Why Your Strategy Retreat Is Already Broken Without a Post-Mortem

You are a high-ranking executive in a company that is about to create a new strategic plan. It comes on the heels of mostly poor results from the prior strategy. You sense that today’s corporate strategy should not be set aside without learning from it, but the rest of your team disagrees — led by your chief executive officer. How hard should you push?

Somewhere in the executive suite, someone knows exactly what went wrong with the prior strategy. They won’t say it — and not always for lack of courage.

Sometimes that is because the person who most needs to hear it, the chief executive officer, has quietly made the plan’s failure a referendum on himself. There is a name for what is happening. It is not stubbornness, and it is not ego in the sense most executives mean the word. It is an unlikely fusion between identity and authorship, and it predicts why the team’s next plan won’t break new ground.

It seems obvious that a failing chief executive officer is the one person who needs introspection. But that is rarely how it plays out.

Most people who have worked with top leaders know that many tend towards ego and narcissism. They take things personally. Successes are due to their innate strength while failures are often pinned on outside forces like “bad luck”.

Therefore, it takes work for them to own failures — work we assume isn’t needed when things go well. Here is evidence otherwise.

Garry Ridge ran WD-40 for over two decades, building one of the most studied culture turnarounds in business on a command-and-control mantra: be brilliant, be brief, be gone. Then he said something that mantra could not survive: “I couldn’t do this alone.”

Alan Mulally, credited with rescuing Ford without a government bailout while its rivals took one, said it just as plainly: “It’s bigger than me.”

Satya Nadella went further — he dismantled Microsoft’s senior leadership structure, believing that no single person, including him, should hold that much of the answer.

The assumption that failure requires more introspection misses what actually happened here: Each chief executive officer was already succeeding, with every reason to keep doing more of the same.

None of them lacked self-awareness. Yet, each one gave up sole ownership of their company’s vision anyway, voluntarily, before anyone forced the issue.

We may think there is some common personality trait. But underlying both failure and success is a deliberate decision the best leaders make.

The Unusual Decision

They each made a conscious decision to step away from personally “owning the vision”. Ridge, Mulally, and Nadella weren’t managing their egos better than other leaders; they were rejecting a common premise.

Here is the conventional wisdom. A chief executive officer is supposed to have a vision for the company. It is part of the job. However, there is a flaw in this popular belief.

Consider that vision shouldn’t be authored by an individual, brought down on a modern version of golden tablets. Instead, a vision must be surfaced collectively.

Furthermore, the more the vision is treated as the leader’s precious baby, the harder he will resist a post-mortem.

Failure and Success: Same Reflex

When the chief executive officer senses that the prior strategy was a failure, he will often try to suppress honest discussion. A suggestion of a post-mortem lands like a criticism, even when carefully facilitated.

By contrast, a chief executive officer who defends the prior strategy’s successes and resists a balanced analysis may block the next strategy session entirely. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” This Kodak-Blockbuster-Intel mentality prevents the consideration of incipient threats like new technology until it is too late.

These are opposite reactions, but they come from the same place — a tendency for chief executive officers to take vision and strategy personally.

If you are not the top leader, you may need to prompt a transformation. One approach: help the chief executive officer see himself as “Chief Learner” or “Experimenter-in-Charge” rather than sole author.

Tell the stories of Ridge, Mulally, and Nadella — proof that the shift is possible. Then picture your own chief executive officer hearing them.

Back in that room, he is still resisting the post-mortem, and you are still deciding how hard to push. Pressure won’t move him. A different question might be: Whose vision is this supposed to be?

Ridge, Mulally, and Nadella all answered that matter the same way, each at the peak of his influence, when nothing compelled the admission. That is the opening worth using — not a challenge to your chief executive officer’s judgment but an invitation to a job description he never quite chose, and one he is now free to choose.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To search his prior columns on productivity, strategy, engagement and business processes, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com.