5 Reasons the Strategic Catalyst Model Still Makes Sense
If you need help with strategy, choose the right model
Last week, Christine Heckart hosted a mini-reunion of some of the folks from TeleChoice. Twenty-years ago this boutique consulting firm pioneered a new category for strategic consulting. We called it “Strategic Catalysts”. We probably weren’t the first to practice this approach, but I think we were the first to name and define it.
I still believe the catalyst model is the best way to help companies that need assistance in developing a critical strategy. In fact, it probably makes more sense now than ever.
So what is it? Strategic catalysts accelerate the creation of strategies for high impact. They don’t replace the staff of their clients in developing strategies, but they bring the missing ingredients (experience, methodologies, tools, focus) to enable clients to rapidly and successfully create strategies that work. TeleChoice was the strategic catalyst for the telecom industry.
How does this differ from traditional consulting? Yesterday, I received an e-mail newsletter from a consulting company. One of their messages was “We do the work, so you can focus on running your business.” The implication is that you don’t have time to develop your strategy, so you should outsource it to someone else.
Traditional consultants typically show up with a team of smart, hard working associates. They work hard to learn your business. They probe into every corner of your company gleaning insights and diverse perspectives. They analyze and reconcile those findings to develop a strategy for you that they believe will meet your objectives. Along the way they provide readouts to the senior management team to ensure that the end product will be accepted by executives and hopefully adopted by the whole organization.
It is a model that has worked generally well for decades, but it is far from perfect. For starters, it is expensive and time consuming. It’s not unusual for a strategy project to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and take several months. But more critically, the level of buy-in to the developed strategy is often low (except perhaps among top executives) and, to use a familiar analogy, you’ve bought a fish, you haven’t learned how to fish. That may guarantee future “fish sales” for the consultants, but doesn’t prepare your company to respond to the dynamic uncertainties that all businesses face today and will face tomorrow.
In the strategic catalyst model, a very small team (sometimes just one strategy leader) engages with your company. The catalyst teaches a working team from your company the best tools and methodologies for making the strategic decision you face. He helps your own workers and leaders to learn from each other and to collaborate to develop a strategy that uniquely makes sense for your business. Those workers and leaders throughout your organization become champions for the strategy, helping everyone else learn and embrace it. And they have gained new skills that will help them with future strategic decisions. This approach takes a fraction of the time at a fraction of the cost, and often delivers a more impactful strategy.
Here are five reasons that I believe the strategic catalyst model is still the right solution for those looking for help with their strategic decisions:
1. No one will ever know your business as well as you do.
The traditional consulting model requires the outside consultants to learn your business so that they can make good decisions on your behalf. This is highly inefficient, and even then, the consultant will never have a complete understanding of your culture, how you operate, and the unique dynamics within the business.
2. Rather than teaching an outsider, your team needs to learn from each other and rally together around a strategy you jointly own.
Not only does it take time and hard work for consultants to learn your business, it takes time and hard work for your team to teach consultants about your business. Wouldn’t it create more long term value if that time and work were spent by leaders and workers in your company teaching each other about the aspects of their own business that they may not fully understand? When that deeper understanding grows within your company, it drives multiple levels of benefits for the current strategy effort, but also well into the future.
More importantly, when that joint learning and deeper understanding is integral to the strategy development process, the participants feel a much higher level of ownership in the new strategy and have much higher confidence that it will actually work within your company’s reality. That confidence and consensus can rapidly spread throughout the company.
3. Your team needs to deeply understand why your strategy is right for you and why rejected options are wrong for you.
The traditional consulting model relies on smart outsiders deeply evaluating different strategic options, eliminating many bad choices, and helping executives understand why the one solution is the best from among a small set of viable alternatives presented to them. In reality, as soon as the decision leaves the board room, employees start asking “Why aren’t we doing X instead?” If addressed to an executive who was in the room, and if X was one of the small set of options presented, the asking employee might hear a credible and convincing reason for the selection. More often, confused employees never hear a clear and compelling response, undermining confidence in the purchased strategy.
In the strategic catalyst model, the working team will actively discuss and debate a broad range of options, evaluating and eliminating many. In the end, that cross-functional team will deeply understand why the right answer is right and the wrong answers aren’t, and as they go back to work alongside their peers, they are ready to actively engage with hard questions about the strategy.
4. Everyone on your team needs to deeply understand the strategy and how it will impact the decisions they make.
Traditional consulting results in a tidy and impressive Powerpoint deck that may get broadly distributed. It likely includes well crafted strategy statements designed to be memorable in hopes that leaders and employees will think about the strategy as they go about their day-to-day work. The deck probably includes powerful background research and analysis to support the strategic conclusions, but that unfortunately, most employees will either never see or may not have the context to understand. The result is a relatively shallow understanding of the new strategy that isn’t readily applicable to the real world decisions that team members make every day.
In the strategic catalyst model, the strategy is developed by your team members with deep understanding of your operations. They develop the strategy within the context of the real world decisions made throughout your organization. They inherently understand the linkages and, as they go back to their day jobs, they take back to their teams that implicit understanding of how the new strategy should change how they approach their day-to-day work. In fact, it is their championing of those operational impacts that will drive broad adoption of the strategy throughout the company.
5. Next month, when the world changes again, your team needs to be ready to adapt the strategy to the new reality.
As we face an increasingly dynamic external environment, we must realize that no strategy can remain set in stone for long. The high level direction hopefully won’t change often, but the detailed plans must flex to withstand unexpected stresses. If a traditional consulting firm left you a stack of “hardcopy” strategy binders (or even the “softcopy” equivalents), then you probably won’t ever reap the value of your investment in outsourcing the strategy.
A strategy developed through the strategic catalyst model naturally results in a growing competence throughout the organization for ongoing agile strategy development. The relationships and dialog developed through the process create a natural network for continuing to refine and adapt the strategy to the changing conditions. The tools and methodologies can easily be put back to work. And most importantly, the confidence the team has in themselves and their ability to navigate hard strategic decisions encourages them to take it on.
So, is the strategic catalyst model for everyone? No, some organizations will struggle to adopt it and may be better served by the traditional consulting model. Examples of organizations unlikely to successfully embrace the catalyst model are:
- Highly siloed organizations where sharing information across departmental boundaries is rare and discouraged
- CEO-centric fiefdoms where input from front-line workers isn’t welcome or valued
- “Shoot-the-messenger” cultures where asking questions or identifying problems can be career limiting
For these types of companies, traditional consultants may be able to reach inside the silos, collect and deliver front-line perspectives, ask hard questions and call out the biggest challenges facing the company, and maybe even deliver a credible strategic path forward. However, bigger challenges are likely looming for companies like this.
If you’d like to understand how the strategic catalyst model might work for your next strategic project, feel free to reach out and schedule a call.
