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Hand drawn graph with ruler and pens measuring operational excellence.

“If we have data, let’s look at the data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.” – Jim Barksdale, the former CEO of Netscape.

Data is driving the future

For the last five years, every major management consulting firm—from EY to McKinsey to Bain to BCG—have all been banging their fists about the importance of making data-based decisions in business. But why? The reason has something to do with those 86 billion neurons between your ears.

In the preceding decades, neuroscientific researchers around the world started to discover and document cognitive biases—systematic errors in human thinking and rationality in judgment which could have a negative impact on the quality of our decisions.

And while a quick look at the 209 documented biases on wikipedia's list of cognitive biases is enough to make your head spin so much you’ll never trust your own brain again, one way to start to overcome those biases is to use data—to complement your intuition—to make business decisions.

The pitfalls of data

But transitioning to a data-based approach is also fraught with fragility. Many organisations fall into the trap of measuring everything, simply because they can. And while the underlying premise of more data may be sound, presenting the brain with too many metrics and options at once can decrease the quality of decision making.

Another common pitfall is when organisations go to the other extreme and measure success with only one or two golden metrics. In this circumstance, it is common for employees to subconsciously substitute the strategy for the metric. This approach often leads to undesirable behaviours which increase the metric, but can actually work against the very strategy it is meant to represent.

But by far the most common stumbling block we see is organisations measuring what is easily measured, rather than what is important to be measured. And as Peter Drucker so famously said, “...What gets measured gets managed—even when it’s pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organisation to do so.”

Measuring execution

Ironically, despite an organisation’s strategy living and dying by its execution, one of the important elements which often slips off the measurement radar—or worse yet, gets substituted with the wrong metrics—is execution.

As measuring the efficacy of an organisation’s execution can be illusively difficult, it is only natural that executives levitate to more quantifiable metrics. But for those who succeed in meaningfully measuring their execution, they stand to pull ahead of the crowd. While their competitors’ strategies stall in the murky shadows of their execution inefficiencies, they’re deploying laser focused strategies to streamline their operations, increase their speed and agility and bring their strategy to life.

F

requency

Corresponding words:

blue.

As you undoubtedly noticed, the word blue appeared three times. Repetition is one of the oldest known ways of encoding information to memory. It is the foundational memory tool used in traditional education (times tables flashbacks anyone?). Repetition has been studied extensively by scientists, and while the frequency and duration can impact recall, as a rule of thumb, the more frequently something is repeated, the more likely we are to remember it.

Practical takeaway: Communicating the new strategy to staff at the town hall once is not enough. It must be communicated repeatedly over an extended period of time (much more than we intuitively think) in order for it to be encoded into the memory of staff.

E

motion

Corresponding words:

holiday, covid, coffee, kiss and any other words which align with your passions or fears, wants or worries.

Emotion supercharges the encoding of memory. Any event that you are easily able to recall will most likely have been emotionally charged. Think... first kiss, wedding day, birth of a child, first time you jumped out of a plane. But the emotion does not have to be positive. For example, can you recall where you were when you heard that someone famous or someone you cared about passed away or where you were when you learned of a tragic event such as September 11? Negative emotion is more precarious, however, and recent studies have shown that too much of some negative emotions, such as stress, can also impair memory function.

Practical takeaway: Strategies and strategy decks are often very dry, emotionless documents. The more emotion you can inject into your strategy and the communication which surrounds it, the better chance it has of being remembered. One of the most influential ways of doing this which has emerged in recent years is creating a ‘meaningful’ organisational purpose.

A

ssociation

Corresponding words:

mountain & goat, chicken & egg, kognitive & brain, blue & dog (for bluey fans).

Association has been connected to the roots of memory function for over 130 years. Association is one of the main techniques often used in memory hacks, such as memorising names, among other things. While much of our brain’s association memory function is unintentional, intentional associations can be utilised to significantly improve the retention of information.

Practical takeaway: Use intentional associations within the communication of your strategy where possible. Acronyms such as FEARS can also be an effective way of creating a pseudo-association and encoding strategic information such as values, key initiatives, goals, etc.

R

ecency

Corresponding words:

smile, shoe.

Psychologists have identified a cognitive tendency for the items, ideas or arguments that come last in a sequence to be remembered more clearly than those that came before them. This effect is closely related to primacy, the tendency to have better recall for the items at the beginning of a list or experience.

Practical takeaway: The way your strategy is structured, organised and presented makes a difference to how it will be remembered. Pay special attention to the start and end of your strategic documents and presentations.

S

tories

Corresponding words:

While it may not have been directly highlighted by the word memory activity, the S in our FEARS model is certainly related to words—in fact it’s made of them: stories. Stories are deeply ingrained in human history and are fundamentally intertwined with human memory. “Researchers have found that information presented in story form is considerably more likely to be recalled than comparable material presented using expository methods”.

Practical takeaway: Converting your strategy into an emotive story can dramatically increase its retention.

📳 Book a discovery call to learn about how we have helped strengthen alignment at leading organisations around the world.

Emotional alignment

If intellectual alignment is about the brain, then emotional alignment is about the heart: it’s about buy-in. It’s about employees taking action not because they have to, but because they are inspired to.

When staff have bought into the organisation’s vision, when they are emotionally invested in the organisation’s success, not only are they more likely to remember the strategy, but they are much more likely to act upon it. And motivation, discretionary effort, and engagement increase.

But how do we go about building more emotional and intellectual alignment in our organisations? While this is a complex task that Kognitive’s accelerators and consulting address, here are five strategies to help get you started.

Kognitive’s Performance Pyramid

Built from decades of research and experience in assisting organisations with evaluating and improving their execution, our Kognitive’s Performance Pyramid (PP) provides a simple framework which enables leaders to dissect their organisation’s execution and focus their efforts where it really counts. Through the lens of tools, processes and culture, Kognitive’s PP analyses the seven key domains of high performance organisations.

‍

1.
Direction
2.
Alignment
3.
Accountability
4.
Speed & Agility
5.
Focus
6.
Collaboration
7.
Leadership

1. Direction

High performance organisations are built around clear strategic direction. Without a single north star to aim for, different aspects of the business can easily fall out of alignment, resulting in confusion, wastage and frustration.

Ask yourself: Does your organisation have a clearly articulated strategy which is easy to understand? Do staff know where your organisation is going and how it plans to get there? Does your organisation have clearly defined, meaningful metrics by which success will be measured?

2. Alignment

It doesn’t matter how good your strategy is on paper: unless it translates to the decisions and actions of your employees, the execution will stall. When evaluating alignment, as you learned in chapter two, there are two dimensions to consider: intellectual alignment and emotional alignment.

Intellectual alignment is about awareness, it's about the brain, it’s about every employee cognitively understanding how their role and goals contribute to the organisation’s success.
Emotional alignment is about buy-in, it’s about the heart, it’s about people taking action not because they have to, but because they are inspired to.

Quantifying each dimension of alignment is critical to improving it.

3. Accountability

In addition to having staff aligned to a clear strategic direction, a high performance organisation has a strong culture of accountability. Staff feel a shared responsibility to each other and to the company to make it happen. Employees do what’s best for the business, take ownership and help drive initiatives of their own accord.

Cultivating accountability is as much about process as it is about culture, and when you evaluate your organisation’s accountability, it is critical to identify if your company has both the behaviours and business processes which foster organisational-wide accountability.

People rowing in boat holding each other accountable

4. Speed & Agility

COVID has changed speed and agility from a competitive advantage to being essential for survival. But despite Agile being a common catchphrase, organisational agility is far from common practice.

Ask yourself: Can your business rapidly change direction or does execution frequently lag? Are decisions made fast and adapted as needed, or do complex decision or approval processes frequently stall execution? Are tools and processes streamlined and efficient, empowering people to work productively? Do employees operate with a sense of urgency and action orientation? Are teams and projects structured in a way which enables them to quickly iterate to an optimal outcome?

5. Focus

In a market that demands greater levels of precision and speed than ever before, focus is what allows employees to deliver high quality work, fast. But this critical cognitive resource has become a scarcity in most modern organisations.

Ask yourself: Are staff aware of the criticality of quality concentration at your organisation? Are your employees able to concentrate deeply when required? How resistant is this focus to disruption? Do you have a high interruption or focus friendly culture? Are employees strategically managing communication tools to foster a balance between focus and collaboration?

6. Collaboration

At the centre of every organisation are people, and the success and productivity of every business hinges on the ability of these people to collaborate effectively.

Ask yourself: Does your organisation have a culture of collaboration? Is it built upon interpersonal trust, cohesion and psychological safety, or does office politics make it difficult to get things done? Is information freely and productivity shared or is it siloed? Does communication flow vertically and horizontally across the business? Are meetings effective and productive?

Professional knowledge workers collaborating in boardrooom

7. Leadership

Organisations that are truly high performance are universally driven by high performance leadership. Leaders play a key role in developing, living and reinforcing the other six domains, helping to fulfil the organisation’s potential.

Ask yourself: Do leaders at all levels help their direct reports live and breathe the strategic direction? Do they set clear goals, hold staff appropriately accountable and facilitate productive performance conversations? Do they support and champion their teams? Do they cultivate speed and agility? Do they create environments which foster focus and collaboration?

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