Last week, I shared my strategic planning model called The Strategic Planning Pyramid (the name is accurate, if not a little obvious). It has been developed through two decades of working in strategic foresight and planning, and although simplistic on the surface, it highlights some of the fundamental problems leaders face when developing and delivering strategic plans.
As promised in last week’s post, I’m going to do a deep dive into the model, starting at the bottom and working our way up. So, without further ado, let’s jump into the need for shared understanding, why it’s increasingly hard to come by, and why we often believe we have it even when we don’t.
What is shared understanding
If our strategy is the course we set, then shared understanding is the collective capacity to draw and read a map.
We’ve very quickly become accustomed to having access to global maps, with submetre resolution on our smartphones, but for more than 99% of human history, this hasn’t been the case. For millennia seafaring has taken place using maps with little detail and questionable accuracy (and a recent story of people following Google Maps as they drove off an unfinished bridge suggests maps still aren’t as trustworthy as we expect them to be).
During the golden age of exploration from the 15th to 17th centuries, colonial powers such as Italy, Spain, England and the Netherlands realised that having more extensive and accurate maps was a distinct competitive advantage. Within palaces all over Europe cartographers were tasked with collecting information from various sources to continually extend and improve their maps – and subsequently, their power.
Cartographers were rarely explorers themselves, but rather, individuals who were tasked with collating information into a coherent view of both what was known and what was yet to be explored. The bigger and more complex the maps, the more this became a collective effort. It was only by bringing together knowledge from multiple sources and the experiences of different people that an accurate map could be created.
This is not dissimilar to what is required when developing strategy. To formulate a robust strategy there is first of all a need to understand where we are and what’s happening around us. There is also a need to consider the different directions we could head in and what we might find if we went there. Finally, once we’ve shaped this into a coherent map of the present and the future, we need leaders and decision-makers who can read and understand the map in a consistent way.
Why shared understanding is so important
In 1544 a German polymath and academic by the name of Sebastian Münster created the first widely distributed map to not only depict, but to name ‘the Americas’. In doing so the landmass to the east of Europe across the great sea became commonly understood using a singular term. It didn’t bring the Americas into existence but it greatly reduced the risk of mistakes and misunderstanding when talking about it.
Having a shared map of where we are and where we are going means we can be far more intentional in our decisions and far more effective in our planning and use of resources. At its core, this is what strategy is, the intentional choices about how we use our organisation’s resources to take us in a direction we collectively desire. Although we could do this without a foundation of shared understanding, we will forever be plagued with questions such as “Where are we going?” and “What did you mean?”.
Why shared understanding is hard to achieve
Achieving shared understanding is simple on the surface but is becoming increasingly difficult.
Shared understanding is simple because it’s the natural byproduct of talking to other people. The very act of communicating aligns our understanding of what words mean on a micro level. And by sharing our knowledge and experiences with others, and them sharing theirs back to us we help align our beliefs about the world and what’s going on around us.
But creating shared understanding is difficult because understanding isn’t static. Unlike the world as depicted on a nautical map, the world our organisations inhabit continues to evolve and change (perhaps akin to a weather map). The uncertainty people currently experience is an indicator that the world is changing faster than we might be comfortable with and, our shared understanding is struggling to keep up.
This breakdown of shared understanding is also impacted by:
- Staff turnover – if we have high staff turnover we are constantly introducing both new beliefs and having to bring people up to speed on the beliefs we collectively share
- Reduced interactions – Working remotely and general busyness means we don’t make as much time for the aligning conversations. This is particularly the case for boards and other decision-making groups that come together rarely.
- Growing diversity – As teams become increasingly diverse individual perspectives are likely to diverge. As much as this can bring significant benefits in the long term there’s also greater opportunity for misunderstanding in the short term.
Why we believe we have shared understanding when we don’t
Unfortunately we aren’t always aware that shared understanding doesn’t exist. Most people tend to think that others see the world in the same way and believe words mean the same thing.
A couple of weeks ago I shared one of my favourite pieces of research from the last few years – MIT found if you take two random people off the street there’s only a 20% chance they will agree on what a penguin is. They might agree that they are flightless and they can swim but there are high rates of disagreement on their size and whether they are soft or rough to touch.
I witnessed a good example of this type of misunderstanding just a few weeks ago. I had the honour of Chairing the AGM of My Community Library for the very first time and as part of my annual report I proudly shared some of the diverse programs and services Myli provides to the community. After the AGM one of our new board members (who is also the mayor of a regional council) came up to me with such enthusiasm and said, ‘I didn’t realise the library did all those things’.
Before that moment, when he heard the word ‘library’ he didn’t think of surfboards, energy efficiency kits and the Library of Things. He didn’t think about the programs Myli runs to support the unemployed and recent migrants to write resumes and improve their employability. He just thought “books on shelves”.
When we say library, customer, products, marketing, social media, and strategy (let alone more emergent terms such as AI, flexible working and diversity and inclusion) we assume others understand the same thing we do. But I would suggest it’s very rarely the case – unless effort has been put in to make it so.
How to create a foundation of shared understanding
With the privilege of looking in on leadership teams from the outside, I see that so much of the conflict, frustration, mistrust, poor decision-making and wasted resources in organisations ultimately stems from a lack of shared understanding, yet it often gets blamed on either external factors such as unpredictable “once in a 100 year” events… or individual incompetence.
And although shared understanding can be created unintentionally through watercooler-type conversations, this can’t be relied on, and we increasingly need more intentional approaches. A big part of the work I do with organisations is providing structured processes that bring people together to develop a collective map.
This could be an extended engagement to develop a suite of future scenarios that allow leaders to see over the horizon in different directions, or it could be a shorter one-day workshop to bring a team together so they can refocus their efforts for the year ahead. It might otherwise be a session to help stakeholders develop a shared understanding around emergent concepts such as AI, flexible work, community activism, and corporate social responsibility.
If you’d like to look into these keynotes, workshops, and services in more detail, you can check out my shiny new services guide that was released just a week ago. Otherwise, next week, we’re going to continue this series with a deep dive into the need and challenges of creating collective purpose.
Simon
