Playing The Long Game
“A river cuts through rock, not because of its power, but because of its persistence.”
~Jim Watkins
I love peering over the edge of really tall mountains. In no way am I an adrenaline junky. But I’m mesmerized by the perspective. Right at the edge, I always see the view a bit differently. The first time Brian and I visited Zion National Park, I convinced my soon-to-be husband to go to the top of Angel’s Landing with me. As my partner in adventure, I’d never seen him nervous on a mountain. Our first date was a hike up a really tall mountain. Our wedding reception was a hike up that same really tall mountain. But that day at Zion, as I grabbed onto the anchor chain at the edge of Scout’s Lookout and started heading up to the summit, Brian hesitated.
The Angel’s Landing hike is not for the faint of heart. The summit towers 2.4 miles and 1,488 feet above the canyon floor. Once you make it to Scout’s Landing, to summit, you must leave the safety of a wide trail to ascend another 500 feet along an exposed, sheer fin of the Jurassic-age Navajo Sandstone. At times the trail gets so narrow, you can see the view of the valley below on either side of you. Turns out Brian is not afraid of heights. Turns out, it makes him really nervous when I peer over the edge of really tall mountains. The good news is we made it to the summit and back down again in one piece. But something happened to me at the Angel’s Landing summit. I remembered why I so dearly love National Parks. Looking down below at the narrow sliver of water winding through the valley, I found it hard to fathom the Virgin River carving those miraculous red stone structures over the course of 13 million years.
Our daily work takes us into organizations of all sizes and across industries. The leaders who contact us have the desire to build organizations and teams of strength, resilience, and endurance. They are interested in playing the long game but have no idea where to start. We find that some of their teams are working on the right things, but oftentimes, in the wrong order. They focus on what they want to achieve at their destination instead of drawing and following the right map to get them there. Or they focus on some of the right things but miss some critical elements necessary to execute plans effectively. And sometimes, they focus on the wrong things altogether. None of these approaches work. Leaders of enduring organizations that transcend market disruptions and existential crises treat their organizations as dynamic systems. They consider the unique parts, but they see the whole.
Organizations are interconnected, dynamic, functional, and self-maintaining systems. The phrase, what you put in is what you get out, aptly describes the behavior of systems. From an organizational perspective, this principle holds true for negative inputs as well as positive ones. Elements of any organization or system reciprocally influence each other, creating a reinforcing context. The reciprocal influence and reinforcing context breed conditions for enduring growth or decline.
Unfortunately, more frequently, we see this play out from a negative angle. We have to go here first to understand the true nature of systems. The problems leaders face rarely result from outside forces. Problems usually originate inside the organization and are perpetuated by poorly-considered, short-term solutions. It is easier to slap a bandage on a problem rather than investigate the underlying issue and methodically solve it. Short-term solutions to temporarily fix issues only perpetuate the problem, reinforce other existing problems, or create new problems to deal with down the road. Because of feedback delays within the system, we don’t know that the problems are growing immediately. This creates an organization in chaos, a tangled mess exceedingly more challenging to fix.
I’ll give you a couple of examples I see time and again. It’s human nature to expect a relatively close or timely cause-and-effect relationship. When faced with decreasing revenue, executives have a knee-jerk reaction to cut training and development funding. Nine times out of ten, this is the first thing I see reduced in the budget. However, the underlying reason for decreasing revenue may directly relate to the need for that line item. I’ll give you a couple of common situations. First, members of the sales team lack key competencies to sell effectively. Therefore, cutting T&D would create a more significant problem. Left without the funding to pay for needed training, members of the sales team continue to perform at a deficit, and sales continue to decrease.
Second, customer experience team members have not received the proper training and knowledge transfer to support customer needs. Over time, loyal customers become passively committed and eventually start detracting from the organization’s success. Instead of referring new customers to the organization, those detractors now ward off potential new customers from ever buying the company’s product. The budget is balanced just long enough to make it through the end of the fiscal year—a close cause-and-effect relationship—but the true source of the problem goes unidentified. The executive ignores or fails to consider the long-term, detrimental impact of decisions that support solutions to the immediate problem of decreasing revenue. And the problem of ill-prepared team members becomes more and more convoluted.
The organization, as a self-maintaining system, maintains in a state of internal disorder. The self-preservation mode and evolutionary behavior of systems can keep an organization afloat even through the most significant internal strife. But when outside disruptions threaten the organization—competition, economic downturns, environmental crises, and societal shifts—the organization is incapable of responding effectively. Rather, it responds in a way that’s characteristic of its internal self.
Untangling any suffering or broken system is not easy, and it doesn’t happen overnight. In the same way, building an enduring organization isn’t a quick-win growth strategy. I’m not saying it’s going to take 13 million years. But as Ruth Porat, CFO of Alphabet, says, “You can't cost-cut your way to greatness.” Ultimately it comes down to the decisions leaders make and the actions they take in the most challenging moments. They have to decide what legacies they want to leave.
