Recently a client asked me to assist their sales and marketing leadership team in planning for the coming year.
They had a strategy, capable people and a great deal of work going on. Yet the situation wasn’t coming together as well as had been hoped.
The obvious thing to do was to get all of them into the same room, decide on the priorities, allocate responsibilities and then leave with a plan.
After a few conversations, it seemed as if something wasn’t right.
The issue was not that people lacked the ability to carry out their duties.
In fact, they were quite good at carrying out those tasks.
The issue was that each person viewed the business from their own particular point of view.
Sales faced pressure. Marketing had its own priorities. The customer support department was handling the results of decisions taken elsewhere.
Each point of view was reasonable by itself.
Yet when taken together, they did not necessarily result in the outcome that the organisation desired.
That’s a quite interesting problem.
When progress comes to a halt, our tendency is usually to add more information. More specific objectives, more definite responsibilities, and better reporting as well – another plan.
All perfectly reasonable.
What if the issue isn’t a lack of information?
What if individuals understand the aspect of the business that relates to them but fail to understand the rest of it?
Instead of getting on with planning, we took the time to assist the team in investigating what was working, what wasn’t, and the areas where tensions existed between the different functions.
They started to notice things which they had not before considered.
A major insight was that the process of onboarding and developing salespeople, an area which has in the past been considered a supportive function, plays a central role in achieving the company’s wider customer experience objectives.
The work was exactly as it had been.
The change concerned the way people saw the importance of it to the entire business.
This understanding then appeared in the situation that followed.
Managers began to assume a greater degree of responsibility outside the scope of their jobs. In one instance, a manager restructured a system with due consideration for the sales team’s experience. Also, the team leaders became more focused on coaching their employees.
Sales and operations organised their very first joint planning meeting before the major seasonal delivery.
What is interesting is not just that people had agreed upon a plan.
They were starting to regard their responsibilities towards each other in a different way.
I have been thinking about that distinction.
A plan can arrange the actions of people.Shared understanding enables people to make better decisions when the plan does not specify exactly what they should do.
In complicated organisations such moments frequently occur.
Maybe it is for that reason that a great many well-meant strategies have difficulty in getting going.
We take a great deal of time planning the strategy, setting out the objectives and assigning the tasks.
However, considerably less time was spent on designing the conditions that would enable people to work in different ways.
The sense of relationship, trust, common understanding, and readiness to go beyond our own responsibilities.
They are not just pleasant things to have.
This is how change happens.
Then, at your next planning session, ask yourself a different question.
Should people be given more direction or should they instead gain a better understanding of how their work relates?
Your choice could affect the action you take next.
The reflection is based on my work with CRV. For more details, you can visit my website.
Turning understanding into action
Recognising the problem is one thing. Knowing how to bring people together, build shared understanding, and turn it into meaningful action is another.
That’s why we wrote Innovation in Action. It brings together practical tools, real-world examples and a structured approach to help people navigate complex challenges and implement change that sticks.