Overview
Strategic planning examines position, priorities and resources, but rarely the hidden forces that actually drive how people behave. When the plan and those forces conflict, the hidden forces win.
Most planning sessions cover competitive position, priorities, resources and sometimes the values the organisation aspires to. What they leave out are the mental models Peter Senge described in The Fifth Discipline: the unspoken assumptions about what matters, who gets heard and what success really means here. A team can run an excellent session and still change nothing, because those assumptions were never on the agenda.
The article gives the example of an engineering company that grew from a few hundred to several thousand people in under five years, and over the same period built a troubling safety record. Nobody designed that outcome. The pressure to grow fast was the force producing it, and it is unlikely ever to have been named in a planning session.
The remedy it proposes is to make those forces tangible. Leadership teams build them as physical models, using LEGO® Serious Play® at the level of system modelling, so that impatience, a belief about growth or a fear of honest conversation sits on the table, where it can be discussed without blaming anyone. Combined with Senge's framework and Dialogue, that is the method set out in The Systems Synergy.
It closes with a test for any planning session: three months on, what has actually changed in how people behave?
Read the full article in Training Magazine
Sean Blair is the founder of Serious Outcomes and SERIOUSWORK™, and the author of The Systems Synergy.