of the organisation and the “system” within which it operates. Effective delivery will be defined and shaped by the leadership group working together and providing a consistent narrative.

Key outcomes from Contracting

At least three important outcomes from this step are:

1. “North Star” – draft summary of Purpose
2. Business and benefit case explaining why this is important
3. Scope and approach to this work; who else to involve and how to keep focused on intentions

Activities and issues to consider during Contracting

• Explore readiness for change so that the team is confident that it is up for a significant shift in direction if the need emerges
• Establish transparency of process so that the leadership team have complete ownership, including the option to stop the work
• Insist on self-analysis of data so that internal or external consultants manage the process not the content emerging
• Ask questions that encourage self-disclosure and learning to give leaders insights into what gives their work meaning, for themselves and for their clients
• Identify and tackle dilemmas and political agendas that always surface: such as the relative merits of top down and bottom up approaches, the merits of an outside in and an inside out perspective to data collection, whether to explore the whole or just part of the system
• Agree clear outcomes and measures so that the team knows how to expect this work to deliver value, so that it can measure progress and so the team can learn from the work’s successes and shortcomings

Discovery

What is important during Discovery

Discovery is an exploration of what stakeholders value – from employees and their managers to customers, partners and regulators. The essence of defining Purpose is to synthesise this feedback, drawing out themes that resonate across stakeholders and using processes (visuals, stories) to build on words to articulate Purpose.

Discovery implies both an exploration and a journey. The Purpose is “out there” and the work is to identify, enrich, focus, describe and communicate that Purpose.

Key outcomes from the Discovery step

• Perspectives from all significant stakeholders on the role of the group
• Synthesis of these perspectives
• Creative articulation of Purpose
• Engagement plan for invoving people in translating Purpose

Activities to consider during the Discovery step

• Ensure all influential stakeholders feature in both the data gathering and the engagement planning
• Agree what data is required – for a discovery process around purpose the essence of the inquiry is about what the organization exists to do in the eyes of different stakeholders and to explore what the organization means to different stakeholder groups
• Embrace diversity so that many different perspectives are heard
• Think rationally and emotionally – Purposes provide direction and inspire so it is important not to overlook the emotional value that can be delivered by a well researched Purpose appropriate to key stakeholders
• Agree what data collection methods will best uncover insights for different groups – approaches can include interviews, focus groups, story boards, free form drawing, observation, document review, etc.

 

Engagement

What is important during Engagement

Engagement emphasises that the effective delivery of Purpose is the responsibility of all people in the organisation and some outside it. However well defined the Purpose, if these people do not get it and how they relate to the Purpose, then it will remain words and aspirations on a page.

Line managers are pivotal in engaging people providing the face to face link between the organisation and the customer facing teams. Their involvement in the process begins in the discovery stage and is major during engagement. Ultimately it is the line managers who help others bring purpose and strategy to life making it relevant to different teams and helping people to connect their roles to the bigger picture.

Key outputs and outcomes from the Engagement phase

 

• Communication materials (e.g video, social media platforms)
• Face to face conversations to translate Purpose at local levels (e.g. conferences, workshops, team meetings)
• Alignment between teams and throughout organisation on common goals
• Inspiration – making greater meaning for people on the nature of their work

 

Activities and issues to consider during Engagement

• Help people connect everyday work to higher Purpose
• Who is going to lead conversations – will this be led by local managers, by a special team of facilitators, by leadership – or by a combination of these
• Maintain an external focus on what people do for others
• Involvement of all groups internally and clear communication through multiple channels to external stakeholders
• Clear outcomes and measures against each group of stakeholders
• Measurement processes to start early (establishing baselines) and to continue to learn what is and is not working and to help sustain the engagement

 

 

Final thoughts

Rather than looking for rules or experts to answer questions about how to build a sustainable process, the approach above represents a more sustainable approach that views developing purpose as a discovery process with a number of different steps and ongoing feedback loops to collect and interpret data.

For more information on the importance of connecting people to Purpose go to:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/importance-connecting-people-purpose-mike-pounsford?trk=prof-post

For more information about recent clients’ experiences of sustaining Purpose go to:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/focussing-purpose-mike-pounsford?trk=prof-post

For more information about how to use the Big Conversation as an approach to communicating Purpose and Strategy go to:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/using-big-pictures-engage-people-strategy-mike-pounsford?trk=prof-post

 

Big Pictures portray company strategies and are designed to help individuals and teams have conversations about what the strategy means for them. Some high profile examples like the “New Day on Retail Street” by Sears Roebuck or the “Big Conversation” by TUI Travel [add new link] demonstrate the impact they can have.

Despite this, organisations still seem shy of using pictures as a platform to engage people in strategic discussions. Concerns that “it would not work here” or that pictures trivialize the strategic intent get in the way. So here are seven reasons to help persuade colleagues why it makes sense to use Big Pictures to communicate strategy.

1. Pictures are more efficient

Pictures can communicate complex information quickly. The use of graphics increases comprehension, and recollection and retention. The rise in popularity of infographics is based on this and some have claimed (3M) that visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text. Communicating strategic concepts and the links between different themes in the strategy can be achieved more efficiently using visual metaphors. The Tube map conveys the efficiency of visuals: imagine trying to convey the content of this map using words!

 

2. Pictures are more memorable

Numerous experiments over the last 30 years have demonstrated the “picture superiority effect” – concepts that are learned by viewing pictures are more easily and frequently recalled than are concepts that are learned by viewing their written word form counterparts. Professor Allan Paivio found that people’s memory for images far exceeded their recollection for words. 10% could remember the word “circle” 3 days later while 65% of those shown an image of a circle remembered it after 3 days.

 

3. Pictures complement story telling

As pictures are used to tell more complex stories they adopt the properties of narratives. Typically a Big Picture will cover the history of the organisation, the drivers for change, key themes in the plans for change, and the vision for the future. This narrative sits behind most organisational strategies and recollection is increasingly helpful as people continue to link their roles with the bigger picture of the strategy. Consider the illustration of the nativity scene and the Ten Commandments. How many people can remember the Ten Commandments? How many can tell the nativity story? Big Pictures help convey a narrative around the strategy that is easier to relate to than a series of bullets. This engages more circuits in our brains, including those associated with emotions. So while a list of bullets tends to trigger a more critical reaction in which we critique and challenge the content, Big Pictures trigger a more curious reaction that brings people in to the conversation and encourages them to link their stories with the bigger company story.

 

4. Pictures invite participation, debate and dialogue

 

 

Unlike formal cascade approaches to the communication and discussion of strategy, the use of pictures to convey key themes, avoiding technical language and jargon can be much more accessible and more democratic. Using a picture to invite people to have a conversation about the strategy and how it relates to the team involved encourages more people to talk up and debate where they see themselves in the picture and the implications of the strategy for their role.

 

 

5. Pictures affect emotion and decision-making

 

“Ahh!”

Pictures can be powerful at generating an emotional reaction. Scientists have shown that even simple exposure to the colour red can heighten our pulse and breathing rates.

When people lose parts of their brain associated with emotions they find it more difficult to make decisions even though their rational and analytical powers are unaffected. So imagery is important not only because it can convey ideas quickly and make them memorable, but also because it operates at an emotional level. This, alongside rational facts and evidence, can help us reflect and decide on courses of action or priorities that may be important.

 

6. Pictures work across borders

Using a picture as the platform for a conversation removes language and translation issues from conveying the core messages. Pictures cross borders so that we can have in-depth, creative and heated discussions about the strategy in our own languages but using a common visual platform that conveys one core story globally.

 

7. Picture development helps test and create alignment, and build buy-in

The process of developing the picture that captures the strategy is iterative and can help the leadership and the wider organisation engage in a co-creative process to define what will make us successful in the longer-term. Increasingly companies are looking to approaches that enable them to respond quickly to fast moving markets and competitive threats. Separating out the formulation of strategy from the execution is increasingly impossible. On the ground speed and agility is paramount and engaged employees who have a clear sense of the overall narrative and understand what it means for them will increasingly become the differentiator of success.

Graphics and visuals are increasingly used to communicate. We see it in the success of picture-sharing sites like Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr; the imagery in newspapers; the ubiquitous infographic and even a study of science textbooks over 50 years has identified a major shift from text to pictures.

The technology may be new, but it is only reflecting how we like to communicate. Our brains like pictures as we can probably all remember from our early reading efforts – this reflects the way our brains work. We’ve been using pictures for 30,000 plus years while text has only been around for 4,000 years. Pictures serve an important role in helping us convey, assimilate and use information.

Have you used visuals or Big Pictures to communicate strategy? What success have you had with the approach?

How to focus on purpose

I am always being asked how we can ensure the Big Conversation process leads to sustainable change rather than being a one-off process. So we have just completed a review that explored – with the benefit of hindsight – what helps leaders sustain conversations about core purpose and strategy within their businesses? 8 companies employing over 133,000 employees took part, all of which had launched initiatives to communicate strategy and translate it at local levels.

We found that some organisations set up cycles of local conversations so that teams regularly discussed the Big Picture and what it means for them, while others cascaded once and did not revisit the strategy. We tried to identify what made the difference.

The feedback identified five insights into what helps drive sustainable change in the context of using the Big Conversation process. I suspect the lessons apply to change efforts more generally.

Inspire the CEO

It’s an obvious point to say that the CEO has to buy in and support the change process but this is more nuanced. What we found was that in the organisations where the conversations thrived the CEO had experiences early on that inspired them. For example one CEO found that he had more meaningful conversations with groups of employees as he piloted the process. He became an evangelist because he found he learned a lot and then encouraged his team and their managers to see the strategy communication process as a learning opportunity. Another one’s initial cynicism shifted because the senior leadership team’s debate highlighted different perspectives on direction. He wanted people at other levels to have similar quality conversations and as a result started asking more questions about progress and maintenance of the process.

Build the business case

It’s also obvious that people find clear direction and purpose useful (and actually our brains need it if we are going to perform at our best). But a constant re-focus on purpose and strategy is difficult to maintain because leadership teams lose interest; they tend to think that once it is communicated then the job is done. But we found this is only the start. What it takes to keep people focused is a compelling business case for the investment in time on the “bigger picture” and hard data to track progress. For example we found that one company tracked positive differences in awareness and understanding created by teams having regular conversations. This same company collected customer feedback suggesting that customers noticed this difference, so the process established a link between better understanding of strategy and customer satisfaction.

Focus on tangibles: what we do and how we work

Conversations were more helpful when the focus was not on the strategy but on “what it means for us”. When people just focused on strategy, conversations lacked immediacy and relevance. When people talked about how they could improve relationships and what this might involve conversations became more helpful and energised. But it can be difficult to engage people in this conversation if it comes over as criticism. We found conversation leaders that had more success over the long-term asked questions like:

• What will things look like round here if we are delivering our strategy?
• How would that change how we work?

Listen don’t tell

One company has now institutionalised the process of talking about strategy. What used to be the Big Conversation has become the Little Conversation because, 3 years in, all the benefit is perceived to take place at the team level. Regular cycles of conversation revisit priorities and ‘issues to address’ to support the business strategy. The HR Director says this happened because the company stopped trying to communicate strategy at people and started asking them what they thought was important. Data started coming back from the process that helped marketing, human resource, finance and operational teams develop new approaches to building the business (e.g. the design of more customer friendly bills, ideas for sharing information more effectively).

Invest in conversation leadership

In the company above the conversation leaders told the HR Director that the approach was wrong, and their feedback and involvement, she says, is what has helped sustain the process. Early on the company invested in helping the leaders explore how to run effective conversations. Investing in this support gave managers the confidence to turn the strategy communication process into two-way conversations focused on effective change. In another company this investment has taken the form of ensuring no one leads conversations about strategy until they have participated themselves. In another company HR and communications partnered with line managers in the early stages of the engagement process to help make sure the conversations remained two-way.

Simple rules to sustain conversations around purpose

It is anecdotal data but turning these observations into tangible lessons for the effective engagement of people around organisational purpose, some simple rules may be:

• Get the CEO leading from the front, not taking a “hands off” or back seat role
• Adjust mind-sets: rather than emphasising leaders role broadcast strategy, start thinking about how to deliver the strategy by leading conversations about it and listening to ideas and input
• Keep leaders engaged by frequent feedback on progress and achievements, and ideas emerging
• Focus on the short-term in the context of a longer-term vision
• Discuss and debate tangible actions and behaviours
• Give people autonomy to develop ideas and suggestions that will take the business forward
• Support the development of conversation leadership skills