Move. Azzarello Patty

“Go forth and improve market perception.” You need to do some work to clarify in what manner you will accomplish that. Will you train your salespeople to engage differently? Will you change your marketing message? Will you improve your relationships with market analysts and media? Will you change your product? Will you create a new customer service offer?

      When I take management teams through my Strategy into Action program, this lack of clarity about what the organization needs to do in the “Middle” is what we focus on the most. We shine a big spotlight on defining what the specific approach is in the Middle to make the end goals come true. I have taken countless leadership teams through this process, and this basic idea about strategy always works:

      A strategy must describe what you will do, including how you will measure and resource it. Strategy must clarify specific action.

      An end goal, no matter how inspiring it is, is not enough to mobilize an organization. What it gives you is a list of wishes, not an actual strategy. But by insisting that your strategy describes what you will do, you will by definition be making it clear what things need to happen in the Middle.

      Moving from Big, Vague End Goals to Actionable Strategy

      Think about the really important goals your team talks about all the time. When you talk about them everyone agrees they are critical: We must improve quality. We must innovate. We must respond to a competitive threat. We must evolve our business model to provide better service.

      Talk vs. Action

      To move your team from talking about important stuff in a vague way to actually making progress on these things in a real way, the first step is to realize that you are stuck because you are still only talking.

      You need to change the nature of the conversation to become one that drives action, instead of just more talking. One of the biggest hazards to watch for is a concept called “smart talk.”

      The term was coined by Bob Sutton and Jeffrey Pfeffer in their Harvard Business Review article, “The Smart Talk Trap” (May–June 1999), and it so richly describes what happens when smart people substitute talking for action:

      We found that a particular kind of talk is an especially insidious inhibitor of organizational action: “smart talk.” The elements of smart talk include sounding confident, articulate, and eloquent; having interesting information and ideas; and possessing a good vocabulary. But smart talk tends to have other, less benign components: first, it focuses on the negative, and second, it is unnecessarily complicated or abstract (or both). In other words, people engage in smart talk to spout criticisms and complexities. Unfortunately, such talk has an uncanny way of stopping action in its tracks. That's why we call this dynamic the smart-talk trap.

      This is a specific and unfortunately common type of corporate behavior where people substitute sounding smart in a meeting for actually contributing work. I'm certain you know some of these people!

      These people will come to meetings with lots of insight and data. They will always be ready to shed more light on the problem by providing details, benchmarks, and customer examples. They will have lots of smart stuff to say. Everyone will think, “Wow, they're really smart.”

      Describing the “Situation”

      It's vitally important as a leader to recognize when your team is falling into the pattern of accepting smart sounding ideas and inputs instead of measurable forward progress. The most effective way I have found to break through this is to recognize when you get stuck in a pattern of smart-talking about the “situation.”

      Groups of people have a very strong tendency to discuss the situation – a lot. Over and over again. For a really long time. Situation conversations are the easiest conversations to have because there is no risk. You are simply stating facts. You might contribute facts that no one else knows, and you might sound really smart while saying them, but the fact of the matter is that there is no forward progress because you are simply describing what is happening.

      Situation discussions describe what we are doing, what the market is doing, what the competitors are doing, what the investors are saying, what the problems are, what the costs are, what the customers are demanding, what the changes in business model are causing, what the opportunities are, what the employees are doing and not doing. Situation discussions don't go anywhere; they only gather more detail. With a ready supply of smart talk, the situation discussion will be colorfully augmented by someone saying, “Well, this is an even more critical problem than we thought because I just got back from Asia and saw this…”; or, “This is even harder because I learned our competitors are launching their new version this quarter....” More and more smart talk gets added, and the situation discussion turns into a bigger and bigger situation hairball.

      Sure, it's important to use some time to note and understand the situation, but you can just feel it when everyone has internalized the situation and then…you keep talking about it! Talking and talking and talking about it. You can feel it in your stomach when the meeting is not going anywhere, and you're still talking. The talk gets smarter and smarter and the forward motion everyone is craving never happens.

      Situation discussions are basically this: collectively admiring the problem.

      Situation vs. Outcome

      The way to break through this type of stall is to train your team members to catch themselves having a situation discussion, and then say, “Let's stop talking about the situation and let's try to define an outcome that we want to achieve.”

      For example, one of the most common situation discussions that I guarantee is happening hundreds of times at this very moment in business meetings around the world is the following “mother of all situation” discussions:

      This is very important, but we don't have enough resources to do it.

      Here is a specific version. We need to improve the quality of our product to be more competitive, but all of our resources are tied up on creating new features. We can't fall behind on features, and we have no extra resources. But we really need to improve quality. But we don't have the budget…and around and around.

      Instead of adding fur to that situation discussion, let's take this situation discussion and turn it into an outcome discussion. Here is an example. Note how resisting situation talk allows the discussion to move forward:

      ● Okay. We can't afford to fix all the quality problems, so let's stop talking about this in a vague way. Let's talk about some concrete things we can do on a smaller scale that would make a positive difference. Which quality problems are having the most negative business impact right now?

      ● There are two issues in the user interface that our biggest customers are complaining about. (Situation)

      ● How about if we fix those two problems first? (Outcome proposal)

      ● But that doesn't take into account the issue in Europe. The quality issues in Europe are related to difference in governance laws. (Situation)

      ● I suggest we fix only the top one issue in the United States right away, but we fix the top three in Europe now too (Outcome proposal), as we have more pipeline held up in Europe.

      ● But that doesn't solve our overall quality problems, which are related to the fundamental structure of our product, which I have assessed is slowing our sales pipeline growth by 20 percent. (Smart talk. Rat hole. Situation)

      ● What outcome do you suggest we target to solve that particular point? (Challenge to smart talk)

      ● I don't know, we just need to fix it. It's really important. (Situation. Stall)

      ● That is still situation discussion. How about we fix the problems we just listed first, and right away we train the sales force on how to help customers work around these platform issues temporarily? (Outcome proposal)

      ● But when can we fix the main platform? We don't have the resources to do it. (Age-old situation)

      ● Let's look at doing a platform release one year from now. After we fix this initial round of quality issues and release