Week of 2022-08-22
Where I try to distinguish between two mindsets: vision-oriented and impact-oriented, and then talk a bit about this notion of organizational FOMO and how it relates to strategy.
Vision-oriented and impact-oriented mindsets
I had this really interesting framing pop out during a chat with colleagues. It’s a bit contrived, but I found it useful. Imagine that there are two distinct ways to look at the work in front of us: vision-oriented and impact-oriented.
When we have a vision-oriented mindset, we see some future state of our surroundings and we try to move toward it. For this mindset, work is the means to make progress toward that future state – and we only do the work that we believe will take us there.
When we have an impact-oriented mindset, we want to make sure that our contributions matter. The work in front of us is the instrument by which we make an impact. When we’re in this mindset, we seek out work that is impactful.
Comparing the two, it seems that they are each other’s complement: an impact-oriented mindset does not require a specific vision to exist to guide the work, while the vision-oriented mindset does not need to make an impact. As long as the impact-oriented me makes a difference, I don’t really care if some vision is coming to fruition as a result of this work. Conversely, a vision-oriented me just wants the world to change in a specific way, and if nobody notices — that is alright.
Each mindset has its upsides and downsides.
Vision-minded folks tend to suffer from holding their vision too firmly. This, like clockwork, leads to blindspots that box us into a space that we refuse to get out of. Even if the desired destination is impossible, we keep trying and failing and trying again, railing against the laws of physics. The vision becomes part of our identity and any disconfirming evidence about this vision’s feasibility causes nearly physical pain.
By the way, this fusing of vision with identity is a good way to spot a vision-oriented mindset among your co-workers. They are usually characterized by their adherence to the vision: “the culture weirdo” or “the robots wonk”. I used to be “the Shadow DOM guy” and even drove a car with a personalized “SHDWDOM” license plate for some time.
Woe to the team who has a strongly vision-minded member with a vision unaligned with the team’s. They will stubbornly stick to doing what they believe matters, even though the rest of the organization doesn’t see it as contributing to the larger whole.
However, if an organization’s and individual’s visions are aligned, such folks become linchpins – they can make amazing things happen. Spotting a vision-minded candidate in such alignment is a treasure for any team. Just don’t make any changes in direction – the gift will turn into a curse right after the pivot.
Impact-minded folks tend to fall into the trap of opportunism. When I am optimizing for impact, I end up selecting work that will… well, make an impact. This tends to bias us toward immediate, shorter-term outcomes. I can still invest effort into longer-term ventures, but only if there’s a strong guarantee that they will succeed. In high-complexity environments, such combinations are rare.
Additionally, when we ourselves are vision-agnostic, we develop an intuition for spotting work that is seen as impactful by others. And it turns out that “seen” is subjective. People who evaluate potential impact could be wrong, leading us off the cliff. Or worse, we may discover that we can generate impact by doing work that looks awesome, but doesn’t actually yield any lasting benefits. Komoroske calls the latter “the appearance of heroic motion”.
At the organization level, a combination of complex problem space and overemphasis on impact can spiral into a veritable festival of Goodhart’s law. When everyone is searching for the next best metrics to define impact, and the meaning of metrics keeps collapsing under the optimization pressure, there’s a frantic churn of action, permeated by the overall sense of dread of the organization not actually going anywhere.
Conversely, if the team has strong, stable metrics and a lot of room to climb them, impact-minded folks are exactly the right fit. They will find the most effective way to ride it all the way to the top of the S-curve. However, you must be ready for these folks to suddenly become disoriented and unproductive when the growth slows. Once it becomes unclear where to go next, our impact-oriented selves can optimize the team to death.
As one of my colleagues pointed out, an effective team needs a mix of both mindsets. The trick is that this mix has to shift pretty fluidly in complex spaces. It’s tough when a change in team direction suddenly turns the key contributors on your team into ornery naysayers. Or when it becomes hard to see where the team is heading in the chaff of heroic motion. I am not sure I have any great insights here, other than this: someone who can switch from one mindset to another, at least temporarily, is a truly precious find. If you’re gearing up for a long journey, those are the companions you want.
🔗 https://glazkov.com/2022/08/25/vision-oriented-and-impact-oriented-mindsets/
Strategy and FOMO
There’s this really fun neologism that the cool kids use: FOMO, or fear of missing out. It’s a useful snapshot of feelings we experience when our friends are doing something awesome and we are somehow left behind, literally or figuratively. I found that it can serve as a useful handle in strategy work as well.
It seems that organizations collectively experience FOMO. There is a lot of amazing, disruptive innovation happening out there in the world. In the information-dense environment, new and possibly groundbreaking stuff shows up in our various feeds every day – and sometimes more than once a day. Is this the next big thing? Or just hype? How do I know? Strategists fret every day, taking a mental diff between their organization’s course and the potentially significant new thing that just dropped in the Twitterverse. At the age we live in, the fog of uncertainty creeps up the runway of business.
For teams with a narrow cone of embodied strategy, spotting that new significant thing early feels ever more important. Given the limits of motion, a lot of time and effort needs to go into shifting trajectories if that suddenly becomes necessary. The lead times on change are long. So… Was that it? Did we miss the turn? Are we too late? FOMO intensifies.
It is my experience that, just like with us humans, organizations are better off creating space between their feelings and the actions that follow.
In itself, feeling fearful about missed opportunities is not a bad thing. It implies that we have enough awareness of the different possibilities and – perhaps implicit – practice of playing out various scenarios. This is all good stuff, and any strategically-savvy organization will (and must) have a bunch of people worrying about the future.
However, where things typically get sideways is when we, spurred by our fears, are compelled to act. FOMO tends to trigger a spectrum of reactive patterns. For example, after seeing a new potentially big thing emerge, we might decide to immediately start building an alternative that rivals it. The reactive patterns are rarely rooted in rigorous strategic thinking. Instead, the urgency of the moment causes the organization to fall back onto its embodied strategy. The outcomes can still be favorable, but they will have more to do with luck and brawn, rather than clarity of thought.
However, if we choose to take a collective breath and pause between the next onset of FOMO and our habitual reaction, we can create a space where new, yet unseen opportunities can emerge. In this space, we need to ask – sometimes fighting down the urge to “just jump” – ourselves fairly basic questions, like “what are our capabilities and strengths that might intersect with this new emerging thing?” and “what are the surrounding areas into which the momentum may expand?” and “what are the second order effects of this momentum? What happens when the hype cycle concludes?”
These questions may require some extra effort to answer honestly. But in my experience, the answers they bring reveal insights that could help our team plot a path that is not an instinctive response. And hey, it might still go up in flames. But at least we won’t be backing into it without looking.