how to get strategies back on track

by Chris PehuraC-SUITE DATA — 2024/10/29

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You’re humming along with your strategy, your program, your project, and then a major crash happens where things are majorly derailed. Quite a bit of money is lost, a lot of people are very angry, and quite a few people just look bad all the way around. But you need to fix getting things back on track, and you need to do it ASAP. So you focus on the post-mortem.

POST-MORTEM

The post-mortem is where you figure out just what went wrong and what caused the whole massive failure. You will find in a post-mortem it is not a single failure, but a series of failures, a cascade of failures that resulted in this one massive failure. And the way that the program, the thing that you’re running worked, it was absorbing the damage from those smaller failures. But then it got to a point where it couldn’t absorb anymore and then there was the crash. The major derailment.

Now, when doing post-mortems, you have to worry about how people interact with each other. How were activities working together to determine that cascade? But when presenting your findings for post-mortem do not focus on specific activities. Especially, not the individuals because there are people within your company who are mad and will want to weaponize your findings. This will result in people getting demoted, moved around in the company, and terminated. I’ve seen this and how people can use post-mortems. So please focus on recommendations geared towards the environment, the way things work in that environment, and how people and activities should fit within that environment.

ENVIRONMENT

Have the shift of blame to the environment, not to the people. The environment was just not as understood as well as people thought. That’s the problem. It wasn’t the people’s performance. Now, mind you, maybe some people were the problem, but we don’t want politics to weaponize the learnings of the post-mortem to destroy individuals and their careers. So focus on the environment and focus on visuals for how to explain that environment and how to best work within that environment.

I use journey maps, process maps, phase diagrams — things that show how people should change and navigate through an environment.

SCALE

Now the key thing to when you have a massive failure, there were things that you were doing well before and during the failure. And some things you weren’t. It’s very likely that the things that weren’t done well could have caused the failure. So if that’s the case, you scale back, focus on more of the stuff that you’re really good at doing and making sure that your program, your strategy is really emphasizing that at its core. And then start focusing on the stuff you’re not so good at in little drips so that you don’t cause another derailment, another crash. Your focus is getting back on track with whatever it is you’re doing.

JOURNEY

It’s a journey.

The first part of the journey is mourning the loss of looking bad, of being involved in a crash, and being involved in something derailed. And then there’s the period where you just don’t care. The next phase is things are working where you don’t care if it passes or fails. And then you reach that point where you’re actually excited. This is going well. Then when you get that feeling the crash is never going to happen again, a minor speed bump happens and then people think another crash is happening and everyone jumps up in the air. There’s a lot of meetings and a lot of conversations that really don’t lead anywhere, just driven primarily by fear.

So you got to make people aware of that sort of journey, of the emotional journey when something big fails. A lot of people aren’t good at where big things fail. They’re not ready for the emotional rollercoaster or the emotional investment in it. A lot of the journey is trying to get that emotional investment away from the failure and into what they’re currently doing. So they’ll fight to make sure that the thing doesn’t fail again or get derailed again.

WHAT ABOUT BOB

Now I talked pretty high level about this sort of stuff. Now maybe some specifics, like I’m thinking of one in particular. Let’s call him Bob.

OK, Bob was a new director at a company. He was brought in before my time when I was brought in there as a consultant. Now Bob wanted to push in a way of delivering products to the industry, innovative products. The challenge was is that the company was very process-centric in terms of how it did things and Bob wanted to move that to a design-centric paradigm. The reason being innovation and design, they come pretty much hand in hand.

OK.

There was a crash with what Bob was doing with one important project being launched later on in the process. And there was a crash, a derailment. A post-mortem was done and the people since they were consulting friends of the executive team, started pointing blame at the activities and specifically at Bob and what Bob was doing. It was Bob’s fault for doing all this stuff. And really, it wasn’t Bob’s fault.

Bob was not popular. Yeah, like that’s the case. But some of the stuff he was doing well and some of the stuff in the way that this whole strategy was being run was going well. It was primarily the environment. There was a conflict between the process-centric approach of how the company was working and the design-centric approach that Bob wanted to have the company adopt. That was creating friction and visuals were pulled together to show that friction. And I had a hand in making those visuals. I tried my best to save Bob, but Bob was demoted in responsibilities, demoted to manager, and then demoted again to analyst. And I was pretty sure they were demoting him until he was out of the company.

I put together visuals to show how design activities and design practices would fit within a process-centric environment. They’re pretty different when you look at them and from the nuances and how certain design activities worked at the company. They worked very well at the company. The strategy, its recommendations, and its principles were tailored to so that the company focused more on the stuff that did work. All those other best practices regarding design and innovation — they were put on the back burner and we had a schedule to let them drip in a little bit to help the company sort of get used to those sort of design practices. And get a chance of getting good at them.

Now for the journey.

Bob wasn’t the only one hurt by all of this. In the post-mortem, management looked at it and they started playing the blame game. A lot of people were moved around in the company. A lot of people were terminated. They were walked out by security. They were fired on the spot. And then an hour later they were being walked out. A lot of people remembered that.

And so the journey to getting things back on track was hindered by bad memories. People remembered how people involved in the crash were treated and they just did not trust the executive team. Ahey thought when there must be another failure, there would be the same sort of things happening as it did before. And so it took a lot of healing. It took a lot of shuffling of the executive team and restructuring of the company itself to get people to trust their company again.

So my take-away from this is primarily just how important the post-mortem is that you don’t weaponize it. Don’t make it easy so that people can use it as an excuse to go after someone and destroy them. Because I’ve seen the worst things done under the guise of something being good for the company. So when things crash and burn, do your best to help move away from the investment of that failure, your emotional investment. Move to an investment of something that is to the greater good, to the future, because then you’ll fight to make that reality happen.

You can’t change the past, but you can change the future.


 
Email us at contactus@csuitedata.com to see how we make your plans work.