Hope is not a strategy - reflections on strategy and leadership in Aotearoa New Zealand.pdf

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Hope is not a strategy
reflections on strategy and leadership in Aotearoa New
Zealand

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I specialise in helping organisations understand
the need to think long-term and to develop
practical strategies and tactics to ensure they can
adapt and thrive in the face of the future
challenges and opportunities created by four
global mega-trends:
• a growing and ageing global population;
• mass displacement of workers from
traditional jobs affected by AI and automation;
• the changing attitudes and expectations of
workers and consumers; and
• the impacts of climate change on business,
society, communities and individuals.
As well as long-term strategy and planning, I use
my exceptional leadership and stakeholder
engagement skills to help organisations use
people, systems, and processes to optimise their
effectiveness and perform at their best.
About the
Author
Clive Jones
Metamorphis Digital
CliveJones1

Table of Contents
Leadership
01 Don’t let ambiguity stand in the way of change 7
02 When conventional wisdom fails us 10
03 Educational leadership – its all about you 13
04 Why failure is a better teacher than success 20
05 Why greatness is much more than a lot of small
things done well
27
06 A lesson in IT leadership from a photocopier 30
07 Why expecting gratitude is not part of a leaders job
description
34
08 Leadership teams should aim to coordinate not
collaborate
38
09 Leadership when your life depends on it 41
10 Learning from failure – lessons from crisis 44
Strategy
11 What wilderness navigation can teach us about
effective strategy and planning
48
12 Making strategy simple 51
13 Four essential enablers for successfully launching
strategic change
55
14 Hitting the ceiling – when agile organisations
exhaust their ability to fund change
59
15 “What’s the worst thing that could possibly
happen?”: Why organisations need to focus on
opportunities as much as risks
62
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Table of Contents
16 Policy without strategy is the noise before failure 65
Project Management
17 When push comes to shove – why projects need to
surface conflict sooner
698
18 Why all or nothing is a bad idea 71
19 3 reasons why your organisations does NOT need a
project management office
75
20 The crucial role of executive sponsor in mission
critical projects
78
Data and Analytics
21 When the facts won’t help 82
22 The failure of ‘Big Data’ is data 85
23 Data analytics – what soap operas can teach us about
the importance of filling in the blanks
88
International Education
24 The importance of “What’s in it for us?” to industry
growth
92
25 Is transnational education at the heart of disrupting
international education?
96
26 The global international education industry: 2018 in
review and some bold predictions for 2019 and
beyond
100
27 Lessons for international education from a major
natural disaster
104
28 It’s time to rethink student recruitment fairs 108
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Table of Contents
29 Is New Zealand doing enough to ‘Future Proof’ its $5
billion international education industry?
111
30 Why we need to re-purpose our education system,
not just reinvent it
117
31 Will digital marketing disrupt the role of education
agents?
122
32 For purpose or for profit? What does it mean to be
part of a profession?
127
Other Topics
33 Learned helplessness is more common than you
think
130
34 Counting paperclips syndrome 132
35 How to disagree with the CEO 136
36 The danger in forgetting quality is fitness for purpose 139
37 Relearning how to pay attention at meetings 142
38 5½ pieces of fairly ordinary career advice 144
39 When did “reliable” become a bad thing? 147
40 Making the shift to digital: 10 lessons learnt 149
41 How to fail in business without even trying 153
42 Shovelling water: why COVID-19 teaches us nothing
about responding to climate change
155
5

Don’t let ambiguity
stand in the way of
change
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7

Leading change within any
organisation can be challenging but
change within higher education can be
especially hard for everyone involved.
As a change leader in an academic
institution you will invariably be
surrounded by highly qualified and
incredibly smart people whose job it is
to think critically, to challenge the
status quo, and who often will be
teaching the theory of what you are
trying to practice.
But its this very ability to be highly
insightful, reflective and critical that
makes many academic staff
seemingly struggle with change
processes that involve high levels of
ambiguity. Why? I think the three
main causes include:
1. The need to know all of the
answers to all of the questions
before committing to change; and
2. Acknowledging the need for
change without wanting to be
personally involved; and
3. It's not the best solution
Clearly it would always be ideal to
have all of the answers to all of the
possible questions prior to embarking
on any change process, but the world
is messy and hardly ever serves up all
the possible answers in advance, let
alone the questions.
So it's almost always the case that
there will be many unknowns in a
change process (after all this is the
future we are talking about) and
unrealistic to think that any
organisation can afford to wait until all
the unknowns become knowns.
The second issue with ambiguity is
that it causes many people to want to
be spectators of change rather than
participants. In the face of lots of
unknowns they would rather stand
(vocally) on the side-lines than be
active players on the field.
The final impact of ambiguity is it
invariably means that there are many
other possible solutions, one of which
might be the best possible solution as
opposed to your proposal.
So what are some of the approaches
to lead effective change in
environments where people generally
struggle with ambiguity?
• Work with those staff most
affected by the change proposal to
identify and prioritise which
unanswered questions are most
important to them and provide
adequate information to answer
these (triage).
• Discourage side-line spectators by
making sure all staff understand
that providing feedback on a
change proposal comes with an
obligation to be an active change
participant (no passengers).
Don’t let ambiguity stand in the way of change
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• Find a vocal critic of the change
proposal that is trusted by other
staff and persuade them to come
on-board as an active participant
in the change process - focus on
answering their key questions
knowing that they speak for
others.
• Start with the end in mind. Have a
clear and coherent objective or
destination that is well understood
from the outset. The 'how' can be
debatable but the 'what' should
never be in doubt (don't move the
goal posts).
• Keep people focused on 'better not
best' and help them understand
the trade off's involved.
To be clear, I have worked with
hundreds of truly fantastic academic
staff that routinely adapt and respond
to change in their professions, their
disciplines, and the needs of their
students and colleagues. It's what
they have always done and will
continue to do.
If you have responsibility for leading
change within an academic institution,
look to harness the power of all the
clever people around you and make
sure ambiguity doesn't get in the way
of effective and timely outcomes.
Don’t let ambiguity stand in the way of change
9

When conventional
wisdom fails us
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Have you ever had a moment when
you arrive at the realisation that what
you have believed about something for
the longest time actually isn't true?
I've had plenty of them over the last
twenty years and every time I have
found myself scratching my head to
understand how it is that the things
taken as the truth by an entire
organisation over a long period turn
out to be, well excuses.
Some real world examples
A few years back I was working in a
leadership role in higher education.
The whole sector had been told by its
government funders to lift the
educational achievement of learners.
Course completions, retention,
progression and qualification
completions all had to increase
significantly.
My role as a leader was to work with
academic and support staff within a
Faculty to achieve this. And as an
organisation focused largely on
second chance learners this wasn't
ever going to be an easy exercise and
'engineering' improvements through
cynical approaches like lifting our
entry criteria to exclude learners that
didn't have a good chance of passing
was never going to be an option.
One of the issues we noticed in some
of our Certificate level courses is that
the number of students attending
class dropped off rapidly after
scheduled term and semester breaks.
As a team we were brainstorming
ways to improve engagement and
someone casually wondered out loud
why we let students have study
breaks.
The immediate response was that
study breaks were included in our
courses because we were dealing with
adult learners and they typically had
childcare responsibilities during K-12
holiday break periods.
But given that the courses with the
biggest student retention issues were
dominated by recent school leavers
typically in the age range of 17-20 it
was immediately obvious that what
we believed: "Students need study
breaks because they have childcare
responsibilities during K-12 holiday
break periods" was mostly untrue.
And it didn't take too long to figure out
that the real reason for having study
breaks in our courses was for our
convenience, not learners and that it
was our academic and support staff
that had childcare responsibilities
during K-12 holiday periods not largely
our students.
This breakthrough lead us to change
the way we delivered some courses to
at risk cohorts of students so that only
those students who were on top of
their course work got a break, while at
risk students were encouraged to
continue coming to scheduled
classes, tutorials and support
sessions with no break.
When conventional wisdom fails us
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This epiphany also encouraged us to
look at other aspects of programme
delivery and we found a number of
other ingrained practices that all
turned out to be for our administrative
convenience rather than serving the
best interests of learners.
Other examples of convention wisdom
failing us were driven by more external
concerns around protecting student
privacy and not voiding our insurance
cover by admitting liability for our own
(occasional) mistakes. But in both of
these types of situations following
convention wisdom just made things
worse:
• Telling a concerned parent of a
young adult learner that you can't
discuss why their son or daughter
has failed their course (and now
has a large unproductive student
loan) because of privacy laws isn't
conducive to having a constructive
conversation, but is a good way to
make them angry;
• Not being able to apologise to a
student when your institution has
made a mistake is not conducive
to effectively resolving complaints.
Students understand that
institutions make mistakes and
most times they just want
someone to say sorry and to be
assured that the same mistakes
won't be made in the future. Not
acknowledging mistakes and not
apologising because of the
potential to void insurance cover
might be good legal practice but
isn't the right thing to do from a
learner perspective.
So what's the best way to spot
situations where convention wisdom
is failing us? In just about every
industry there will be a single powerful
question that consistently cuts right to
the core of what your organisation
stands for. In education its:
what's the best thing to do for the
learner?
Time and again I've seen how powerful
this one simple question can be and
how it can instantly cut through all the
extraneous competing considerations
and arguments and focus everyone on
the one thing that matters - helping
every individual learner to succeed.
When conventional wisdom fails us
12

Educational
leadership – it’s all
about you
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13

Educational leadership - its all about you
It could be somewhat of an
understatement to say that much has
been written about Leadership.
Typing ‘leadership’ into one leading
search engine provides “about”
171,000,000 hits. Another leading on-
line book retailer has 16,571 titles on
leadership. It could well be possible to
spend most of ones life reading about
leadership, rather than actually doing it
in our personal and professional lives.
Along with this plethora of books on
leadership is a wide diversity in the
possible definitions of what leadership
is. These range from the broad -
“influencing others to some purpose”
(Wikipedia, 2005) across a wide
spectrum to positional, religious,
academic, and civic.
Of these, one definition comes from Dr
Lester Levy of the New Zealand
Leadership Institute who said
“Mastery of self is where leadership
begins”. Perhaps this is not so much
a definition of what leadership is per
say, as a pointer to when and more
importantly where leadership can be
found.
Leadership through mountaineering
I have never subscribed to the view
that one should keep their personal
life separate from their professional
life. Life to me is a whole with fairly
permeable barriers between family life,
personal life, and professional life. As
such I have been integrating
mountaineering expeditions into my
family and working life for the past 20
years, climbing in Peru, Argentina,
Nepal, Pakistan, and Tibet.
This has always involved a lot of prior
effort, huge impact on colleagues and
family, and enormous financial cost,
but somehow has always ended up
enriching both myself and the
organisations I have worked for.
The expeditions themselves have
always been incredibly hard.
Mountaineering is a ‘hard’ adventure
sport with high objective dangers. It’s
also about endurance, both mental
and physical. A typical Himalayan
expedition might cost US$25,000 up to
US$50,000 for Everest, involve a year
of prior endurance training, last
around 7 to 10 weeks, and involve
being cold and physically stressed for
extended periods of time. Expedition
climbing is not a glamorous sport –
sleeping on the ground and not being
able to have a shower for weeks on
end is not ‘fun’ in the normal sense.
But rewarding it certainly is. Life is
incredibly simple on expeditions.
Instead of keeping track of meetings
and appointments in 15 minute
increments you quickly lose track of
days of the week and sometimes even
what month it is. Personal needs
extend only to warmth, food and
safety.
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As a climber you quickly learn that
patience, perseverance, and the ability
to stay focused on a single goal for a
long period of time are of utmost
importance. You also learn humility
and the value of life through the
consequences of poor judgement and
the loss of friends and fellow climbers.
To the summit of Everest
I arrived at Everest Base Camp in early
April 2004 after a 10 day trek from the
village of Lukla in Nepal. Base Camp
is a cold, dry, and inhospitable place
located on the ice and rock of the
Khumbu Glacier at an altitude of 5,400
metres.
There are no facilities at Base Camp
apart from what we have carried with
us. No electricity, no buildings, no
running water, no waste disposal. The
nearest convenience store is a typical
Nepali tea house at the village of
Gorak Shep, a mere 6 hour return walk
from Everest Base Camp; and where a
soft drink and a chocolate bar will set
you back around US$8.
Overnight temperatures at Base Camp
are around -10°C and the air is so dry
that the daily snowfall every afternoon
evaporates (rather than melting) in the
morning sun leaving the ground bone
dry.
And far from being a safe quiet place,
the days and nights are punctuated by
the crash of avalanches from nearby
mountains, the pops and squeaks of
the glacier underneath us and the
need to walk with care to avoid
crevasses and large unstable
boulders. But home it is, and over the
next 6 weeks this will be the place we
retreat to for rest and recovery, and to
enjoy the relative warmth and thicker
air.
Everest base camp is largely free from
litter these days, with strict
environmental and waste disposal
procedures in place. However what
litter there is tends to be on a macro
scale. A crashed helicopter at Base
Camp perfectly illustrates much about
Everest – the humour in such an out
of place object contrasting with the
tragedy of the event that claimed 3
lives.
The first challenge in climbing Everest
is ascending the Khumbu ice fall.
Around 700 metres high, this steep
river of ice exposes climbers to
constant danger from crevasses and
falling blocks of ice.
As an experienced climber I have a
healthy fear of heights, and for
everyone the Khumbu ice fall is a
terrifying place not such much for the
hazards themselves, but for the way
climbers deal with those hazards. In
the ice fall this means ladders.
In the ice fall aluminium ladders are
used to cross the crevasses. There is
nothing special about these ladders –
they’re the same as what you might
have in your garage at home.
15

With crampons on, the technique is to
step from one rung to the next, trying
not to look down into the gaping
depths of the glacier below and trying
to control the fear that can well up
unexpectedly from watching a
snowflake drift down into a 70 metre
deep hole beneath your feet.
To cross larger crevasses requires
ladders to be joined. 1, 2, 3, 4 or
sometimes 5 ladders tied together.
Few ladders are level - they slope, they
bounce, they sag. And there is no tight
hand line to hold on to, merely a safety
line that MAY be anchored at both
ends.
Higher up in the ice fall the focus of
the ladders changes from crossing
crevasses to ascending seracs – huge
blocks of ice that weigh thousands, if
not tens of thousands of tonnes.
There are 30 or 40 separate ladders in
the ice fall and because the ice is
moving the route through the ice fall
and the position of the ladders
changes almost every day.
In the ice fall there is always plenty of
time to deal with fear, because a one
way trip through the ice fall takes from
3 ½ to 5 ½ hours, and in
the course of climbing Everest you are
going to have to make something like
26 separate trips through it. And deal
with fear you must, because to reach
the summit of Everest you have to
cross the next ladder or go home.
It’s really that simple, and people do
go home rather than face the ice fall.
Above the ice fall is the relatively
safety of Camp 1 at 6,100 metres and
beyond it Camp 2 at around 6,500
metres. Here there are new hazards.
Located in the stunning Western Cwm
of Everest, this long, easy angled
valley is a perfect solar reflector
meaning that climbers foolish enough
or not fast enough to make it between
camps in the dawn hours are fried in
high intensity sunlight that raises the
temperature to well over 40°C. Of
course the temperature crashes to
well below zero at night or even when
the sun goes behind a cloud making
clothing choices very difficult.
The head of the Western Cwm above
Camp 2 gives access to the base of
the Lhotse face where things truly
become steep.
Located at around 7,200 metres Camp
3 consists of tent platforms hacked
out of the concrete hard ice of the 50°
steep Lhotse face. It’s a difficult place
to survive with overnight temperatures
of around -17°C and thin air. Several
climbers have died here from falls
while merely going outside to the toilet
and a trip outside to answer the call of
nature requires planning, being fully
dressed, and wearing crampons.
16

Normally climbers spend at most only
two nights here, one as part of the
acclimatisation build up, the other on
the way to the summit.
Above Camp 3 the summit of Everest
makes it presence known not so much
because it’s still a further 1,350 metres
above us, but because of the NOISE it
makes. The summit of Everest is
normally right in the path of jet stream
winds. This fiercely strong wind
blowing at up to 200 kph batters the
mountain until early May when it
relents for just a week or so as the
monsoon pushes onto the Indian
subcontinent.
After descending the mountain for a
few days rest at base camp we finally
received a favourable weather
forecast and on 14 May set off after
our second night at Camp 3 for Camp
4 located at 8,000 metres on the South
Col of Everest.
Even breathing bottled oxygen, our
progress was slow and we arrived at
the South Col, with its small group of
tents and litter at about 3pm in the
afternoon.
While there is much about Everest that
is the same as it was for Ed Hilary and
Sherpa Tenzing Norgay in 1953, some
things have changed. Hilary and
Tenzing had a Camp 5 at around 8,400
metres, leaving at dawn to climb to the
summit. These days’ climbers leave
the South Col the same evening that
they arrive and climb through the night
to reach the summit around lunch
time the following day. Typically by
the time they return to the South Col
they will have been on the go for 30
hours or more without sleep.
My climbing partner Kenton Cool and I
left the South Col for the summit at
around 9.30pm. The night was dark,
clear, and cold, with no moon, and
stars hanging in the sky without
twinkling.
We travelled together, but with our
oxygen masks on and under many
layers of clothing there was almost no
conversation. The only light was from
our head torches and the predominant
sound was of our own breathing
amplified in oxygen masks. There
were no footsteps to follow from
previous climbers as ours was to be
the first ascent of the season.
Dawn found us on the ridge proper at
a place called the ‘balcony’ at 8,400
metres where the rising sun brought
little relief from the -30°C temperature
but rewarded us with stunning views.
Ahead of us, and much steeper, was
the deep snow and loose rock of the
South East Ridge which we surmount
at the snails pace of about 50 metres
per hour. Slowly and surely we
ascended with an ever widening view
of other Himalayan giants until we
reached the South Summit of Everest
at 8,700 metres.
17

Now a mere 150 metres from the
summit, the difficult climbing begins
on Everest. The ridge at this point
narrows and is intersected by several
deep guts.
At the bottom of the Hillary step, a 5
metre high vertical step of rock, there
is no room for hesitation. Standing in
a notch in the ridge not much wider
than your shoulders there is a 2,000
metre drop on both sides. In 1953 the
Hilary Step was the key to Ed Hillary’s
and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay’s
successful ascent and it remains key
today.
Utilising fixed ropes from previous
years it was simply a case of pulling
yourself up and hoping that the rope
you’re pulling on is well anchored and
not weakened by exposure to sun and
wind.
Above the Hilary Step I remember
clearly wondering why Kenton, who
was slightly ahead of me, had stopped
and was sitting down on a small
mound of snow. In my oxygen
deprived state it probably took me 30
seconds or so to realise that he was
sitting down next to the metal tripod
that marks the summit at 8,848
metres and I joined him on the summit
itself just a few minutes later.
There were many things I had planned
to do on the summit of Everest. Take
some photos, eat and drink
something, collect some rocks, or
maybe call home on our satellite
phone. But I never really got the
chance. Already around 12.30pm
when we arrived, it was vital that we
made it back to the South Col before
nightfall. Only about 10 minutes after
arriving Kenton said ‘its time to go’
and we began our descent.
Most of the things that go wrong in
mountain climbing happen on the
descent, so I was relieved to make it
back safely to the South Summit and
paused for a moment in the spot
where New Zealander Rob Hall died in
1996 to remember him and my
previous experience on Everest that
same year.
Just before 6.30pm we made it back
to the safety of Camp 4 on the South
Col and I remember feeling utterly
exhausted and finally really emotional
about having reached the top of the
world.
18

The next day we descended very
slowly to Camp 2 which was followed
the day after by one last scary trip
through the ice fall which now had a
rather ominous and foreboding feeling
– like it was alive and waiting for us in
the mist.
Two days after returning to Base
Camp I set off alone down valley on
my way back to Lukla, Kathmandu,
and then home to New Zealand. With
the monsoon approaching it rained on
me for three days solid and the lodges
and tea houses were nearly deserted.
It was a good chance to reflect on
‘success’, frostbite in five fingers, and
a fairly typical climbing season that
saw eight people die on Mt Everest.
Educational Leadership - its all about
you
People often ask me why I climb
mountains, and I often struggle to
answer. If I borrow a concept from the
business world, to me it’s about risk
and return. Climbing is a high risk
activity that has enormously high
returns. But what’s the nature of
those returns?
For climbers the returns seem to be
about understanding truly who we are
as individuals, and what really matters
in life. And in the process of climbing
we develop a set of qualities that are
prized but often lacking in our modern
society. Qualities like determination,
focus, persistence, courage, and
confidence.
In our respective institutions we all
face an array of challenging issues as
managers and leaders. And in these
roles we intuitively understand that the
biggest challenges are unlikely to be
surmounted by good management
alone, and that we are required to
provide educational leadership to
staff, students, and stakeholders.
But it’s this view of leadership as
something we do ‘to’ others that is
where the problems lie, because if we
accept that “Mastery of self is where
leadership begins” as Levy suggests,
then leadership itself is about “what
lies within us” (Emerson) and that we
are granted a mandate to lead from
others only on the strength of who we
are as individuals.
I believe that as education leaders we
need to have far more than just goals
for ourselves. We need a purpose in
our lives - our own 'Everest' - and the
courage to put our purpose and
ourselves first, and by doing so be
leaders.
19

Why failure is a
better teacher than
success
4
20

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Mt Shishapangma in Tibet stands at
8,027 metres and is one of only 14
mountains in the world over 8,000
metres. In 2006, two years after
climbing Mt Everest, I was eager to
add Shishapangma to my growing
tally of 8,000 metres peaks.
First time unlucky
This is not the first time I have been
here though and I already know not to
underestimate this mountain which is
often described as 'easy'. In 2002,
after five weeks of hard work I had
been high on the mountain and poised
to leave for the summit after spending
one final night at our high camp.
At 2.30 am in the morning I remember
being woken by the sound of snow
falling on our tent, and thinking we
were going to have to wait for one
more day.
But four days later there was no sign
that the blizzard was going to stop,
and with no food or water left, our
survival now depended on
descending, despite the danger. Still
snowing heavily, and in gale force
winds, we made painfully slow
progress downward through thigh
deep snow.
In the mountains, accidents typically
happen when climbers push the
boundaries of safety, either because
they want to achieve a summit, or as
in our case that day, when they are
put in survival situation.
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Out front breaking trail, and entirely
invisible to my team mates through
the blizzard, I finally reached the top of
a steep slope which lead down to the
safety of our lower camp immediately
below. Entirely predictably, my next
few steps triggered a massive
avalanche which buried me
completely. By sheer dumb luck I
managed to free myself and the whole
team reached base camp safely very
late that night.
Second time unlucky
So fast forward four years to 2006 and
here I am back on Shishapangma for
the second time.
After five more weeks of hard work its
late in the evening as we approach
our high camp at 7,500 metres. This
time around the snow is only knee
deep and the weather looks
promising. We need just half a day
from here to summit and retreat to
safety.
Our summit day dawns fine and
promising, but right from leaving the
tent, it’s obvious that things are not as
they should be. The snowpack has an
icy crust on top under which is half a
metre of unconsolidated loose snow
sitting on another layer of hard ice.
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As we gain height the slope gets much
steeper and vibrates with each step I
take, telling me its under a huge
amount of tension, stretched tight like
a drum.
Clearly the only thing holding all this
snow onto the slope is gravity and the
line of steps we are making across it
is like saying ‘cut along the dotted
line’.
I reach a high point at 7,800 metres
and stop. Up until now I have been
desperately trying to stay out front to
avoid the inevitable conversation – its
far too risky to go on.
Soon the rest of the team catches up
and there isn't even a discussion or
lengthy debate on the merits of going
further – we just turn around with a
word being said.
Third time unlucky
12 months later I am back on
Shishapangma for the third time, and
once again the snow is deep and the
weather poor. This time we don’t
even make it above 7,000 metres.
On the descent I find myself once
again in a blizzard in zero visibility and
standing at the top of the same slope
where I was buried in the avalanche in
2002. The snow feels bad, and I take
a deep breath before heading down.
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Arguably there is a fine line between
perseverance and stupidity, so in
2010, with my enthusiasm once again
rekindled I head to a different
mountain – this time to Manaslu -
which at 8,163 metres is the worlds
eighth highest mountain.
Manaslu is an impressive mountain
and far more technically challenging
than Shishapangma. However the
biggest challenges of this climb will
turn out not to be the technical ones -
this time it’s the team itself and the
weather.
Unlike Shishapangma where the
weather was poor, on Manaslu the
weather was appalling. Every morning
we awoke to glorious sunny weather
and blue skies, only to find that by
lunchtime it was snowing heavily.
In the four weeks we had on the
mountain, we had only two full days of
fine weather, with the rest of the time
spent in cloud, fog, frequent
snowstorms and despite the altitude,
even occasional rain.
Text Photo Page
24

It’ about the choices we make
Why failure is a better teacher than success
Basically there are two choices –
either wait the poor weather out and
hope it improves or work with what
you have. For a while we worked hard
in the poor weather and spent a
number of challenging days climbing
in blizzard conditions and nights spent
digging out tents to avoid suffocation
as they got buried by heavy overnight
snowfalls.
But an even bigger barrier than the
weather soon presented itself and the
teamwork required to climb a big
mountain evaporated as it became
clear that my kiwi approach to
climbing was at odds with the
approach of my Spanish and Italian
team mates.
Running out of time before the
monsoon was due to arrive, the
already unreliable weather forecast
finally threw up a three day window of
fine weather and we pushed upwards
again, this time hoping to summit.
Two days later we left camp two early
to set up our final camp at 7,500
metres and the weather finally looked
promising – sunny blue skies and no
wind.
But less than four hours after setting
out, the wind had picked up to 70
kilometres per hour and I was
struggling to stand up-right on steep
blue ice at 7,000 metres.
All seven of us crammed ourselves
into an abandoned tent and debated
the options while the weather rapidly
worsened outside.
One of my team mates was here on
Manaslu for the second time and
risked losing their commercial
sponsors if they couldn't come back
with a summit.
Without the same pressure to cloud
my thinking I knew there and then that
our survival was dependant on
immediate descent to safety, and
struggling to make myself heard over
the roar of the wind outside, I
expressed this view by gesturing
vigorously downward.
Sensing the lack of agreement on the
faces of my colleagues I did
something I have never done before. I
acted without waiting for agreement
from my team and left the tent to
begin the descent alone in the now
blizzard conditions.
I had committed myself to a course of
action and was relieved when after
what seemed like an eternity, the
others emerged to follow. We all
reached our lower camp together
safely that afternoon and overnight
over one metre of new snow fell.
25

So what have I learnt from failure?
Why failure is a better teacher than success
Just two days later our team had
fractured for good, with half of us on
the trail heading for home. Our
Spanish colleague decided to stay on
in order to give Manaslu one last try.
But Manaslu base camp became
buried under 2 metres of new snowfall
and the approaching moonson
effectively called the climbing season
to a close.
If I had been successful on
Shishapangma and Manaslu the first
time around, I would have simply
added them to my existing tally of
three 8,000m peaks and moved on
down the list. Tick.
Instead of summits, I was forced to
find the mental endurance, patience
and perseverance to deal with
snowstorms, blizzards, avalanches
and high altitude climbing for weeks
and weeks on end.
More importantly I learnt that there
were times I had to act on my
convictions and to lead on my own
rather than rely on the leadership of
others. And I learnt to find the
resilience to deal with the
disappointment of turning back so
close to two summits in order to
succeed another day.
In the end I figure failure taught me
that success is not actually about
standing on the summit, but actually
about knowing when to turn away.
“What lies behind us and what
lies before us are tiny matters
compared to what lies within
us”
26

Why greatness is
much more than a lot
of small things done
well
5
27

Why greatness is much more than a lot of small things done well
Popular culture would have us believe
that "greatness is a lot of small things
done well", but in my experience, for
organisations it is never enough just to
focus on doing the small things
(basics) well.
In a past life I worked as a Software
Development Manager for a utility
billing company in rapid growth mode.
It was a great company to work for but
still being run like a start up with the
three original founders in their garage.
When I joined they had 400 staff and
no systems and processes to support
their growing global customer base.
I would describe the organisational
culture as chaos - every Friday there
were customer release commitments
to be met and in this face of this
everyone in the Company got dragged
into doing whatever it took to get
customer releases out the door. It
was crazy and exciting and our whole
focus was on meeting our customer
promises.
Within the Company we had a
dedicated R&D team who were some
of the most experienced and
technically talented staff in the
organisation. The R&D team were
also constantly drawn into the chaos
of getting customer releases
completed because we needed their
skills and expertise to solve difficult
technical problems and we came to
rely on them being available to assist.
Problem was, the R&D team were
supposed to be working on developing
the next generation of our billing
system product, and without being
able to ring fence their efforts, the
development schedule for our future
product fell further and further behind.
Lesson learnt: Its not enough just to
do the small things well
Fast forward to my next role -
Executive Dean in a higher education
institution -which for me was a
complete break from the past 10 years
in IT technical and leadership roles.
With the inevitable steep learning
curve of a new organisation and new
career focus, my natural inclination as
a techie was to focus on operational
excellence - doing the small things
well.
The institution itself had some
ambitious future strategies it was
pursuing, including merging with
neighbouring institutions, pursuing
ambitious student enrolment growth,
and to bring a globally branded
product to the New Zealand education
market.
This same institution also had some
very significant issues around its
current operations - in particular the
educational achievement rates of its
learners were right at the bottom of
comparison tables with peers.
28

Why greatness is much more than a lot of small things done well
My inbuilt bias was that none of these
strategies made any sense as long as
the institution wasn't focused on the
needs of it current learners and
achieving operational excellence. In
my view we needed a single minded
focus on fixing our current problems
and these other strategies should wait
until we achieved excellence.
Not surprisingly this put me in conflict
with my Leadership team colleagues
on many occasions, and in particular
with the CEO (situation normal). I still
remember one particularly vigorous
discussion where the CEO leant
forward and say very calmly "Clive, its
not enough just to focus on doing the
basics well".
And like many things over the next 10
years, he was absolutely right.
Why? Well don't get me wrong, doing
the basics well absolutely does
matter. With a strong imperative to lift
student achievement, over the space
of three years we saw course
completion rates in our Faculty rise
from 42% to over 70%. How? Lots of
hard work on the part of academic and
support staff and by focusing on what
learners needed to succeed.
But in that same time we also grew,
merged and secured a suite of globally
branded qualifications. In short, we
focused on improving our current
operations and pursued strategies
that were about the future success of
the organisation.
And not surprisingly the external
environment also changed a lot in that
same time - the expectations of
learners, the impact of technology, the
needs of employers, the economy. In
hindsight if we had only focused on
getting the basics right we would not
have been well prepared for any of
these changes.
My natural inclination in any
organisation I work for will probably
always be to build a base of
operational excellence first and
foremost, but sometimes I have to
remind myself that greatness is much
more than just doing the small things
well in as much as greatness needs to
focus on future opportunities and
challenges as much as it does on
today's.
29

A lesson in IT
leadership from a
photocopier
6
30

A lesson in IT leadership from a photocopier
Early in my IT career I learnt an
important lesson on the importance of
customer ownership and perceptions
of technology solutions.
The first time I experienced this was in
my role as IT Manager for a mid-sized
energy company and it involved the
replacement of our organisations
photocopiers.
Not exactly the most high-tech or
exciting of purchasing decisions but I
diligently sought proposals from
suppliers, researched the technical
and cost benefits and chose the
copier that I believed best met the
needs of our organisation.
Job done, problem solved and said
photocopiers duly arrived and were
installed. Entirely like the other
photocopier solutions available, the
machines weren't 100% reliable - they
jammed occassionally (as
photocopiers do) - and some of the
more advanced electronic document
management features didn't work
entirely reliably.
But because I made this particular IT
purchasing decision entirely on my
own, the problems our internal
customers experienced became
entirely my responsibility as well, and
for the next three years any time one
of these machines jammed or didn't
work as expected, they were referred
to as "Clive's photocopiers" (generally
in conjunction with some kind of
derogatory word).
Lesson learnt #1: IT Leaders should
leave the decisions on what's best for
their internal customers to the
customers themselves.
Yes IT has a role to play in supporting
and guiding those choices, but clearly
If I had let our internal customers
make the final decision on which
photocopiers to purchase I would
have:
a. demonstrated that the objective
of IT was about meeting the
needs of our internal customers
and being useful;
b. Avoided three years worth of
professional grief;
c. Ensured our internal customers
were better able to accept
responsibility for the outcomes
(both good and bad) of
technology solutions.
Over the next decade the importance
of this lesson was reinforced as I was
involved in the delivery of a number of
large scale, complex IT projects either
as Project Manager or Project
Sponsor or CIO.
One particular project I still remember
very well. It involved the procurement
and implementation of a new ERP
system for a large municipal authority.
It was my first large IT Project
Management role and I had a trusted
senior executive as my project
sponsor.
31

We had already been through an
extensive RFP process and had got
down to a short list of three or four
vendors and systems based on an
initial desk analysis of all the RFP
responses.
The final phase in the procurement
process was to have the short-listed
vendors demonstrate their systems on
site to an internal customer evaluation
panel and run through a number of
prescribed functional requirement
scenarios.
The day of the demonstrations arrived
and one by one the vendors
demonstrated their systems with our
panel members scoring each against a
set of agreed criteria including fit with
our business requirements, vendor
capability and experience, technology
fitness for purpose, cost etc.
Each panel member did their ratings
separately and at the end of the
process we came together again to
discuss our individual scores and to
agree overall rankings.
I was a little surprised to find that the
project sponsors overall vendor
rankings were completely opposite to
mine so I asked to briefly discuss in
private how we had arrived at such
different results:
Me: "I thought vendor A demonstrated
the best fit with our business
requirements". Project Sponsor: "Yes
but their presenter had dirty shoes".
Me: "I thought vendor B demonstrated
the best capability and experience".
Project Sponsor: "Yes but that
presenter chewed their nails".
Me: "I thought vendor C had the best
technology". Project Sponsor: "but
they couldn't even operate their own
product properly!".
It's probably self-evident to say that I
hadn't noticed a single one of these
things during the presentations but
having worked with this senior
executive before, I knew they had
fantastic intuition and judgement
when it came to people, and when it
came down to it, the real critical
success factors in this project were
about choosing a technology partner
that was trustworthy and reliable (and
compatible with our people) and in
helping our own staff to adapt to the
changes in their roles that this project
would bring about.
So I changed my overall rankings to
match and the panel found a
comfortable consensus. It was still the
case that this IT project was incredibly
complex and challenging, but because
of the way we got internal customer
ownership of the initial procurement
decision and in the implementation
process itself by drawing on internal
process owners and experts, the
project turned out to be a real
success.
32

Lesson learnt #2: Successful IT
leadership is about being useful to
your internal customers, not
technology.
Lesson learnt #3: Successful IT
projects focus on people and change
management, not technology.
Over the course of working on many IT
projects I also learnt a fourth lesson,
which sometimes was rather hard to
swallow, but still seems to be
universally true nonetheless:
Lesson learn #4: IT projects are
successful only if your internal
customers think they are successful.
By this I mean I have been involved in
delivering some IT Projects that
completely met all their agreed
business and technology objectives
and were delivered on time and
budget. But because these projects
didn't sufficiently address all the
people and change factors, they were
seen as failures by the internal
customers (therefore they were
failures).
Conversely, I have also worked on
other IT Projects that delivered only
mediocre business or technology
outcomes, ran over time and over
budget but were nonetheless seen as
huge successes by the internal
customers (therefore they were
successes).
Perplexing? Not really once you have
learned lessons 1 through 3.
33

Why expecting
gratitude is not part
of a leaders job
description
7
34

Why expecting gratitude is not part of a leaders job description
In the past I worked for a higher
education institution that went
through two separate mergers with
smaller institutions that were
geographically adjacent to where we
operated.
Of course the term 'merger' was a
euphemism, as really both of these
mergers were takeovers that saw the
smaller institutions totally absorbed
into ours and become satellite
campuses.
The primary driver behind the mergers
was that both smaller institutions
lacked the critical mass to continue to
be financially or educationally viable
on their own and they had both
suffered from under-investment in the
years leading up to the mergers.
Because there was a great deal of
sensitivity in one of the communities
around the potential loss of education
provision that might result from the
merger, we took - by our normal
standards - a very light touch
approach once the merger was
completed.
Yes the merger process did involve
some initial rationalisation of support
functions and the closure of a small
number of the worst performing
programmes, but actually in a very
limited way.
What we did do was to invest hugely in
bringing the teaching and learning
facilities up to the same standards as
we had on our home campus, invested
in updating IT infrastructure, health
and safety, library, student support
services etc.
What we didn't do was try to touch the
key programme portfolio offerings
that were seen as 'iconic' by that
community despite them being dated,
rapidly dwindling student enrolments,
and arguably poorly aligned with
actual community needs.
This was in direct contrast to the
'normal' approach we took on our
home campus where for years we had
been systematically rationalising our
programme portfolio - closing any
programme that didn't meet the
benchmark rate for contribution to
overhead costs.
But the core problems remained - we
now had a satellite campus in a
community that was determined to
retain education provision with a
portfolio of programmes that was for
the large part still financially and
educationally unviable.
At the bottom of this complex pile of
problems we had also inherited a
culture where we had some key staff
who put their own needs and the
needs of their students first, but
unashamedly at the expense of other
staff and students within our
combined institution.
35

Again because of our sensitivity to
community support we largely steered
clear of tackling significant culture
and behaviour issues head on.
In the years after the merger we
periodically felt we were making real
progress in terms of changing the
culture and future prospects of this
satellite campus. But every time this
happened we would invariably be
reminded of just how little progress
we had actually made.
From our perspective we had entered
into the merger with the best of
intentions: we had invested a lot of
time and energy and money in
improving the satellite campus and
keeping it operating, and we were
asking our staff and students on our
other campuses to make sacrifices in
terms of teaching and learning
resources to achieve this.
In short we had fallen into a mindset
where we expected the recipients to
be grateful, and the fact that they
weren't left us disappointed.
But if we had put ourselves in their
shoes, their are some fairly compelling
reasons to say that expecting
gratitude was never warranted:
1. The 'merger' was something that
the community didn't actually
want and through it they had lost
control of their own independent
institution;
2. They had likely observed from
afar the way we had fairly
ruthlessly approached
rationalising educational delivery
on our home campus before and
after the merger, so may have had
good reason to doubt our
intentions in the long term;
3. The term 'merger' didn't help us
any, as clearly the end result was
more akin to a take over;
4. Arguably all the things we did to
invest in the satellite campus and
bring the facilities and learning
environment up to scratch - well
that was our job to do all that
stuff in the first place, and the
government had given us a capital
injection for this very reason;
5. Staff acting in the their own best
interests - well why wouldn't they?
Especially so if we were never
courageous enough to tackle the
behaviours that we saw as not
fitting with the culture we wanted
to create.
36

I've seen the same kind of thing
happen in the process of dealing with
hundreds of individual student
disciplinary issues over the last
decade. No matter how much you go
out of your way to give a student a
second or third or final chance to
demonstrate they can succeed
academically or can meet minimum
standards of conduct, I quickly learnt
not to expect gratitude for providing
further chances.
As a leader or a manager we often
have to do some really unpleasant
things: discipline or expel students,
performance management staff, make
great staff redundant, cut budgets.
But good leadership is not a popularity
contest. As a leader or manager we
need to stay focused on whether we
are doing the right things for the right
reasons, and not expect to be
rewarded with gratitude from those we
serve for doing our job to the best of
our ability.
37

Leadership teams
should aim to
coordinate, not
collaborate
8
38

Leadership teams should aim to coordinate, not collaborate
I've worked on a number of Senior
Leadership Teams over the last 20
years, and have been part of some
highly effective ones as well as pretty
dysfunctional ones.
So what makes a Leadership Team
composed of highly capable and high
committed individuals highly effective
or highly dysfunctional? Here are
some of my thoughts and
observations:
1. An effective Leadership Team has
thought about (and agreed) on
their purpose. Are they a decision-
making team? A coordinating
team? A consultative team? An
information-sharing (alignment
team)? A fairly sure sign that a
lack of an agreed purpose is
holding a Leadership Team back
is individual members expressing
frustration at why particular items
end up on the agenda, and fairly
regular attempts to rejig the
meeting structure or frequency.
Key learning: Effective
Leadership Teams need clarity on
their purpose and role within the
organisation.
2. An effective Leadership Team
requires the business unit or
functional managers who sit
around the table to invest as
much time and effort into the
Lead Team as they invest into
making their own team effective.
Key learning: Effective
Leadership teams are made up of
individuals who understand they
are actually part of two teams
(the Lead Team and their own
team) and invest as much time
and effort into supporting their
Lead Team colleagues with their
work as they do with their own
direct reports.
3. An effective Leadership team is
made of individuals who
understand they wear two hats
and that the purpose of a Lead
Team is to act in the best
interests of the organisation as a
whole rather than a place for
individuals to compete for ideas
and resources. Key Learning:
Effective Leadership Teams are
made of individuals who are able
(and willing) to both represent
their own business unit or
functional perspective alongside
acting in the best interests of the
organisation as a whole - even
when this isn't in the best
interests of the functional team
they lead.
"A Lead Team without an agreed
purpose is a Committee, not a Team"
39

Leadership teams should aim to coordinate, not collaborate
4. An effective Leadership Team
understands they are being
closely watched by every member
of the organisation and that how
they work together and how they
treat each other will be mirrored
and amplified internally. Key
Learning: Effective Leadership
Teams model the kinds of
behaviours they are seeking to
influence in the wider
organisation.
Most Lead Teams, like most
organisations I know, have been
banging on about driving better
internal collaboration for donkey's
years. I'm totally over this collaborate-
at-all-costs approach as it just seems
to slow everything down and
undermines the genuine expertise of
internal teams that actually know what
they are talking about as opposed to
enthusiastic (but non expert)
collaborators.
A final thought: Lead Teams seem to
work best when they aim to
coordinate their individual activities
across the organisation, but stumble
when they try to devise a single
shared agenda. Collaboration is just a
bridge too far...
"the purpose of a Leadership Team is
to act in the best interests of the
organisation as a whole rather than a
place for individuals to compete for
ideas and resources"
40

Leading when your life
depends on it
9
41

Leading when your life depends on it
At 8,163m, Manaslu in western Nepal
is the eight highest mountain in the
world.
In 2010 I'd already been on the
mountain for several weeks and just
about everything that could possibly
go wrong on this expedition had
already done so.
The weather had been continuously
awful for more than four weeks - it had
snowed every day. Some Korean
climbers had got lost above 7,000m in
bad weather and several of them died.
My team mates were Spanish and
Italian who spoke as little English as I
spoke Spanish or Italian, and Rosa and
I just seem have very different
philosophies when it came to
climbing.
Rosa was an enormously talented and
successful Himalayan mountaineer
but from what I could tell her climbing
approach was to conserve energy and
effort by picking the right time to
follow. My philosophy was to be out
the front - no matter what the weather
- working hard to break the trail. And it
had also become apparent that we
had B-grade Sherpas (who knew that
was even possible?) and more than
once I found myself carrying a heavy
load and breaking trail in deep snow
for hours while everyone followed.
So with time running out we had one
more roll of the dice and made our
way back up to our high camp at
7,000m for our summit push. The
morning we left camp 2 headed for
camp 3 at 7,500m dawned clear and
calm- maybe this was all going to be
okay after-all.
The slope above camp 2 was much
steeper than I expected and it soon
became hard blue ice. A slip or fall
here would be fatal. There was an
abandoned tent halfway to camp 3
above me and in rapidly strengthening
wind I put my head down and once
again I'm leading from the front.
By the time I arrived at the abandoned
tent the wind was building and by the
time the others arrived there was zero
visibility, it was snowing and the wind
made it hard to stand up.
42

Leading when your life depends on it
There were five of us piled into a small
tent having a 'conversation' about
what to do next while the weather
outside got worse. Soon going down
wouldn't be a safe option either. In
that very confined space we debated
the options in a variety of languages.
Rosa wanted to go up. I wanted to go
down. It was as if all those differences
between us became concentrated into
a single point in time. I knew this was
a life-or-death decision and I did
something I've never done before - I
made my own decision and left to
descend without waiting for
agreement or consensus.
Eventually the others reluctantly
followed and we made it safely back
to camp 2. That night over a metre of
snow fell on the mountain, effectively
ending our chances of summitting and
our trip.
Even now I'm still not sure I did the
right thing in choosing to make my
own decision without regard to the
others, but maybe leadership in
extreme situations looks different to
what it looks like from the safety of an
office.
43

Learning from failure –
lessons from crisis
10
44

Learning from failure – lessons from crisis
Professionally I've learnt more in the
last three years of my career than the
whole prior decade due in no small
part to experiencing a number of work-
related crisis incidents. These
unwanted and unexpected intrusions
into the familiar ebb and flow of a
'normal' working week would be easy
to see as toxic at first, but have helped
me build new skills and experience
that a lot of leaders and managers
may never experience in their careers.
Here are some of the things I've learnt
about dealing with crises so far:
• Slow Down! No matter what kind
of crisis it is - cybersecurity,
privacy, customer satisfaction or
pandemic etc. - there's a lot of
think about and 1,000 ways to
make it worse. Rushing the
response is the single biggest
mistake you can make, so rule no.
1 in a crisis is "slow down".
• Errors compound. This is what
happens when you have yet to
learn rule no. 1 or forget it. In the
rush to respond you will make
more mistakes and those mistakes
will rapidly compound. Customers
generally understand that
organisations and their people
make occassional mistakes, but
reputations and careers are easily
destroyed if further mistakes are
made in responding to a crisis
incident. Rushing an incident
response means not taking the
time and care to work through the
complex decisions and
judgements often required, and
invariably means introducing
further errors which rapidly
compound.
• FFS not now! There is no good
time to have a crisis, but timing
wise they do seem to coincide with
the worst possible times
imaginable. Late Friday evening
when its almost impossible to get
hold of colleagues? Check. On the
way out of the office to attend the
staff xmas party? Check. Key staff
members on leave? Check.
• Real-life is not like the movies.
The first time you pick up your
organisations business continuity
plan in anger to deal with a real-life
crisis is likely the first time of
many that you realise that its
pretty unhelpful and doesn't really
cover what you are dealing with.
What's way more useful than a 30
or 60 page BCP is something akin
to the rules that pilots learn when
dealing with an emergency (aviate
- navigate - communicate). In a
crisis, if you're asked to be the
incident response manager and
find yourself in this situation get a
blank piece of paper and write the
following across the top:
CONTAIN-ASSESS-NOTIFY-
PREVENT. Focusing on following
those four generic steps in
sequence will largely keep you out
of trouble so long as you also
remember Rule no. 1!
45

Learning from failure – lessons from crisis
• It's a team sport. Crisis response
has so many moving parts you
need a small team to get it right.
IT, communications and media,
legal, finance, dealing with
insurers, dealing with the Board
and other key stakeholders. The
list of what needs to be done is
long. If you're incident manager,
your job is not to do any of the
doing - your job is to ensure that
everything on the list gets done by
others, and in the right order. Step
back and let them do their jobs.
46

What wilderness
navigation can teach us
about effective strategy
and planning
11
48

What wilderness navigation can teach us about effective strategy and planning
One of the biggest challenges in
traversing untracked wilderness like a
dense forest, a twisting ridge line, a
glacier, or a fast-flowing mountain
stream is connecting the 'big picture' -
what you see on the map - with what
you find with boots on the ground.
Modern maps provide an excellent
high-level guide for navigators,
showing us the shape and form of the
land from the air, but not the actual
conditions on the ground. A map will
show the forest canopy and contours
of the land underneath but not the
dense undergrowth that can slow
travel to a crawl, or bluffs and small
ravines that can completely bar the
way.
Smart navigators use the map to plan
an intended route from origin to
destination, but execute that plan
based on what they experience. In this
way, the destination doesn't change
but the intended route may vary
dramatically as navigators constantly
adapt their direction of travel based on
the map (zoom out) and actual
conditions encountered on the ground
(zoom in)
Zoom out - Zoom in: an alternative
approach to strategy in a world that
defies prediction
Deloitte have developed a useful
approach to strategy development
that shares many similarities to my
wilderness navigation experience.
You can find it at
https://www2.deloitte.com/content/d
am/insights/us/articles/4615_Zoom-
out-zoom-in/DI_Zoom-out-zoom-in.pdf
The Deloitte zoom out / zoom in
approach focuses on two very
different time horizons and iterates
between them. One horizon is 10-20
years, the other is 6-12 months.
There is no focus on the 1-5 year
horizon, with the rationale being if you
get the zoom out horizon right, and the
zoom in horizon right (with constant
iteration), everything else takes care of
itself.
"In challenging terrain, the shortest
distance between two points can
generally be guaranteed to take the
longest time"
49

What wilderness navigation can teach us about effective strategy and planning
And if we focus on a five-year horizon,
it’s possible to convince ourselves that
our company, and the business
environment, will look then pretty
much like they do today. Which of
course it won’t.
In the zoom out process its important
to drive an outside-in perspective
looking at the evolving needs of
customers and stakeholders.
In the zoom in process its important to
scale 'edge' opportunities required to
become the zoom out business and to
determine the one (yes one) near term
initiative that can strengthen the
current core business. For most
companies it will also be crucial to
identify what marginal activities to
stop in order to free up resources to
fund new initiatives.
For me, the similarities between good
wilderness navigation and the Deloitte
zoom out / zoom in approach to
strategy are striking: having a sense of
destination and committing to
accelerated movement (rather than a
fixed trajectory) to reach that
destination.
One final thought: Good navigators
walk at the back of the group because
its always easier to see the best way
forward with a team in front of you,
rather than behind. Is this the same
with strategy?
50

Making strategy simple
At times it seems like there's a whole
industry dedicated to making Strategy
as complex and as complicated as
possible. But the essence of effective
Strategy has always been about
simplicity, not complexity.
While my natural tendency is to over-
complicate most things, my colleague
Jeremy Campbell has a knack of being
able to cut-through complexity to get
to powerful simplicity, so he
developed a simple process to drive
our work helping companies develop
"Business Strategy for a Digital World”.
The process revolves around five D's:
Discover, Direct, Debate, Do, and
Debrief:
1. DISCOVER the possibilities
2. DIRECT the conversation
3. DEBATE the alternatives
4. DO the actions
5. DEBRIEF the outcomes
52

Why the old approaches to strategy
don’t work like they used to
Typical strategic planning approaches
are good in theory but in our
experience they rarely achieve the
results organisations are looking for.
This is because they often:
• Look forward only three to five
years where the 'future' looks
pretty much like the present. For
all its inherent challenges, avoiding
looking forward 10 to 20 years
means we end up not really
considering any genuine disruption
or change.
• End up trying to justify what we're
already doing rather than a
genuine attempt to position the
business for what needs to be
done.
• Avoid having to make difficult
trade-offs and end up being a
patch-work quilt that justifies
pretty much any and every idea in
order to keep everyone happy
instead
In modern business environments
strategic plans need to be less
prescriptive and focus on setting
direction and purpose, creating
momentum and being adaptive and
flexible
In a world where change is the only
constant, driven by factors such the
impact of automation and AI on work,
a changing global population, and
changing climate, strategic plans need
to be less prescriptive and focus on
setting direction and purpose, creating
momentum and being adaptive and
flexible.
This is a difficult balance to achieve
but we find that organisations that do
not plan in this way find themselves:
• Focused on their how whilst
arguing about or not
understanding their why
• Putting their customers second or
struggling to identify just who their
customers are
• Spread too thin as they do not
know which opportunities to say
no to or which old business
practices to let go
• Increasingly reactive as previous
failures to adapt have created an
organisation that is not well
adapted to its wider environment
• Managing conflicts between the
strategic, operational and tactical
arms of the business
• Stalling or struggling to generate
momentum
"In contrast to traditional
approaches, modern strategic
planning needs to create a
sense of direction, purpose
and momentum, whilst being
flexible to constant change".
53

In our 'Making Strategy Simple'
approach, we focus on asking the
right questions, knowing that the
answers tend to take care of
themselves
The 'right' questions will vary
depending on the circumstances. As a
rule though, the more challenging, the
better. Some of the questions we’ve
found useful include:
• What is value and how do we
create it now and in the future?
• Who are we creating value for?
• What can we do that no-one else
can or will do?
• How do we balance the needs of
now with the needs of the future?
• What do we start, what do we
change, what do we stop and what
do we continue?
• Does our structure serve our
purpose?
Deloitte's Zoom Out - Zoom In
approach was designed as an
alternative approach to a world that
defies prediction
We like the Zoom out - Zoom in
approach and have successfully used
it several times. We particularly love
the way it:
• Forces organisations to take a
genuine long-term view of their
industry
• Helps organisations to understand
where they need to be to succeed
in that future
• Identifies the two or three
initiatives that organisations need
to invest in to start moving
• Ensures resource allocation
matches strategic objectives
54

Four essential enablers
for successfully
launching strategic
change
13
55

Four Essential Enablers for successfully launching Strategic Change
Leading significant organisational
change programmes is hard at the
best of times. Even when a compelling
imperative for the need to change
exists and there is broad agreement
on where the organisation needs to
head to, it still feels a lot like trying to
launch a rocket into space. Except
instead of trying to overcome gravity
we're trying to overcome the internal
inertia created by the existing status-
quo and the gravity-like pull of
structure.
Having led a number of significant
organisational and strategic change
initiatives, I've observed four things
that seem to make a big difference
between achieving a successful
'launch' or never making it off the
launchpad in the first place:
• The right operating model to
deliver change;
• The right approach to funding and
investing in change;
• The right balance between
addressing future opportunities as
well as solving current problems;
• The right level of granularity within
the strategic change programme.
Enabler #1- the right operating model
to deliver change
An organisation's operating model is
the combination of roles, skills,
structures, processes, assets and
technologies that allow an
organisation to deliver on its strategy.
In effect, it is the way the organisation
is set up to achieve its goals, and meet
future challenges.
Let's be really clear: getting the right
operating model to deliver strategic
change is as important as the
strategy itself.
Bain & Company have done some
great thinking about the role that
operating models play in bridging the
gap between strategy and execution.
They also reinforce the key role that
structure plays in magnifying the
internal change inertia that we need to
overcome.
• “the backwards pull of structure
will undo even the best laid
strategic plans”
56

Enabler #2 - the right approach to
funding and investing in change
Weirdly, many organisations with
significant strategic change agendas
have already reached the point where
they have no residual capacity left to
fund the work required, or at best can
only fund marginal changes over and
above existing BAU activities. There is
always the hope it will be enough.
Hope is not a strategy and marginal
changes to existing funding
allocations are never enough to get a
strategic change agenda off the
launchpad.
In 'Strategy beyond the Hockey Stick:
People, Probabilities, and big moves to
beat the odds' Chris Bradley, Martin
Hirt, and Sven Smit set out compelling
research that shows the difference
between exceptional companies and
mediocre ones is their ability to rapidly
reallocate existing resources to
pursue new opportunities and
strategies. We're not talking about 1%
here, or even 5 to 10% - we're talking
about 20-30%.
And that's exactly the problem for
most organisations pursuing strategic
change. Everyone will agree the
change agenda is a great thing until
you ask them to give up a significant
chunk of their existing budget to fund
it. Then World War III breaks out and
99 times out of 100 the status quo
prevails and the change rocket blows
up before even leaving the launchpad.
Successful strategic change is always
underpinned by carefully targeted
funding and investment, and there are
a variety of approaches to achieve this
- some fairly passive and some
unapologetically disruptive. I've set out
some of the targeted approaches
together with pros and cons below:
Having worked in education for a long
time, one of my enduring insights
would be that innovation only occurs
when constraint is introduced - I
suspect this is the case for many
other sectors as well.
Enabler #3 - the right balance
between addressing future
opportunities as well as solving
current problems
Leading effective change requires
careful thought about how to invest to
create both current and future value
for customers and stakeholders.
Typically, organisations have two
‘engines’ for value generation, and
without an explicit focus on both, they
tend to focus on the here and now
only. 57

Engine One – connect & optimise
Engine one is good at making the
most of now but generally works to
slow or prevent engine two activity.
We generally mistake incremental
improvement for real transformation
and it’s hard to move away from tried
and trued activity, even when its
demonstrably no longer working.
Engine one involves investing now to
get value now or soon.
Engine Two – develop & transform
Engine two is good at coming up with
new ideas and new ways of doing
things but needs to be practical and
scalable. Engine two involves
investing now to get value later.
Picking the right balance of
investment in change and business
improvement initiatives between the
two engines is important. For most
organisations a 70:20:10 split or
similar will work well.
Enabler #4 - the right granularity
within the strategic change
programme
In practical terms, the level of
granularity within a strategic change
programme really matters. I've seen
strategic change programmes with as
few as seven initiatives, and others
with upwards of 80+.
Set the granularity too high, and not
only will everyone lose sight of the
detail, but invariably the heavy lifting
will fall on the shoulders of just a few
key internal change champions while
the rest of the organisation goes
merrily on doing what its always done
(except for a new mission to actively
undermine the change programme).
Set the granularity too low and its all
just noise, with too many moving parts
to make a lot of sense, but at least
everyone will feel like they're making a
contribution. Doing everything
conceivable will fool us into focusing
on "doing things right" (i.e. project
management) rather than "doing the
right things" (portfolio management).
A workable compromise is often to
have two levels of granularity in your
strategic change programme - for
example having 7-10 strategic
initiatives each with 3 to 5 key actions.
58

Hitting the ceiling – when
agile organisations
exhaust their ability to
fund change
14
59

Hitting the ceiling - when agile organisations exhaust their ability to fund change
In the last few years my colleague
Jeremy Campbell and I have been
working with several ambitious,
capable and agile organisations that
have 'hit their heads on the ceiling' -
that is they've reached the point where
the only way they can fund the
development or implementation of
new activities or initiatives is to reduce
or retire an existing activity to free up
the resources necessary.
• When organisations ‘hit the ceiling’
the only way to introduce new
activities or initiatives is to retire
an existing activity to free up the
resources necessary.
Organisations that have built their
culture on the almost heroic basis of
constantly trying bold, new, and
exciting things, are very very good at
nurturing and growing new ideas, but
typically terrible at stopping old, less
relevant, or less valuable things.
It takes enormous discipline to
challenge and question the value of
tried-and-true approaches, and as a
result, for some organisations that 'hit
the ceiling' they'll never get off it.
You've seen this right? Where the best
predictor of every business units
budget is what they got the year
before or where the leadership team
agrees on a bold new strategy right up
to the point it means taking resources
away from one business unit to give to
another and then WWIII breaks out
and it all turns to custard.
Getting off the ceiling needs new
disciplines and behaviour...
Organisations that hit the ceiling and
want to get off it so they can keep
doing bold and ambitious things need
to develop new disciplines and
behaviours to complement the old
ones:
1. The discipline of understanding
customer value and how it is
created
2. The discipline to evaluate what
has always been done and to
challenge the purpose and value
of existing core activities (internal
disruption if you will)
3. The discipline to move existing
resources (people, $) away from
where they have been allocated
historically, to where they are
most needed to move forward
4. The discipline of using data and
evidence alongside values and
beliefs in decision making
5. The discipline to decide what not
to do and what to stop
...And it needs new processes
Alongside new disciplines and
behaviours, the ability to still move
forward requires an approach we
rarely see - Jeremy calls this the
'retirement home' - a place that we
send things to live out their remaining
lives with dignity and respect.
60

Hitting the ceiling - when agile organisations exhaust their ability to fund change
The loop shown in the diagram below
between 'Greenhouse' to 'core
business' to 'retirement home' creates
an effective and predictable way to
recycle finite resources in a closed
eco-system and helps balance our
propensity to do shiny new things
alongside the discipline of ensuring
every $ we invest in our core business
remains relevant and demonstrably
achieving what was intended.
61

"What's the worst thing that could
possibly happen?": Why
organisations need to focus on
opportunities as much as risks
15
62

"What's the worst thing that could possibly happen?": Why organisations need to focus
on opportunities as much as risks
Boards and Senior Executives are
spending an increasingly large amount
of time identifying risks and figuring
out how to manage or mitigate those
risks, which is entirely appropriate
given the increasingly volatile and
unpredictable world we find ourselves
living in.
It strikes me as odd however, that
most of these same organisations
spend relatively little time thinking
about the opportunities created by
that same volatility and
unpredictability while spending so very
much time thinking about all the
things that could possibly go wrong in
the face of it.
The role of Boards in developing
Strategy covers some of the
opportunity piece in the same way it
covers some of the risks - after all
Strategy is fundamentally about what
choices the organisation makes (what
it will do), the trade-offs required (what
it won't do), and the underlying
purpose and vision that drives those
specific choices from a large set of
possibilities.
So opportunity and risk is part of
Strategy for sure. But just as risk is
dynamic and can change in real time,
so can opportunity. And if Strategy
was enough to completely cover
opportunity and risk, why is it then that
I've come across a lot of 'Audit and
Risk' committees and precisely zero
'Opportunity and Risk' committees?
I've come across a lot of 'Audit and
Risk' committees and precisely zero
'Opportunity and Risk' committees
And if you think there's not as much
need to focus on opportunity
management as there is on risk
management, I've worked with quite a
few organisations that have well
thought out strategies and strong risk
management frameworks and
practices that still appear to be doing
all kinds of random stuff with no
apparent purpose, and others that are
easily surprised by their own runaway
success.
In a Digital World, underestimating
success is as much of a problem as
underestimating failure
A microcosm of what I'm talking about
seems to be routinely playing out in
organisations making the shift to
digital.
I've seen a number of examples of
organisations that have launched a
digital product or service only to find
that the demand from customers is
orders of magnitude greater than what
they anticipated.
Unmitigated wild success can be as
much of a problem as unmitigated
failure if the organisation can't deliver
or capitalise on the potential, and
sometimes its actually worse.
63

"What's the worst thing that could possibly happen?": Why organisations need to focus
on opportunities as much as risks
And most of these same times, the
wild success should not actually have
come as a surprise at all given the
careful product, market, and customer
research that's taken place
beforehand. So why then was it so
unexpected? I think there's two key
factors in play:
• We been conditioned to focus on
what happens if things go wrong
(an increasingly long list) rather
than to focus on what happens if
things go right.
• We've become really conservative
in the way we develop business
cases (IT is this your fault?). Even
if we've done the hard work to
prove the potential, we're more
inclined to dumb this down to
something pretty modest to get a
green light for investment. In those
same business cases we're
expected to have a strong focus
on what happens if things go
wrong, but I can't remember the
last time a Director asked 'what
happens if things go wildly right?'.
The Future is less frightening through
an opportunities lens
If you've read any of my other articles,
you know that I routinely harp on
about the world being a very different
place in less than 30 years from now.
The four mega-trends of a growing
and ageing population, mass
displacement of workers from
traditional jobs affected by AI and
automation, the rise of Gen Z, and the
effects of climate change will all have
profound impacts on business.
It's a natural thing to see all that
change as a threat, but if you can find
a way to focus on the opportunities, it
will seem far less threatening and a
whole lot more engaging.
64

Policy without strategy
is the noise before
failure
16
65

Policy without strategy is the noise before failure
I was bemused recently to discover
that the only 'strategy' related part of
two senior public-sector strategy
leadership roles was the word
'Strategy' in the title, and that the roles
were fundamentally about policy
leadership, not strategy.
What's the problem? Aren't policy and
strategy closely related or
fundamentally about the same thing?
Policy is the ENDS and Strategy is the
WAYS and MEANS?
Maybe, but I think the key differences
between strategy and policy are poorly
understood and critically important in
a global environment increasing
dominated by uncertainty.
If you think about the difference
between 'being in the right place'
(strategy) and 'doing the right thing'
(policy), you might better see what I
mean (lower right):
Clearly in my worldview, strategy and
policy are both important to get right
to ensure long term success, but even
the very best public policy can't
succeed without the strategy being
right in the first place.
I think there are other important
differences between strategy and
policy as well, although clearly those
differences fall on a spectrum rather
than being completely distinctive.
In the public-sector space I see a lot of
things recently labelled as 'strategy':
housing strategies, transport
strategies, education strategies.
All of these have good intent, but just
like the strategy roles I saw advertised,
when you scratch the surface, a lot of
these 'strategies' don't really appear to
have much to do with actual strategy.
66

When push comes to
shove – why projects
need to surface
conflict sooner
17
68

Over the years I have been involved in
many projects either as Project
Manager or Executive sponsor and
have learnt that successfully
managing stakeholder expectations
from project beginning to end is a
critical success factor in almost all
projects.
Despite knowing the importance of
managing expectations and putting
enormous effort into stakeholder
engagement, there are a couple of
projects I have been involved in that
still went pear shaped right at the end.
Why? Well on reflection I think there
are three major reasons:
1. The consequences of the change
weren't obvious enough at the
outset. A great example of this
was a Faculty restructuring
process in an academic
institution. The project involved
building a new, modern trades
training facility that would support
project-based learning and flexible
learning spaces. All the affected
teaching staff were involved in the
project from the outset and
consulted frequently, but for
many, it was not until they stood
in the newly completed building
that the penny dropped - the way
students would learn was
radically different and their role as
teachers had now fundamentally
changed. Needless to say they
were under prepared.
2. Stakeholders are 'engaged', but
not actually paying attention.
You've provided briefing papers,
regular project overviews and
updates - gone way overboard on
the comms and stakeholder
engagement, and yet somehow,
right at the end of the project, one
of the key stakeholders says,
"Why didn't I know about this until
now?". Turns out that despite your
sterling efforts at managing
stakeholder expectations, one or
more key stakeholders just
weren't paying attention. This is
your problem, not theirs.
3. You've been standing in a
minefield all along. Similar in
some ways to attention deficit,
this is where there was always
some underlying conflict or strong
disagreement with the basis for
the project, but it doesn't surface
until the very (bitter) end. People
generally avoid conflict, so they
keep their disagreement to
themselves for as long as
possible until 'Boom!' you
unwitting stand on the landmine
that was there all along.
My solution? Engineer what I like to
call "push comes to shove" moments
early in the project. These moments
are what happens when you ask
someone to do something that will
guarantee you have their attention and
surface any underlying conflicts or
disagreements
When push comes to shove – why projects need to surface conflict sooner
69

It takes a bit of skill to pick effective
'push-comes-to-shove' moments, but
here are a few examples:
• asking a key stakeholder to
approve funding for your project
from their budget;
• asking a key stakeholder to de-
prioritise another project that they
have been visibly supporting in
favour of your one;
• taking the people that will be
affected by your project or change
into a physical environment where
they can clearly see the
consequences for them;
• Using a noisy customer to test
your organisations actual
commitment to change in the face
of the likely potential for customer
complaints or dissatisfaction.
Projects are about change, so whether
you are a project manager, project
sponsor or change manager, its in
your best interests to have affected
staff understand the consequences
for them, for key stakeholders to be
paying (enough) attention, and to
avoid stepping on unexpected land
mines.
By focusing on creating push-comes-
to-shove moments as early as
possible in the life of a project or
change management process, you can
be sure to lift the likelihood of an
successful outcome and avoid a lot of
grief in the process
When push comes to shove – why projects need to surface conflict sooner
70

Why all or nothing is
a bad idea
18
71

As both a Project Manager and
General Manager I have had plenty of
career experience in building business
cases for either internal or external
funding approval at CEO and Board
level. Business cases can take an
enormous amount of time and effort
to get right, and through hard won
experience I have learnt to optimise
my success rate by fine tuning my
approach.
Here's my take on how to improve
your business case outcomes:
1. You get what you ask for: Which
is why creating a business case
that has only two options
(everything or nothing) is
generally a bad idea - there are
really only two possible outcomes
and both might actually be
undesirable / undeliverable.
2. Options are good: Building a
business case with a few well
chosen options (somewhere
between do nothing and do
everything) is likely to get you a
better outcome - choice is good.
3. Don't leave things to chance: Just
like a multi choice test, if you put
a business case together with say
four different options, you should
be aiming to elevate the chance of
your recommended option getting
approval by making the other
options either downright
unpalatable or far less attractive.
4. But be subtle: Subtly shaping the
options is fine, showing a clear
bias is likely to backfire...
5. Have a clear recommendation:
Don't make the mistake of not
actually asking for what you want.
Have a clear recommendation
with a compelling rationale.
6. Start with the end in mind: You
should be constructing your
business case around a particular
'end in mind' right from the outset.
Don't start writing until you have a
clear idea of what you want and
why you want it.
7. Use someone else to make your
case: There is a time and a place
to use external consultants. One
of these times is to lend weight
and credibility to your business
case and recommendations. If
you do use this tactic make sure
the consultants actually have
standing with your decision
making audience (i.e. are trusted)
and that the cost / benefit makes
sense - it won't be cheap! Using a
powerful Executive Sponsor from
within your organisation may be a
useful alternative to lend
credibility to your work.
8. Be visual as well as data driven:
Typically only some of your
audience will be data driven -
tables and text are fine, but don't
underestimate the power of a
good graphic or chart to engage a
decision making audience. Oh
and a well constructed photo or
two illustrating the problem you
are trying to fix / improve in the
work environment itself can also
work wonders.
Why all or nothing is a bad idea
72

9. Use the language of your
audience: If its a business case
about technology investment, use
the language of business and the
accepted tools (NPV, IRR, RoI
etc.). Using the wrong language
won't help your chances of getting
what you want and will only serve
to make future business cases
more challenging to get over the
line.
10. Watch out for corporate amnesia:
It's likely that your business case
will be built on previous strategies
and decisions within the
organisation. Corporate amnesia
is the ability of senior
management to completely forget
or overlook these previous
decisions and choices. If your
business case is building on
things that have been agreed in
the past, remind your audience of
this.
11. Don't overlook the why: The
outcomes you are trying to
achieve and the problems you are
trying to address may be entirely
self evident to you but that's only
because you have been immersed
in trying to solve this problem.
Make sure your business case is
strongly focused on the 'why' and
not just the 'what'. If you make a
strong argument around the 'why',
the solutions you are proposing
should be self-evident and easy to
support.
12. Socialise your business case at
an early stage: This one key tactic
alone can help you achieve
success. Socialise the key
elements of your business case
early with the decision making
audience in a formative way.
You'll not only get valuable
feedback at an early stage that
will help you shape a better final
draft, you'll also get stakeholder
engagement. And at the very
least you will avoid wasting a lot
of time.
13. Corporate amnesia is highly
selective: If you've failed to deliver
on a business case that has been
approved in the past - even where
the reason was completely
outside of your control - you can
guarantee your board or CEO will
clearly remember every single
detail of this. Even if it was years
ago or was a one off failure.
Reputation is a fragile thing. If
you've had failures acknowledge
them and demonstrate the
lessons learnt. Making mistakes
is generally acceptable, making
the same mistake again generally
has low tolerance.
So here's how these approaches can
work in different contexts:
I worked as the CIO for a large
municipality. The planning and
approval process for IT business
cases was long and torturous. It took
about two years to get an idea from
concept to approval.
73

All or nothing business cases
invariably resulted in getting nothing,
but giving the elected members
choices was a winning tactic. Better
still, framing business cases around
programmes of work which were built
in palatable chunks, but still
connected by an overarching plan or
strategy yielded the best results.
Contrast this to when I worked as the
CIO for a small electricity retail and
network company. Pitching even
clearly underformed ideas to the CEO
and Board was likely to result in
getting the go ahead virtually on the
spot. Getting what you asked for can
equally result in an 'ouch' moment
when you were just thinking out loud
or when you realise that what you
asked for may actually be
undeliverable.
One of my friends was the Factory
Manager at a dairy company. The
board were mostly farmers
themselves. Put up a business case
for a million dollar investment in a new
IT system and the discussion would
last about ten minutes. But put up a
business case about buying a new
milk tanker - something they were
experts in as farmers themselves - and
the discussion could last hours.
Clearly putting a lot of effort into
building a extensive business case for
an IT system investment was probably
a poor use of time, while the business
case for a new milk tanker was a great
example of the need to socialise ideas
at a very early stage.
Oh and one last thought. In another
organisation I worked for (in a non IT
related role), I quickly learnt never to
put a graph in front of the CEO. Text -
yes. Tables, yes. But never graphs.
Give him a graph and he would
invariably get wildly distracted and
head off on a tangent with no
guarantee of ever getting him back to
the topic at hand. Just goes to prove
the adage "know your audience".
.
74

3 reasons why your
organisation does NOT
need a project
management office
19
75

3 Reasons why your organisation does NOT need a Project Management Office
Project Management Offices or PMOs
seem to be all the rage at the moment,
especially in SMEs.
Having worked in project and
programme management as well as
strategy for years, you would think I'd
be thrilled to see the PMO finally being
recognised as a core capability for
organisations to translate their
strategies into desired outcomes. But
I'm more inclined to see the call for a
PMO within an organisation as
symptomatic of other problems
lurking just below the surface. So in
this article I'm going to set out three
arguments against setting up a PMO
within your organisation:
1. You don't need a PMO to help you
deliver all those strategic or
change initiatives, you just need
to do less:
The business case for establishing a
PMOs is often premised on the need
to co-ordinate the delivery of a large
number of complex strategic, change,
and /or business improvement
initiatives.
Organisations seem to readily fall into
the trap of associating being
frantically busy delivery stuff for
'customers and stakeholders' with
actually making a meaningful impact.
PMOs allow organisations to ramp up
from frantic to manic when what's
actually needed is more thinking
(about what creates customer value),
and far far less doing
You'll need a PMO to deliver 70 key
initiatives, but you don't need it for the
seven initiatives that actually matter.
2. You don't need a PMO, you just
need to learn how to say no:
The really hard part of strategy is
making choices. What the
organisation will do, and more
importantly won't do. But in truth we
avoid making those hard choices like
the plague because saying 'no'
involves egos and vested interests and
tears and conflict.
So we end up saying 'yes' to everything
that floats to the top in our strategic
planning and business planning
processes so long as we can fund it -
even when it doesn't make any sense
to do half that many things just to
keep everyone happy.
And as a result of not being able to
say 'no', we end up needing a PMO to
help deliver all that stuff, most of
which doesn't actually have a
meaningful impact apart from making
us feel manically busy.
3. You don't need a PMO, you just
need 'connecting' in your leadership
culture.
Aside from help organisations embed
project management disciplines in
their core, the key function of
programme managers and PMOs is to
connect the dots across complex
streams of activity involving multiple
teams, customer groups, and
stakeholders. 76

3 Reasons why your organisation does NOT need a Project Management Office
PMOs act as connectors where
leadership teams are failing to do
their job.
If senior leadership teams actually
acted as teams - driving alignment and
coordination of activities across
multiple functional silos, and
supporting cross-team collaboration -
you wouldn't need a PMO inside an
SME-sized organisation.
But regardless of leadership quality,
any organisation that encourages its
staff to collaborate and connect
across teams already has the key
capability needed to succeed.
Connection-as-a-behaviour, if it can be
embedded in an organisation's culture,
is far more likely to drive enduring
success than a PMO model which
seeks to achieve connection-as-a-
function.
77

The crucial role of
executive sponsor in
mission critical projects
20
78

The crucial role of executive sponsor in mission critical projects
I've been working on getting a couple
of mission critical projects to the start
line recently and its reminded me once
again of a few simple truths about
project management and project
planning:
• there is simply no amount of
planning and preparation that is
enough to power change
So if the 4P's of project management
(People, Product, Process, and
Project) aren't enough on their own to
power change, then what's needed?
Change needs energy
Projects are about change, and
change is hard. Achieving significant
change requires a massive investment
of personal and professional energy to
overcome the tendency of people and
systems to want to stay the same. In
my experience, nine times out of 10 its
the executive sponsor, not the project
manager that has to find the energy to
get a major project over the line.
• It's the role of Executive Sponsor
to power change
Getting people's attention is
ridiculously hard
Maybe its just me, but I've just about
lost count of the number of times that
I thought I had stakeholders engaged
on a mission critical project at an early
stage of a project only to find out
towards the end that I didn't have their
Attention.
When stakeholders are engaged in a
project you can point to all the ways
they have been informed, but you can't
count on any of that when the fur is
flying. It's only when you get people's
attention because they now
understand what this change means
for them that you can count on
knowing where people actually stand.
It's amazing how the contentious and
sometimes blindly obvious aspects of
change that a project is driving will
remain hidden until the very end.
Through past experience I now try to
create what I call 'push-comes-to-
shove' moments early on in a project
with some aspect of the project that is
so contentious that it's guaranteed to
get peoples attention.
• It's the role of Executive Sponsor
to get the attention of
stakeholders, and get it early.
Are we there yet?
If you end up driving a mission critical
project that spans multiple planning
periods (years), you're highly likely to
have to fight the natural tendency of
organisations to want to move quickly
on to shiny new things.
Keeping the focus on a mission critical
multi-year project is an especially
tough gig, as attention fatigue is a real
thing and a kind of amnesia will creep
in where people will naturally lose
79

Hope is not a strategy - reflections on strategy and leadership in Aotearoa New Zealand.pdf

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