As it is customary in Estonia, Midsummer and Christmas are the 2 dates by which everything should be settled and in order – including strategies and goals.
Just as around 70% of changes fail to work, around the same proportion of strategies do not materialise, according to various studies.
No, it’s not about knowledge, action plans or KPIs or OKRs or anything else.
The point is that something or someone is unconsciously being held back in the system. I see this a lot in my work with managers and teams:
– We know what should be done
– We agree it’s important
– But we don’t do it
Why?
From a systems management perspective, there can be several reasons:
🔹 Loyalty to the old leader or founder whose values and goals were different
🔹 The original idea of the founder of the organisation vs. today’s strategy and need
🔹 Fear, A fear that success means loss of belonging and loss of the familiar
🔹 Guilt or grief over past decisions and failures
🔹 Identity associated with suffering rather than development
🔹 Parental projection onto the leader a la “I will if you love me enough.”
🔹 Confusion of old roles: the professional who fails to become a leader because he or she is holding on to his or her former place in the system
The strategy will not fail because people do not understand. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have recruited these people if they didn’t have good comprehension skills.
The strategy fails because something deep down inside says so: “I mustn’t”, “I can’t”, “this is not my place”. And it has to be made visible. Management approaches to do this usually don’t work.
Management problems are often not management problems at all. They are issues of belonging, of permission, of visibility, of guilt, of identity. Behind every problem there is a “why the problem exists” and therefore leadership approaches do not work in such situations.
If we don’t look at these downsides, no action plan will come to life.
📌 What do you see in your organisation – does it feel like everything is in place but nothing is moving? Is this something we can look at together?
Summer is a great time to plan such activities for autumn.
