It’s time to RESET, again: The Discipline of the Reset
Don’t just Survive - Thrive! While a popular phrase, and one that we hear increasingly after market turbulence, it misses the critical point. Just surviving will not get you to Thrive. If you are not prepared to go through a Reset — and if you are not prepared to manage the changes that come along with it — you will likely not get to Thrive. The power is in the Reset.
But resets are hard because Resets involve change. Creating a robust new strategy is fundamentally about change. Change is hard for individuals and harder still for organizations. So much so, I often get asked by leaders to soften the wording of reset, as they do not want to signal too much of a change. Things are mostly working, they will say, and they do not want to ‘scare’ the team. I appreciate the sentiment; change management is hard and maintaining engagement harder still after a series of changes. The challenge and opportunity we face as leaders, though, is today’s market environment is presenting a constantly changing set of dynamics, which means we need to be prepared to constantly adapt, realign, and yes occasionally, change what we are doing to grab these opportunities.
But how? Here’s a few practices I like to keep ensuring the discipline of the Reset:
Change the first question of the strategy review: We often default to asking the team ‘Are we on track to plan?’ as the start of the strategy review. But asking this question holds some troubling assumptions within it: that there was only one track, we got it right the first time, and the situation has not changed. These are not assumptions I like to make, so instead, start the review with this question: Has the situation changed? This forces the discipline to review your top beliefs and be prepared to adjust priorities if these beliefs have changed.
Don’t have a situation assessment, Chapter 4 of SRT will help you build one!
Communicate beliefs before priorities: When communicating your strategy, always start by what we belief, and link these top beliefs to your top priorities (what we call must-win battles in SRT). Just communicating the priorities, while simpler, does not appropriately frame the organization that we are making decisions based on our current beliefs, and we should be prepared to change those priorities when the situation fundamentally changes. Starting communication with the beliefs does something very powerful: it gives you permission to change.
Want more advice on how to do so, Chapter 10 of SRT goes in more detail.
Empower your strategy champions: Too often we hold strategy champions accountable for activities, and we track and review in incredibly detail the GANT charts and multi-colored slides that show where the activity plan is. This frames leaders to go step-by-step through activities, regardless of learnings, and prevents needed discussions of what we are learning, what’s changed, and how we should adjust. Too many organizations still frame adjusting the plan as wrong, or being off track, but in a dynamic world often adjusting based on learning is the right move to take! Hold champions accountable for outcomes, not activities (and real outcomes, not outcomes that are only outputs, or the completion of activities) and empower them to adjust and move as they go.
Want a template for doing so, chapter 12 of SRT presents one!
Force a strategy reset every three years: You need to force the discipline to truly reset. Otherwise every year will be a rolling strategy where you mostly keep everything the same with slight adjustments or updates. This often prevents new, true breakthrough growth, opportunities for coming onto the short list of priorities. So bust out of the linear growth trap by forcing a ‘reset’ every three years where you re-challenge all your critical strategy assumptions, that is, go through each of the strategy questions afresh.
You’ll need most of the book for this step!
Be prepared for a Hard Reset: Sometimes in doing this, you will realize that all of your assumptions have been challenged. This is sobering, but embrace it, and begin instead the process of the Hard Reset.
I wrote about the Hard Reset last month in Fortune, where I used Dell’s reset as an example. What’s striking is how many current companies need to do one, now. From Boeing suffering a generational crisis in confidence and leadership, to Nike trying to reclaim its brand and image, to Starbucks looking to get back the customer experience and differentiation seemingly lost over the past years. The post-Covid digital/tech value creation drive by many brand-led companies is fading, or at least in the eyes of investors, and industry veterans are taking the helm back from tech and finance-driven CEOs. Will it work? Only time will tell, but I will be writing about our current cases of Hard Resets, so stay tuned.
You are likely asking, how can I reset when I am still facing uncertainty, shouldn’t I wait to learn more? That’s another trap – the incessant holding pattern, where we wait and wait to learn more before making that next step of strategic decisions. Something I caution against, but I’ve got some tips on how to do so, which I explored last month in Fast Company.
And finally for my entrepreneurs, embracing the Reset matters even more so, as often it feels like we are in a continual Reset. How do we bust out of that and get to Thrive? Something I explored with Gene Hammett in his excellent Growth ThinkTank podcast.
