Guiding Ideas

GUIDING IDEAS

Guiding ideas also need to be designed for the people who will interpret and use them. This is a subtler task than drafting a statement: the “design” includes how people develop a shared commitment to it. “Organization design is widely misconstrued as moving around boxes and lines,” Bill O’Brien used to say. “The first task of organizational design concerns designing the governing ideas—the purpose, vision, and core values by which people will live.” But while it is common for management teams to come up with vision and mission statements, understanding that people interpret and behave with such statements in many different ways leads to different strategies.

When you approach the design of guiding ideas with this in mind, several things happen. First, you worry less about getting the words right and more about using the words to engage people. “We used to think we had to fully bake the pie before we served it to the community,” said Les Omotani, the school superintendent in Long Island. “As our teams of teachers, administrators, and community members became used to learning and working together, we weren’t afraid to go to them with half-baked ideas and visions, because they were the ones who would come together to work the details out. We got to the point where we said, you know, why don’t we show some trust here and go out to the community and say, ‘We have choices and we need to find together what we are committed to.’”

Second, you are prepared to take longer to develop statements of guiding ideas. In 2001, Darcy Winslow became the leader of the women’s footwear division at Nike, the company’s first division devoted exclusively to women’s products. She and her management team took a year to come up with four guiding principles for how they wanted to relate to their customer. “What mattered was that we were looking for principles that expressed who we were in terms of our commitments. Coming to appreciate and to start to live by these principles was a core process that built our team. Though they will surely evolve, they’ve stuck now for four years, even after I had to move on to another job. People can still look at them and say, ‘Are we making our decisions for the right reasons?’”

Third, as Winslow’s last comment suggests, you focus on how the guiding ideas are used. Bill O’Brien used to use his “BS meter” to determine whether visions and values were real or just “feel good” statements. “At the end of the day, you just ask yourself, ‘How did our vision and values influence decisions I made today?’ If they did not, then they are pretty much BS.” At heart, this is the difference between a guiding or governing idea and just another good idea. At a meeting of the SoL Sustainability Consortium in spring 2002, one of the founders, Bernie Bulkin from BP, showed us a new T-shirt he had just picked up. On the back were four words: Respect, Integrity, Communications, Excellence. Then he showed us the front of the shirt, which read “Enron.”

This last point illuminates one of the most basic misunderstandings about guiding ideas. People can obsess about getting the words right. Even the question “Is this the right vision?” is the wrong question. A focus on getting the words right leads to beautiful, even inspiring, vision statements that produce little or no change. On the other hand, artful designers in the domain of guiding ideas know that, in my colleague Robert Fritz’s words, “It’s not what the vision is, it’s what the vision does.” They see visions and other guiding ideas as tools for mobilizing and focusing energy. They judge the ideas by their impact, not by how they sound. And they never forget that guiding ideas are always works in progress.