Strategic pillars are a goal-setting antipattern
Strategic pillars are a goal-setting antipattern
A shortcut organisations use to show why it is doing something is to categorise work under 'pillars' with a supposed relationship to a positive outcome. This sets up organisations to underachieve.
It’s been a common occurrence throughout the organisations I’ve worked with or consulted to and see presentations featuring ‘strategic pillars’ - usually 5 or 6 key areas where there were plans to invest. Early in my career, it seemed quite a reasonable approach but later in my career, it’s been more of a smell that there was room to improve the quality of thinking in our planning.
Sometimes they are presented as a simple list. Other times they might be arranged in a diagram. A common example is an acropolis-type structure. Each ‘column’ represents a key area of focus such as ‘revenue’, ‘cost reduction’ or some key initiative. The overall goal is represented by the ‘roof’. The floor might be some enabling element such as ‘governance’ or processes.
It’s hard to be overly critical of the effort leaders put towards communicating the focus to their people; organisations quite consistently underinvest in such communications. The challenge is that strategic pillars tend to be categorical in nature and this can undermine the effectiveness both of the communication and tracking progress. What I mean by this is that they represent activities and intents that are linked by some degree of classification. This leads to a number of challenges:
Pillars often become categories
Categories are not causal
Categories can encourage ‘pork barrelling’
Categories create artificial dependencies
Categories may not communicate the actual outcome
Pillars often become categories
We may have an overall goal of growing revenue. So far so good. If we were establishing this as a goal we’d get really specific of what types of revenue might satisfy the goal, knowing that not all types of revenue would be acceptable.
When we start to use the pillar concept a common failing is to try to keep the pillar simple and it becomes ‘revenue’ - a descriptor that is already less specific. This is how pillars can start to look like a category and unsurprisingly people start to treat them like one.
Categories are not causal
The common anti-pattern that follows is that activities that are related to this category are bundled under this broad heading. The linkage to the goal of growing some specific types of revenue that might improve the business is lessened.
Unlike more specific goals with corresponding measures, categories lack the inbuilt mechanism for testing a causal or at least correlative relationship between actions and a goal. It’s easy to ‘bucket’ activities into a category - an issue I covered previously in this post:
Don't "bucket" work together when planning
Categories can encourage ‘pork barrelling’
Worse than some inadvertent miscategorisation these categories can have an incentive of their own. After all, if we are communicating these as the focus areas for the organisation or department then we have incentivised people to find a relationship for the work they intended to do with these categories.
It would take significant rigour to keep such relationships in tune with the original goal. The justification for linking an activity to a pillar can be lax. Or sometimes the pillar becomes a label that can be applied to legitimise an activity or park under a certain budget code.
Like ‘pork barrelling’ in the political context where other policies get parked under a more substantial bill, the pillars become like those bills carrying lots of loosely related or unrelated activities along for the ride.
Categories create artificial dependencies
And it gets worse. Bloated areas of focus loaded with ‘passengers’ i.e. all the activities that may not be related and without any real mechanism to test if they are aiding the organisation’s progress. These ‘pillars’ by definition take longer to complete.
Another common anti-pattern associated with collections of activity brought together under such categories is they can define artificial dependencies. For instance, if an important pillar is in progress, other important goals may be set to be dependent on the entire pillar/category or activity being completed. Or something important may not be able to start because it is not categorised under one of the pillars.
In the worst instance, this may mean something which actually might contribute to making meaningful progress towards a goal is actually sitting behind (many!) tasks that do not. These category structures are naturally less efficient than goals because goals tend to strive to focus effort on just the relevant work to achieve the goal.
Have you seen this pattern at your organisation? How did it manifest? Do you observe some or all of the issues covered in this post? Share your experiences in the comments.