🍲 Too many cooks spoil the strategy

Interviewed, edited, and titled by Tom Hashemi.

Which lane do you swim in?

The Sheila McKechnie Foundation social change grid was really helpful in our rebrand. It led us to refine what we thought our distinctive place was in this big complex messy world of social change. 

There was something really important for us in just naming what it is we do, and knowing we have to do that really well. There’s stuff for other people to do too—and it’s important we know they’re there—but this is our lane and we’re going to double down on it.

Too many cooks spoil the strategy

The foundation sector was going through a period of introspection at the start of my time at Carnegie. Partly because of Black Lives Matter, partly climate, partly COVID. 

It was merited, let’s be honest, and led to positive changes that brought more voices into decision making. But it also gave rise internally in some organisations to what I think was quite an extreme ‘every voice has to be heard in every single decision all the time’ thing. We had our bit of that, and we came to a point of recognising that actually that kind of approach doesn’t help anyone do their job well. 

Ultimately someone has to decide, and if you don’t, you just end up swirling round and round in circles. The more cooks you have, the harder it is to hold on to real clarity about what we’re doing and why.

Clearly if you are going to be moving into the next phase of your existence with broadly the same people you had at the start of the strategy process, you need to think carefully about how you secure their buy-in, as well as their insights. But it’s a mistake to mix that up with saying everyone has to have a voice in every decision.

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The complexity of an organisation isn’t visible to everyone

There’s that moment in a strategy process where you recognise that not everybody in the organisation can see the whole. If you have everyone participating in the final decisions, there’s a risk that you are asking people questions that they are not equipped to answer. 

People inevitably answer from their perspective, which can be a relatively narrow one. If you’ve been working on a specific piece of policy for the last five years, the likelihood is that you think there are some great future opportunities in that area for the organisation’s strategy. It’s not so easy to see how these line up alongside new and emerging priorities. 

The key thing people want to know is: what does this mean for me today? What do I have to do today? Endless collective strategising does not answer that question.

Throw away the proof points that prove nothing

When I arrived in 2019 we were reporting things to our Board which they had asked for long ago, but which were completely irrelevant to the change we were trying to achieve. Everybody knew it, so we threw it all away and put a new impact learning framework in place. 

Clearly, your board has to buy into a change like that (and if they don’t, perhaps they aren’t the right board?) Ours accepted that the things we were measuring did not tell us about impact. It means that we are no longer chasing the meaningless stuff. 

A good board is expert in the strategy of the organisation

A good trustee, in our context at least, needs to be expert in the strategy of the organisation. You have to really understand our mission. You have to know what the operating hypothesis is and the assumptions underneath our work. And you have to use that as your shared basis from which to hold me and my team to account for whether we are properly learning from what we’re doing.

We use a set of questions to frame our reporting to our Board: what, so what, now what. If a board spends its time on the what, then it’s not adding value, because we know what’s already happened. But if they really push and challenge us on: yeah, this all looks great, but what have you learned? That’s the so what. And what are you going to do about it? That’s the now what. That is where a board can add value.

How do you stop them getting into the conversation of the what? It’s very much a work in progress. We partly do it through the templates we use for reporting. We try to write less in the what bit, and make that a bit less engaging if we can. We really spell out what we think is interesting about what we’ve noticed: what are we thinking this might mean, what are we going to do next with it?

The inverse relationship between media metrics and influence

We did a piece of work where we could absolutely attribute a decision by someone to adopt a bit of policy governance architecture because of us. They heard me talk about it, they came and asked if they could borrow it, they took it away, they turned it into their version of it, and told us they were going to use it.

The Board’s reaction was: that’s great, but you should be shouting about that, you should be press releasing that. But there was no additional value in that because we were already making the positive impact, and in fact increased interest might have undermined our approach. 

The outcome is what we’re focused on and the Board needs to know what that was. No one else needs to know about what we did.

Thank you to the 140 of you who have referred colleagues to this newsletter. The views expressed in Policy Unstuck interviews are those of the interviewee, and do not necessarily represent Cast from Clay’s view. You can read our editorial guidelines for more information on the goals, process, and formatting of this series.