Do You Need to Repaint the Walls?

Do you need to repaint the walls, or do you need to reevaluate whether the walls should be windows, or even exist at all? 

This is an analogy we use at the beginning of our work with organizations and it gets us far. Oftentimes, leaders mix them up and get stuck. One is iterative; you adjust a process, update a policy, refine a structure and keep moving. The other is transformational. With the “walls”, you’re dealing with how someone or a group of folks fundamentally sees the world and what they think is even possible. You can't paint your way out of that one. 

Getting clear on which problem you're actually looking at changes everything about how you approach what comes next. Including, and maybe especially, the plan itself. Because even the most beautifully built plan will sit untouched if the people meant to carry it out didn't have a hand in shaping it.  

Whose Idea Was It? 

One of my favourite moments in strategy work is when a group lands on a direction and nobody can quite trace whose idea it originally was. That's the goal. 

When people move through ideas together, and when they see their perspective reflected, the plan stops feeling like yours or mine… it becomes ours. And that’s everything when things get hard six months down the road. People ​often fight harder ​​​for plans they see themselves in. 

But that kind of ownership only happens when people feel safe enough to say what they actually think of and share new ideas. A big part of what we try to do differently in our Organizational Compass service is create genuine psychological safety in those conversations, so that what surfaces is authentic, rather than just what people think the room wants to hear. ​And when that's working, it all comes together in service of one thing: helping an organization find and commit to its own direction.​ 

​​​​Which brings us to what that direction actually looks like in practice. 

Moving West 

A well-built organizational direction has three layers, and understanding how they connect to each other matters a lot: 

1. ​​The first is values and beliefs​​.​​​ ​​The​​​​ values are what is important, and the beliefs are the ​​ideas you hold about how to best live up to them​​​​​. ​​Together they become a guide for how you move through the world. These are the things you feel most strongly about and are considered your guiding principles. But they're not a trophy to display. Instead, they're more like a hypothesis to continuously test, and refine as you learn more about yourself and the world around us. The learning we do helps us better live up to what is important​​​​.
   

2. The second is purpose; the why behind your existence as an organization. Purpose is altruistic and enduring. You never actually arrive at it. Think of it like deciding you want to move west. You can move west forever and never run out of west to move toward. 

   
   

3. And following closely is mission. This is what makes purpose measurable. If your purpose is moving west, your mission might be getting to Toronto in the next ten years. Then Calgary. Then Vancouver. You can look back and say with confidence that yes, we moved west, while still having endless west ahead of you. 

   
   

From there, your strategic priorities become the base camps along the way. And the decisions people make every morning are the literal tactics and steps. When this is done well, anyone in the organization, at any level, should be able to draw a clear line from the thing they're working on today all the way up to the direction the whole organization is trying to move. That line is what makes work feel meaningful. And it's what makes a plan something people actually use. 

​​Which brings me to where most plans ​actually​ fall apart​; when ​​​we ​​fail to engage people early and bring them along with us.​​ 

​​Let me paint a picture…​ 

The Dance Floor and the Balcony 

Picture a packed dance club. On the floor, you can see maybe five feet around you. You're just trying not to spill your drink or get stepped on. You have no idea what's happening across the room. Now go upstairs to the balcony and look down. Suddenly you see everything. You watch something happen in one corner and have an impact all the way across the floor. 

Frontline staff are ones on the dance floor. Senior leaders are meant to be on the balcony. And middle leaders? Their whole job is running up and down the stairs, bringing leadership down to the floor to say, do you see what's actually happening here?, and walking frontline staff up to say, do you see the bigger picture? 

​​What doesn't work is when the balcony tries to yell down, or when the floor tries to jump up and grab the railing. Both feel impossible, and usually are. And yet that's exactly what happens in most organizations when a plan gets handed down rather than built together. The people on the floor just received instructions from someone who forgot what it felt like to be down there.​​​

​​​It's a silly image. It's also exactly how most organizations operate day to day. The clubs that work best are the ones where someone is always guiding people up and down the stairs.​​​​​​

A Plan Is a Compass

This is where a strategic plan either becomes a living tool or ends up in a folder nobody opens. I've seen the latter happen too many times. Decisions are getting made on gut feel, completely disconnected from anything they agreed to together because it never got used as a compass.

When someone brings a significant proposal to the table, the question can't just be does this seem reasonable? It has to be how does this connect to where we said we're going? Brené Brown has a framework called the five Cs (context, colour, connected tissue, cost, and consequence) that I find really useful for exactly this. It gives people a structured way to bring an issue into a conversation so that someone from a completely different vantage point can actually understand it. It's the stairs, and it's the thing that keeps the dance floor and the balcony in the same conversation, long after the planning sessions are over.

That ongoing connection between the work people do every day and the direction the organization said it wanted to go is an important goal.

That Spark

When people ask me what I love most about this work, deliverables, frameworks, and outcomes are the last thing I’d say

I talk about the moment someone who walked in feeling a little unseen and unsure if their perspective even counted, starts to light up around an idea. That spark is what I'm in it for. Because when people feel actually heard, they show up more fully to the work, and take more responsibility for what needs to be done to create impact. You can care a lot about people and still hold the work to a high standard. In my experience, one actually makes the other better. 

​So maybe the real question was never about the plan at all… instead, it was always about the walls. Are you building a strategy on top of a foundation people actually believe in, or are you painting over something that was never going to hold?

​​​​The plan is the easy part. Getting people to genuinely believe in the direction, and feel like it belongs to them, is the work. And unfortunately, it's the part most organizations skip.​​​