3 Elements for A Strategic Approach

We, the three partners in Brizzey, came together largely due to a shared conviction that People, Partnership & Process are the essence of success in every part of a business and that when we keep all 3 elements at the forefront of our strategic approach, real magic can happen.  People, Partnership, and Process form the foundation of our philosophy, our principles, and our methodologies.  We'll talk more about these elements in future posts, but we wanted to start with a brief overview of why we believe so firmly in each principle.

People

Obviously, people are fundamental to any business.  People are also inherently complex creatures, shaped by a complicated mix of emotions and beliefs that drive behaviors, attitudes, and approaches.  Yet, it's surprisingly easy to overlook the impact of those complexities when we're focused on the goals, plans and activities our businesses demand. 

The good news is that the emotional and behavioral path people take during major change is fairly predictable, whether the change is perceived as positive or negative: denial, resistance, exploration, acceptance (the change curve).  Acknowledging these emotions and behaviors, accepting them as normal, and investing in supporting people through the change curve requires patience and courage and may seem time-consuming. 

Yet investing in the people factor of change will not only accelerate the change, but also ensure its sustainability and return on investment, while preserving the energy and morale of our most important asset: our people. 

Partnership

Silos have taken a lot of stick in recent years, blamed for inefficiency and dysfunctional behaviors; the call is often to break them down.  While silos are important structures in an organization - they allow specific skills and expertise to focus on what they're good at, and they assign clear accountabilities to groups set up to deliver on them – if we build them with such dense walls that messages can't penetrate, then people don't share information across silos, and we impede the communication and collaboration essential to meeting the broader goals of the business. 

By forging strong cross-functional partnerships, we can ensure leaders develop a more holistic approach, set realistic objectives, and align on appropriate risk-taking.  By ensuring cross-functional project teams collaborate from the project's inception, we are more likely to meet our customers' needs and spend our energy on innovation and creativity rather than recovery and rework.

If we invest in looking beyond our silos to understand the interdependencies between objectives and processes, we improve our chances of getting things right the first time, in less time and with less frustration.

Process

As our elder partner Rob is known to say, if each of us got up each day and cut a new path to the watering hole, and the watering hole didn't move overnight, we'd use a lot of energy we could be using for more productive pursuits.  If only we'd agree on a single path to that watering hole…

We're all in the business of producing deliverables or providing services (the proverbial water hole), and to be as efficient and reliable as possible, we need to find the fastest, safest, most reliable path to that water hole, mark it with signs, pave it, and make sure our teams all know about it, so that we can preserve their creative energy for the steps that genuinely do require some alternative navigation.

In the case of a major change, it's essential to define and clearly articulate the new process and understand just how it differs from the old process.  But more than that, the process for process development can be a powerful change management tool itself, creating a pragmatic framework for potentially difficult discussions within and across silos, engaging the people who do the work to define the new way of working, and providing a roadmap to help the unknown rapidly become the known.

If you have any comments on our post or would like to talk about how we might help your organization, we'd love to hear from you.

Justine Swinney