A Great Research-based Hack to Increase Strategic Buy-in

Strategy Creation Stage
As you strive to develop a clear corporate strategy for success, it’s critical to guard against untested ideas and personal biases, while simultaneously not underestimating the requirement to increase strategic buy-in along the way.  Form a strategic hypothesis that outlines your key assumptions and early strategic bets — but pair it with a disciplined process for critically evaluating, socializing, and improving those assumptions with key stakeholders.

This step is especially important in organizations where cognitive biases, entrenched cultural norms, or dominant leadership styles may suppress alternative viewpoints. Constructive debate that ensures diverse perspectives are heard strengthens both the rigor and credibility of your strategy.

The Negative Consequences of Not Testing Strategic Assumptions
Most executives feel tremendous pressure to act.  And they should.  Action creates results and a powerful opportunity to test, learn, and iterate faster.

Unfortunately, our strategy retreat facilitation research found that the majority of teams move too quickly to meet business targets without having a clear plan that:

• Key stakeholders are fully committed to.
• Is actually implementable in their unique culture and marketplace.

We know from change management training that moving too fast causes strategy execution problems.  Sometimes preventable issues arise because the plans are not clear enough; sometimes it’s because the vision is not believable enough; sometimes the strategy just hasn’t been exposed to enough “what if” thinking.

A Messy Example
Some years ago, Snapple developed a new flavor they called kiwi-strawberry on ice. To draw attention to the new line, they put together a marketing strategy that consisted of creating a 17-1/2 ton pink popsicle. It was transported in a freezer container truck from New Jersey to New York and was hauled by crane to dangle over East 17^th Street.

Unfortunately, the core of the giant popsicle had melted and the whole thing dripped until the street was covered in a gooey mess. Not only was the company acutely (and rightly) embarrassed by the snafu; they were also responsible for the clean-up.  No one had challenged the assumptions behind how the popsicle was to be transported and displayed.

A Client Example
One of our financial services clients embarked upon a large-scale ERP implementation.  Almost twelve months into the resource-consuming and budget-busting endeavor they feared they were not on the right track.  It took a three-day executive alignment session for the senior leadership team to agree upon the business case, goals, roles, success metrics, stakeholders, scope, and next steps for a project that had already been inflight for one year — a costly mistake.

No one had asked the hard questions (or listened to the people who had concerns) until it was too late.

The Cure
To avoid strategy missteps and increase strategic buy-in, you need to test out your plan by actively involving stakeholders, especially naysayers and those with different points of view, in the process. We call this naysayer group the “Red Team.”  Similar to a project postmortem, their goal is to ask the tough questions that can save you from making costly mistakes. Questions like:

• Why do we need to do this now?
• What is the downside of our plan?
• What are all the reasons this might go wrong?
• What are the potential negative consequences?
• What if we did nothing?
• How will our competitors react?

Using a Red Team
Historically, a Red Team has been a group of military personnel playing the role of adversaries to test and challenge security postures.  Today the concept of Red Teams is used by the likes of the CIA, military, and corporations like IBM, to have a team of independent people poke holes in their thinking by taking the oppositional point of view.

Simulating adversary tactics to identify and address vulnerabilities works.  For example, in the cyber security world, Forrester found that red teaming not only reduces the number of security incidents by 25% but also lowers the cost of incidents that do occur by 35%.

Red Teams are most often comprised of objective experts charged with pointing out any problems, biases, or risks that early strategic planners or change leaders may miss. Leaders should consider putting together a Red Team to test their strategic thinking for serious faults when:

• The stakes are high.
• The strategy is difficult to reverse.
• There is an urgency to act quickly.
• Information is lacking.

The Bottom Line
Would your strategy execution and adoption strengthen if you consistently and rigorously challenged your strategic assumptions, plans, market realities, and organizational capabilities from multiple perspectives? When the stakes are high, invest the time to pressure-test your strategy with people who have both the insight and the freedom to uncover its weaknesses—before the market does.

To learn more about how to increase strategic buy-in, download 7 Proven Ways to Stress Test Your Strategy Before It’s Too Late