With today’s staffs running painfully lean, a discipline preempting distractions pays dividends.

When an idea is born, our first question is usually, “How do we make this a reality?” We then assemble a small team to confirm the merits, package up a business case, get it approved, and make it happen.

That’s good when the idea supports the company’s strategy… but what if it isn’t aligned?

It’s a hard truth, but some ideas — even good ideas — are distractions from higher strategic priorities, and most companies are running too lean to afford distractions. When unaligned ideas gain traction and become projects:

• Best case: The idea is stopped when it seeks funding approval. Damage is limited to the wasted time and talent of the project team. Of course, we never know what they might have accomplished if they had stayed focused on strategic priorities.
• Worst case: The idea has enough momentum from the time, money and enthusiasm already spent that it gains approval and siphons off even more time and money. As a result, there’s less funding for the core strategies, reducing their ultimate impacts.

In either case, the performance of the core strategies are undermined.

Questions 1 & 2

Leaders can embed a critical test into their capital process. An effective discipline to maintain strategic focus is the “Research Request” — a simple form requiring no more than ten or twenty minutes. It outlines the strength of strategic fit before anyone assembles a team to analyze and generate a business case. “Request” signals that approval is required before anyone begins burning resources and the objective is to evaluate strategic alignment:

1. How does the idea support our strategic priorities? As I have said before, motherhood statements such as “grow our business” and “customer satisfaction” don’t count.
2. What are the best arguments that the idea is a distraction? Flipping the question around can trigger new insights and requires brutal transparency — genuinely stress-testing the proposal.

This can also an opportunity for leadership feedback providing boundaries and conveying expectations (e.g. who needs to be involved and when) to guide the due diligence of approved ideas. And it should be very clear within the organization that all final final proposals need demonstrate they had already secured Research Request approvals at the right time …with appropriate consequences for skipping that authorization.

Of course, there will always be non-aligned ideas worth exploring, possibly even become a new facet of the strategic plan… but that is a decision made by senior leadership before an idea rallies a project team and begins consuming time, talent and resources.

© Dave Wittenberg