When I help organizations develop a strategy they often are discouraged in the implementation phase. Their complaint is along the lines of “Everything seems the same as it did before the strategy.” That is when I tell them what I learned from my grandfather a long time ago: It will take you as long to walk out of the woods as it did to walk in.
Let me explain. It wasn’t knowledge he came by easily. A life long woodsman, he managed to get lost in the Adirondack Mountains in an area he thought he knew. The state police looked for him all night, until he finally walked to a logging road and out of the woods to safety the following day. Later, he shared this hard earned wisdom with me while we sat together at the kitchen table.
I was all of ten years old so I asked him “Were you scared in the night?” That’s when he shared the best part of the story. It is the corollary to the being lost part: You will hear the cars on the road before you actually get there.
Whatever challenges you are facing right now are probably the long term impact of strategies that are almost right. And if you decided to make a change, stick with your new strategy. The strategy you changed from may have been perfect for a season, but the dynamics of a changing culture have made them less than the perfect solution. The process of planning is dynamic and it is never “complete”. It should be revised to accommodate the continuing differences between the plan and actual results. The vision (finding the way through the woods) will remain the same but the adventure has different stages.
Don’t be discouraged. Long before you can actually see the end of the “woods” you’ll hear and see signs that you’re going the right direction.
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