How I Can Help

Plans, goals, meetings, workshops and restructuring don't change the real dynamics.

You have run the off-site. You have set the goals, moved the reporting lines, brought in the training. Ninety days later the organization is working on what it was always working on.

The plan was never the variable. The system that determines what happens to the plan is.

Which of these sounds like where you are?

1. We agreed on it. It still hasn't started.
2. We built the plan. But it doesn't stick.
3. We're following the plan. But it's not working.
4. Everything matters. So nothing comes off the list.
5. I've invested in leadership. Every decision still comes back to me.
6. I've hired great people. They're carrying more than they should.
7. I've built a strong team. There's still no one here who will push back on me.

The first four are the same problem. The next two are a different one. The last one is on its own. Here is each.

If it is any of 1-4 above

A plan is a set of intentions dropped into a system that already has its own momentum. The system was there first, it runs on habit and preference, gives out real time rewards, and it does not go quiet just because a new plan arrived.

So the plan does not fail in any dramatic way. It stalls, or it gets quietly displaced, or it keeps running after it stopped producing, or there was never room for it. Four different endings, one cause.

The work needs to focus on the system rather than on the plan. It happens with your team, in the meetings and decisions where the work actually gets done, because that is the only place the system is visible.

If it is 5 or 6

Growth added people. It did not add ownership.

The test is at the end of a meeting with your team: whose task list grew? If it is yours, the decisions are still routing to you, and the people you hired are not getting the parts of the job that would develop them. You solve the important problems and give the solutions to them.

There's a different version of your team where you can give them the hard problems and they develop solutions.

Look at who is working late. If it is the managers, and the staff leave at four, that is not a hiring problem.

The work needs to focus on what keeps sending decisions back to you, and then changing those handoffs. Some of it is what you say. More of it is what you stop doing.

If it is 7

You are the most senior person in every room you are in. The calls that matter get made alone, and the advice available to you comes from people who have too much to lose to be truly honest.

You may have tried a peer group already and come out of it with good conversation and nothing you would use.

This work involves a small confidential group of leaders who are not competing with each other, meeting six times a year, plus a two-day retreat. Members bring live decisions they are actually facing, and their most pressing roadblocks. The value is in who is in the room, so the room is assembled carefully.

Who I am

Leading organizations since 1994. Master's at Harvard, where I studied why plans fail. I chair CEO forums and work directly with leadership teams.

How we start

A 30-minute conversation about what is actually happening. If there is a fit, I will send a proposal for the work.