Pre-approval

In her brilliant book of essays, The Deadline, historian Jill Lepore writes that “Historians are coroners.” She shares an example of this kind of autopsy:

“Write a book about her!” my mother said, when I told her about Jane Franklin. I thought she was joking. It would be like painting a phantom. History’s written from what can be found; what isn’t saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by earth.

If history survives on what can be found, org behavior is shaped by what’s decided ahead of time.

A long time ago, in a job far away, I worked with an org that seemed to have endless rounds of approvals. Creative ideas had to go through the normal rounds with agency peers, then through agency leadership, then through the sales leaders who held the client relationships. And then the client conversations could begin.

Time crunching aside (teams were not given more time; if anything, less) it could be demoralizing for the hands-on-keys team to have to problem-solve for step after step of what felt like opinions given without prior direction.

This dynamic isn’t unique to that particular company.

One way to evaluate the health of a marketing organization is the ratio of doing to approving. The more people use their role in the company’s workflow to offer opinions on other people’s work, the less efficient its output. On the other side, a strong starter culture a sign of strong division of responsibility, trust that feedback is coming from a constructive place, and clear direction on what the role of marketing is at that brand.

Direction might be the most important part of the equation and the first to begin impacting. Mission clarity gives political maneuvering and emotional triggers a diminished role. Why? Many decisions have already been made.

As Annie Duke writes in Thinking in Bets, “[When we make decisions], we are betting against all the future versions of ourselves that we are not choosing.” And, Richard Rummelt in Good Strategy, Bad Strategy says, “There is difficult psychological, political, and organizational work in saying ‘no’ to whole worlds of hopes, dreams, and aspirations.”

It’s not certain people making decisions for others; we’re also making them for our future selves. We’re meal-planning because we know we’re going to want a cheat meal when mid-week stress hits.

Strategy is pre-approval of yeses and nos. It nudges feedback toward adherence to a plan vs. potential to fit a personal agenda. It also allows us all to propose new actions (i.e. doing) coherent to a plan, one aimed clearly at a place we’ve already decided we want to go.

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I write these posts, 3-MINUTE MONDAYS, every other week. My goal with them is to share a snippet of insight into how to do strategy, build teams, and grow. Comment here or message me on LinkedIn if you want to chat. — Ben