Using Arguments to Make Your Strategies Better [Strategy Roadmap Examples]

Using Arguments to Make Your Strategies Better [Strategy Roadmap Examples]

Mar 7, 2022 | Report Reviews, Resources

MIT_Sloan_Management_Review_Logo

Using Arguments to Make Your Strategies Better [Strategy Roadmap Examples]

Constructive Debates and Healthy Arguments Lead to Better Winning Strategies

4 min read, Feb 2022

FOFO business leaders not listening

Recap of MIT Sloan’s Research: Why Good Arguments Make Better Strategy

The Two Minute Takeaway

Strategy roadmap examples from this research demonstrate that all great strategies are, at their core, arguments.

Download the full report at the bottom of this article ↓

Why has the word “argument” gotten such a bad rap? Simply, because arguing has been equated with fighting and considered to be an unproductive use of people’s time. This research shows otherwise.

KEY TAKEAWAY 1

What’s the role of the leader when it comes to strategy?

Leaders should be the ones that formulate, discover, and revise the logic of success, putting together strategy arguments, as this research calls it.

A strategy argument is MIT Sloan’s approach that includes 3 elements: constructive debate, iterative visualization, and logical formalization.

Leaders can develop creative ways to cut the “strategic fog” and should expect participants in strategy discussions to contribute coherent reasoning and defensible ideas.

Some of the top organizations have deployed the necessary processes that any proposal for new ideas or solutions to current challenges come in a larger package (e.g.: 6-page memos or reports), and these memos require people to write in full sentences and paragraphs which forces leaders to clarify how their ideas connect to each other.

KEY TAKEAWAY 2

What stands in the way of creating better strategies using arguments and healthy debate?

The landscape of today’s hybrid work environments has changed many things. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings views working from home as “a pure negative” for the company, in part because “debating ideas is harder now.”

Companies suffer to create powerful strategies and it’s noticeable across the company as this research shows. MIT surveyed 6,000 executives:

37% said that their company had a well-defined strategy and 35% believed that their company’s strategy would lead to success.

Ouch.

Another element that gets in the way of great strategy is bias. MIT Sloan found that confirmation bias is a big problem. This is the tendency of humans to interpret evidence in ways that confirm preexisting beliefs. This cloud’s a person’s ability to develop their own arguments, but this makes people better at evaluating other people’s arguments.

KEY TAKEAWAY 3

What does this research show as the best way to create powerful strategies?

Creating healthy debate and arguments need some preordained systems and processes. It’s not just coming together in a room to yell at each other. The arguments should follow established rules of engagement that need to be present and are rooted in the principles of deductive logic.

Really great strategy demands the exchange and vetting of ideas — both in its development and implementation.

A way to ensure that all are on the same page, leaders can use strategy maps to surface and examine people’s ideas and proposals as to their underlying logic.

According to MIT Sloan, a strategy map is “…a visual depiction of a strategy argument, using boxes and arrows to represent the structure of connections between ideas.”

Strategy mapping helps executives find an intuitive way of developing and representing their arguments. As they stated, “This means not only understanding the connections and causal flow between its elements, but also working creatively and collaboratively to harness different points of view.”

To develop a strategy map, you start with the conclusion, and map only one conclusion at a time, then you identify and organize all plausible explanations, and then construct the map. Here’s an example of what this can look like:

What does this research show as the best way to create powerful strategies? Creating healthy debate and arguments need some preordained systems and processes. It’s not just coming together in a room to yell at each other. The arguments should follow established rules of engagement that need to be present and are rooted in the principles of deductive logic. Really great strategy demands the exchange and vetting of ideas — both in its development and implementation. A way to ensure that all are on the same page, leaders can use strategy maps to surface and examine people’s ideas and proposals as to their underlying logic. According to MIT Sloan, a strategy map is “…a visual depiction of a strategy argument, using boxes and arrows to represent the structure of connections between ideas.” Strategy mapping helps executives find an intuitive way of developing and representing their arguments. As they stated, “This means not only understanding the connections and causal flow between its elements, but also working creatively and collaboratively to harness different points of view.” To develop a strategy map, you start with the conclusion, and map only one conclusion at a time, then you identify and organize all plausible explanations, and then construct the map. Here’s an example of what this can look like:

Why This Matters

Swae was founded upon the desire to create a way for companies to allow more people to provide their ideas and solutions to challenges the company faces, and to help bring clarity to this entire process from strategy to decision-making.

Assembling people can be difficult but making sure to include more of the people that should be included in these strategic processes is important. So, how do you decide who is involved?

Anyone that needs to inform decision-making in any way and can provide relevant information and expertise. Those responsible for executing the resulting decisions and have the power to make the decisions, need an organized and more structured way to make this all happen.

Those responsible for executing the resulting decisions, need an organized and more structured way to make this all happen.

As we well know, when people feel included, this makes a huge difference to the entire organization. If people are prepped, as this study found, most participants will arrive with ideas and proposals of their own, and the meeting should be structured to encourage everyone to share their views.

(P.S. you don’t need more meetings when you have Swae!)

“The main reason the company could continually reinvent itself and thrive, despite so many truly daunting challenges coming at us so fast and furiously, was that we taught people to ask, ‘How do you know that’s true?’ or my favorite variant, ‘Can you help me understand what leads you to believe that’s true?’” Such questions spawned vigorous internal debates at Netflix that, McCord said, “helped cultivate curiosity and respect and led to invaluable learning both within the team and among functions.”


Patty McCord former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix

Summary and Next Steps

There is no need to wait for a visionary savior to create great strategy or for leaders “at the top” to be the ones that make all the decisions and come up with all the ideas.

This approach provided in this research article from MIT helps to understand a way to make the pre-planning for strategy simplified.

How do you create a strategy argument (and then develop a strategy map from this)?

Figuring out a good topic to argue and debate is first. For example, if leaders are concerned about a new competitor, the strategy argument should include details on why the team should debate whether the entrant truly poses a threat before considering costly initiatives to counter it. (These are the kind of problems that strategic arguments can answer.)

Make a list of the top challenges or innovations your company is trying to tackle and work from there.

The key takeaways to creating a strategy session using this new framework:

  • The purpose of the strategy argument and session should be clear to all participants. Devote time and attention, perhaps in consultation with others, to specifying the scope and desired outcome of the strategic dialogue in advance. As this research demonstrated, “…. providing participants with clear guidance regarding the conversation (and assigning pre-work, if needed) helps them prepare for constructive debate and reduces their uncertainty about the parameters of the discussion.”
  • Choose a setting that offers the participants freedom of movement to encourage new ways of thinking.
  • Great strategies exhibit logical coherence and need a map. They are composed of a set of logically interconnected reasons that necessarily produce the conclusion. Create a Strategy Map from conclusions (you can see the entire process when you download the full research below).
  • Kicking off the session: Ask whoever decided to convene the discussion and the facilitator to choose a starter question to kick it off.

Download the Report

Get the MIT Sloan Report for FREE

Get my report now

*Your personal details are safe with us – we’ll never sell them to other companies for marketing purposes- see our Privacy Policy. From time to time, we’d like to email you eBooks, training or some useful content. By registering you agree to receive this content and you can unsubscribe at any time.

This Article references: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/why-good-arguments-make-better-strategy/

Swae is helping organizations across the world to solve today’s problems and generate tomorrow’s strategy. Our clients are finding that their greatest resource is their people, and Swae is proven to help get the best from the untapped potential within their workforce. We’d love the chance to show you how Swae can ‘pay off’ for you…

Ready to learn how Swae can help your organization?

Schedule a Demo now
FIND OUT MORE >

BOOK A DEMO >

ASK A QUESTION >
More to explore…
Creating an Idea Meritocracy [Key to Unlocking Meaningful Work]

Creating an Idea Meritocracy [Key to Unlocking Meaningful Work]

Mar 3, 2022 | Report Reviews, Resources

Creating an Idea Meritocracy [Key to Unlocking Meaningful Work]

Unleashing “idea meritocracy” within your organization can create a winning work environment for all

3 min read, March 2022

FOFO business leaders not listening

What is “Idea Meritocracy”

First, we need to share more on who Ray Dalio is in case you don’t know him; he is the Founder and Co-Chief Investment Officer of Bridgewater Associates, which is a premier asset management firm. He started Bridgewater out of his two-bedroom apartment in New York City in 1975 and under his leadership, the firm has grown into the fifth most important private company in the US according to Fortune Magazine.

This is a recap of Ray Dalio’s article entitled The Key to Bridgewater’s Success: A Real Idea Meritocracy (a brief essay taken from his book called Principles: Life & Work). You can download the full PDF below.

When Dalio was asked what has made Bridgewater a success, his topline answer is:

“Our success occurred because we created a real idea meritocracy in which the goal was to have meaningful work and meaningful relationships and the way we went after them was through radical truthfulness and radical transparency.”


Ray Dalio Founder Bridgewater Associates

The definition of idea meritocracy: An idea meritocracy, according to Dalio, is a decision-making system where the best ideas win out.

For anyone that read Dalio’s book Principles: Life & Work, it can fuel a lot of excitement around having an idea meritocracy, but rarely does it get executed in the same way that it was created within Bridgewater.

What Do You Need to Create Idea Meritocracy?

1. Everyone must put their honest thoughts on the table for everyone to see

2. All must partake in thoughtful disagreements where there are reasonable back-and-forths in which people evolve their thinking and come up with better decisions that they would individually

3. If disagreements remain, have agreed upon protocols that get people past them in idea-meritocratic ways

This is Dalio’s 3-tier “must-haves” if any organization wants to create idea meritocracy. Bridgewater supported these efforts by creating an environment where the people that worked in the organization sought out meaning in their work and meaning in the relationships within the organization. Dalio’s way of looking at “meaning” is that people are excited, they work collectively on the company’s common mission, and genuinely caring about each other’s well-being that creates a strong community. Two other very important aspects to this approach is to create an environment where people are open to having “radical truthfulness” and “radical transparency.”
  • Radical truthfulness: not filtering one’s thoughts and questions, especially about problems or weaknesses.
  • Radical transparency: giving mostly everyone the ability to see mostly everything. This reduces the negative office political and other “closed door” behaviors. Having things in the open creates more trust.

We have found that, over time, being this way created a virtuous cycle that deepened our relationships, improved our work, and made us more successful.

    Source: LinkedIn 
Bridgewater’s people found the process of bringing the above aspects into the organization quite uncomfortable but also exciting. It requires a lot of emotional processing because it requires a person to separate from their ego (not an easy process!).
“While operating this way might sound inefficient, it is actually extremely efficient. In fact, it is much less efficient to work in an organization in which most people don’t know what their colleagues are really thinking.”


Ray Dalio Founder Bridgewater Associates

There’s a lot of schmoozing, trying to look good in front of others, and other negative behavior that can make a work environment toxic real fast. Dalio’s thoughts were to dismantle this from the get-go so that the superficiality doesn’t win out. Idea meritocracy and the fundamentals listed above to create it builds a more open environment amongst peers and leadership so that more people care about each other, themselves, and the mission. Swae was built upon this construct of creating idea meritocracy (using technology) and helping people weigh different points of view to make decisions and move forward. Bridgewater’s approach is that they take believability-weighted votes (the merits of a person’s view are assessed in relation to their track record in the are being discussed). The entire goal for this framework is creating a workplace where, “…the best ideas win out, regardless of where they come from.”

Summary

Creating idea meritocracy in your organization starts with a commitment to choosing that you want to create a more open environment where people matter, their ideas matter, and you want people to have meaning for their work and in the community, you’re creating in the organization itself.

It also means that you must commit to honesty, being OK with disagreements and working through them, truthfulness, transparency, and creating framework where ideas can be assessed properly allowing your organization to make better decisions as a whole (rather than a few).

Would you rather be in an environment where the “best idea” is whatever the boss decides, or an environment where the best ideas win out, regardless of where they come from?

Download your free “The Key to Bridgewater’s Success: A Real Idea Meritocracy” PDF here

Download PDF

*Your personal details are safe with us – we’ll never sell them to other companies for marketing purposes- see our Privacy Policy. From time to time, we’d like to email you eBooks, training or some useful content. By registering you agree to receive this content and you can unsubscribe at any time.

To learn more about Bridgewater Associates, click here.
This Article references: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/key-bridgewaters-success-real-idea-meritocracy-ray-dalio/

Swae is helping organizations across the world to solve today's problems and generate tomorrow's strategy. Our clients are finding that their greatest resource is their people, and Swae is proven to help get the best from the untapped potential within their workforce. We'd love the chance to show you how Swae can 'pay off' for you...

Ready to learn how Swae can help your organization?

Schedule a Demo now
FIND OUT MORE >

BOOK A DEMO >

ASK A QUESTION >
More to explore…
What Is Inclusive Leadership and What Are Some Top Inclusive Leadership Traits

What Is Inclusive Leadership and What Are Some Top Inclusive Leadership Traits

Feb 22, 2022 | Report Reviews, Resources

What Is Inclusive Leadership and What Are Some Top Inclusive Leadership Traits

Harvard Business Review Assessment: How Inclusive Is Your Leadership?

3 min read, Feb 2022

FOFO business leaders not listening

Summary of HBR’s Study and Review by Salwa Rahim-Dillard, PhD

Assessing the inclusive leadership traits and behaviors that are needed to truly become an inclusive leader today should sit at the top of the priority list of every leader across any sized organization.

The organizations thataren’t taking direct action to highlight the importance of developing inclusive leaders who understand how to authentically co-create positive and equitable interactions and processes are missing massive opportunities to build companies that can be more successful than one can imagine.

Salwa Rahim-Dillard, PhD, a diversity, equity, and inclusion scholar and practitioner and is the founder and principal of EquisionConsulting, LLC wrote an assessment for Harvard Business Review following a study of over 100 mid- and senior-level BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) employees across multiple industries.

“Silence is wrong. It’s complicit. So if you want to be wrong, then stay silent.”


Dr. Salwa Rahim-Dillard Forbes magazine, July 2020

Defining Inclusive Leadership

Inclusive leaders are individuals who are aware of their own biases and actively seek out and consider different perspectives to inform their decision-making and collaborate more effectively with others. (Center for Creative Leadership)

What Dr. Rahim-Dillard found through her work and assessment is a workplace impression-management strategy that emerged called “mirroring.”

She found that,

“Mirroring is a uniquely intrapersonal process that these employees undergo as they grapple with reflecting, mimicking, constructing, understanding, and portraying “professional” workplace identities that simultaneously signal allegiance to their managers, defy negative stereotypes, respect the ethos of their cultures, and propel their careers.”

This process is a practice where BIPOC employees’ question and evaluate the way that their white manager perceives their values, behaviors, gestures, and appearance. This practice of mirroring is when people seek to belong and be accepted, but at the core it disempowers BIPOC employees and leaders and doesn’t allow them to be truthful nor authentic in the way that they manage, do their work, and work with others.

Did you know that white men represent 85% of Fortune 500 CEOs?

    Source: The Society Pages 

“My work assessing the cultural competence (ability to bridge) of over 100 white leaders (manager level and above) showed that more than 89% severely lacked the ability to bridge and authentically connect with people who were different from them.

These white leaders failed at building trusting relationships with BIPOC employees and were not skilled at leading inclusively, which requires acknowledging and valuing authentic demographic uniqueness and facilitating positive interactions that give equity and a sense of belonging.”

Dr. Rahim-Dillard

When BIPOC employees and leaders can’t be authentic to their own values, feelings of disengagement and exclusion affect their day to day and too often they must face tensions where their values conflict with their perceptions of their boss’ expectations.

“In one case, a Black female senior manager was forced by her white male manager to decrease the performance rating of a woman and increase the performance rating of a white male on her team, despite her disapproval and without clear justification. The Black leader thought it was inequitable favoritism and asserted to me, ‘Going forward, I will give my employees what I believe they deserve and not cave into outside influences.’”

What are traits and behaviours of Inclusive Leaders?

  • Inclusive leaders can reflect on their own behaviors and how they affect others and co-create positive and equitable interactions and decisions
  • These leaders are able to understand how their strengths (high ability) should be augmented, and opportunity gaps (low ability) be narrowed
  • Leaders with low ability to be inclusive should reflect on how their behaviors can negatively impact BIPOC employees and be required to upskill and traits to help them become more inclusive
  • Leaders with average ability to be inclusive should strive to achieve a higher level of competence
  • Those leaders with high ability to be inclusive must accept that diversity, equity, and inclusion work is never-ending and encouraged by their organizations to keep going

Summary

“Regardless of demographic background, we all share a basic need to belong, to be accepted, and to avoid rejection.”


Dr. Salwa Rahim-Dillard

This tool provided in this assessment is grounded in years of research and work by Salwa Rahim-Dillard, PhD.

She found that to understand the construct and behaviors of inclusive leadership through hundreds of surveys and interviews and facilitating nearly two dozen Appreciative Inquiry focus groups (with employees at all hierarchical levels), she designed a strength-based approach where employees can identify their behavioral strengths and configure the traits that create a unique roadmap to becoming a more inclusive leader.

Q. Is your organization working on building inclusive leadership across the entire organization and all levels?

Q. If you’re in a leadership role now, how are you assessing your inclusive capabilities and behaviors?

Read the entire Assessment and get Dr Rahim-Dillard’s tool here

HBR Assessment & DR Rahim-Dillard's Tool

*Your personal details are safe with us – we’ll never sell them to other companies for marketing purposes- see our Privacy Policy. From time to time, we’d like to email you eBooks, training or some useful content. By registering you agree to receive this content and you can unsubscribe at any time.

This Article references: https://hbr.org/2021/04/how-inclusive-is-your-leadership

Swae is helping organizations across the world to solve today’s problems and generate tomorrow’s strategy. Our clients are finding that their greatest resource is their people, and Swae is proven to help get the best from the untapped potential within their workforce. We’d love the chance to show you how Swae can ‘pay off’ for you…

Ready to learn how Swae can help your organization?

Schedule a Demo now
FIND OUT MORE >

BOOK A DEMO >

ASK A QUESTION >
More to explore…
Here’s the Real Truth About Workplace Speak Up Culture and Employee Engagement [Study by MIT Sloan Review]

Here’s the Real Truth About Workplace Speak Up Culture and Employee Engagement [Study by MIT Sloan Review]

Feb 17, 2022 | Report Reviews, Resources

MIT_Sloan_Management_Review_Logo

Here’s the Real Truth About Workplace Speak Up Culture and Employee Engagement

3 min read, Feb 2022

FOFO business leaders not listening

We reviewed MIT Sloan’s recent study When Employees Speak Up, Companies Win

Discussing the reality of speak up culture and employee voice, and here’s a recap of what they found.

Sadly, their research reveals that the many headlines you come across are not a totally accurate reflection of the current state of employee voice.

Download the full report at the bottom of this article ↓

As a sample set, MIT Sloan asked 6,000 employees of a Microsoft business unit and what they found was quite surprising:

%

said that they speak up on more than 10 of the topics.

%

Slightly more are silent and said they don’t speak up at all.

%

The largest group of employees said they speak up on five or fewer topics, typically on issues related to their jobs.

It’s important to know what creating a “speak up culture” means for an organization. What is does NOT mean is that employees start a revolution against leadership.

A speak up culture just means an environment where employees feel safe enough to speak up about opportunities for improvement to make things better. These are important aspects for ensuring a workplace is a thriving culture to be a part of versus being a culture that shuts people down.

“These efforts to tell the truth can involve confronting leaders, who can feel challenged or even threatened, especially when the proposed changes involve things that leaders have helped create or for which they are responsible.”

But all of us here at Swae knows that when employees speak up, good things happen.

This current study revealed that speaking up about a multitude of topics is associated with positive employee behaviors.

We found that employees who spoke up about all 15 topics were 92% more likely to want to stay with the company (even if offered a comparable position elsewhere).

Employees who spoke up about all 15 topics were 92% more likely to want to stay with the company

Quick Summary:

Creating a Speak Up Culture

The top contributing factors that help employees feel more open to be honest and engaged:

  • Action-oriented managers on leadership teams that are receptive to employee ideas and willing to act help employees speak up. Among employees who speak up about one to five topics, 83% said they have action-oriented managers as compared to employees that do not have action-oriented managers.
  • 96% of the employees who speak up on all the survey topics said they work in teams that value diverse perspectives and feel safe to express their viewpoints.
  • People need to feel connected. Employees limit their voice when they feel isolated, so employees that feel connected to others even outside of their department helps them to feel open enough to speak up.

Here are the top ways you can create a speak up culture in your organization: 

  • Leaders should be cognizant that the employees least likely to speak up are those with the least power and figure out ways to help them feel more empowered.
  • Companies should train managers to be open to the ideas of the employees on their teams and take prompt action based on their suggestions.
  • Share the results of your company’s efforts to listen to employees company wide to help spread desirable peer behaviors and establish speaking up as a cultural trait.
  • Consider launching initiatives and programs with broader, less specific goals aimed at helping employees develop personal networks and collecting a wide range of ideas.

Q. What are some ways you’re creating a speak up culture in your company?

Q. How are you engaging your employees?

Download the Report

Get the MIT Sloan Report for FREE

Get my report now

*Your personal details are safe with us – we’ll never sell them to other companies for marketing purposes- see our Privacy Policy. From time to time, we’d like to email you eBooks, training or some useful content. By registering you agree to receive this content and you can unsubscribe at any time.

This Article references: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/when-employees-speak-up-companies-win/

Swae is helping organizations across the world to solve today’s problems and generate tomorrow’s strategy. Our clients are finding that their greatest resource is their people, and Swae is proven to help get the best from the untapped potential within their workforce. We’d love the chance to show you how Swae can ‘pay off’ for you…

Ready to learn how Swae can help your organization?

Schedule a Demo now
FIND OUT MORE >

BOOK A DEMO >

ASK A QUESTION >
More to explore…

Agility and Organization Design | McKinsey

Agility and Organization Design | McKinsey

Oct 18, 2019 | Report Reviews, Resources

Agility and Organization Design

McKinsey on Organisation

Read full Report
SUMMARY


“Coming together is a beginning; keeping together
is progress; working together is success.”
Henry Ford

 

What makes an organization successful?
A successful organization is like a colony of bees – a well-structured entity with clear processes and talented contributors who work effectively together.

We are delighted to share with you our latest thinking on how organizations can release their full potential. In this McKinsey On Organization series, we will focus on four critical topics:

 

  • Agility and Organizational Design
  • Talent Management
  • Transformational Change
  • Merger Management
Source McKinsey: here  Authors: Michael Rennie, Mary Meaney, Judith Hazlewood, Gautam Kumra and Ana Karina Dias. Content is © McKinsey & Company
More to explore…
The Helix Organization | A McKinsey Report

The Helix Organization | A McKinsey Report

Oct 18, 2019 | Report Reviews, Resources

The helix organization

McKinsey Quarterly

Read full article

SUMMARY
Separating people-leadership tasks from day-to-day business leadership can help organizations strike a better balance between centralization and decentralization, reduce complexity, and embrace agility.

“As our business environment has become more complex and interconnected, we seem to be replicating that in our organizations, creating complex matrix structures that simply don’t work anymore.”

This content originally appeared at https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/the-helix-organization  Authors: Aaron De Smet, Sarah Kleinman, and Kirsten Weerda, and is © McKinsey & Company
>

Pin It on Pinterest