So over at BBD, Liam asks "How very dare you?" leading specifically to a questioning of the concentration on all things strategy in a lot of the IC world these days.
This is really just a place holder. It’s to remind me to carry on thinking about Liam’s question.
"Should you throw your hands up in horror and stalk out of the building crying “I can’t help you - you’re all doomed!”?
The answer to this, as Liam quite rightly points out, is very rarely going to be yes. But - what are the circumstances in which it might be yes?
All of which got me thinking...
In answer to Casey, the time when you walk out is where you can get a job at an equivalent salary in an organisation that actually has a strategy (preferably one that looks sound.)
Of course, that in itself tends to be fairly rare, all the more so as we appear to be hitting economically uncertain times.
I was going to suggest that if you really believe the organisation is doomed then you should walk out as well, but realistically in our society there's rarely any value to "walking out" unless you have a new job offer in hand. If you are going to move out of your job into unemployment because the company is going down, you may as well hold out for redundancy money.
The only other rationale for "walking out" is if you are genuinely a "high-flyer" with a "performance record" to maintain. Then it might be worth walking out to avoid having the stain of failure on your CV. However, as Liam is talking about "humble IC irchins" then this is not a factor.
So far, so good, I largely agree with Liam's premise.
I'd go even further in that the obsession with strategy in the glossy magazines and in the work and writing of various consultants is part of a wider trend to "worship the leaders of the organisation." This trend is driven by the commercial reality for consultants is that the people who sign the cheques to buy services are mostly those at the top. And we live in times where their role has been heavily mythologised and they have been surrounded by people and media telling them how important they are. As such, there's a lot of pressure to invest in the training, development and interests of top managers. And what is special about the managers at the top of the business? They set the strategy...
I suspect Liam, at heart, like me, wonders sometimes if this approach sets organisations up for failure, because it stunts investments in the skills and needs of the rest of the people in the organisation, who are, after all, vital to the execution of any strategy.
And when I step back to think about my time as an "umble IT manager" I have to agree all the more. Not only did some of the organisations I worked for not communicate their strategy down to my level, some didn't seem to have much strategy at all. And yes, what you do is roll up your sleeves and get on with the nuts and bolts of the job. There are things that need doing to keep things going smoothly. And when you have to take a decision that really should be guided by that nonexistent company strategy, you just make a guess as to what would be sensible and do it.
But of course, 4 months down the line, when the company elucidates a completely different strategy, it can be pretty hard to defend the spending decisions you took...
And to some degree I wonder if it's even harder for IC types. As an IT manager I could always say "well, I kept the email running and the internet access working and the accounts database online," nothing dramatic, but easily understood measures of competence.
For IC types Liam notes:
There's still a pretty good job to be done making sure people stick around, are happy to hand in great work or say nice things about you externally.
Which sounds a bit harder, because as good as you are in IC, if they are working to different priorities in HR or Operations (and remember, we're talking about a situation with a lack of overall strategy) then it might be pretty hard to do that "good job" as Liam defines it.
So, I'd like to ask Liam, if it's not commercially sensitive to blog about the parts of the Dojo where they teach people to deal with not having a strategy. That's not the skills to do "the pretty good job" that needs doing, but the skills to stay sane and cope with the ambiguity, uncertainty and negotiation of the situation.
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