Energy from the Future
Whether explorers or entrepreneurs, the greatest source of energy and genius is the image of the distant new world we are creating.
👋🏻Hi. Amié here. Welcome to Beyond Better Blog. Every other week or so I share new ways of thinking about strategy, leadership and management for becoming an extraordinary founder, leader or contributor.
⌛THIS WEEK!
Join me in the Long-term Strategy Conference. A 2-day virtual event that you can attend FOR FREE.
It will include access to hours of pre-recorded interviews about the many challenges to creating long-term, game-changing strategy. The interviews feature (around)15 different thought-leaders (including me).
But there are also 2 half-days of live sessions (again, included for free). Those will be interactive and fascinating.
Plus, this year there is an entire track about using AI for strategy. That includes two live, interactive panels and:
Live workshop on generating Threats and Opportunities insights with Professional AI Prompting!
This is all happening Wednesday and Thursday, June 25th and 26th. You can register for a free (or pay what you want) option, or upgrade to get additional access, a full year of the prerecorded material, and an additional 25 videos that explain the major challenges to long-term, game-changing strategy.
Don’t miss it. If you can’t attend live, purchase the upgraded access so you can watch all of this amazing content at your leisure!
In case you are on the fence, here is an excerpt from one of the videos. (Spoiler, it’s an interview of me by Conference Host and my former business partner, Francis Wade!).
Now, for our regularly scheduled article!
Most of us know that it takes time and perseverance to achieve real excellence. Yet, many organizations strategize for the short-term. They focus on the next economic or market milestone but never look beyond that horizon. Strategically, this constrains the possibility for true category creation and business innovation. Perhaps less obviously, it may also reduce employee engagement.
In 1271, Marco Polo and his team set out to spread Christianity to China and to establish trade relationships with the then ruling dynasty. But the trip was hard. Hard beyond description. The journey took 24 years and involved harsh terrain, weather catastrophes, native hostility and massive distances. But it was that journey that brought knowledge of the Eastern World to Europe. Still, why did his team stick with him for so long in such awful conditions?
In organizations, those that have attained real greatness have sustained their strategies and the efforts to propel them over decades and sometimes centuries. Just consider the stamina and effort that it took to create and sustain Burberry, L.L Bean, Hermes, or King Arthur Flour. Each has been around for over a century. That is not accidental. Nor does it arise out being in the right place at the right time. Because there were surely “wrong times” during that period—and yet, they endured and flourished.
Our most venerated companies of today have reached for a future that is far-off and out of reach. SpaceX strives to inhabit Mars. Google strove to catalogue the world’s information. These were strategic choices, and they engendered game-changing enterprises.
There are lots of benefits to long-term strategy (and you can learn much more about that at the conference this week!). But one of them is often overlooked.
For companies that never look beyond the next quarter or annual report, employees see their roles as equally mercenary and short-term. And it’s hard to build any kind of extraordinary enterprise without a team of equally enthusiastic and driven people.
Dwindling Engagement
Over the last five years, employee engagement has mostly gone down. I think there was some hope that by employers succumbing to the demand for remote work, employees would be happier and more engaged. They may be happier. They are not more engaged.
In fact, the least engaged employees are those who are remote or hybrid. Strange, huh?
All of that is background information that you need to be aware of if you are considering undertaking a game-changing strategy. Since most of my clients are high growth start-ups, they are all trying to do that. The question is, how do you build a culture that sustains that kind of employee engagement—or does it just comedown to hiring better people?
Intrinsic Motivation
Normally, we try to motivate employees through a one-way mechanism: the organization gives more to the employee. Higher wages, better incentives, more time off. We have hiring bonuses, give commissions and overrides. We try to make the environment enticing, and fun.
But none of these address the most critical issue for sustaining employee engagement. Intrinsic motivation.
Intrinsic motivation is the experience of wanting to do what we’re doing, because it is either inherently interesting, or connected to a purpose that calls to us.
That may be an altruistic purpose, or it may be a purpose that simply excites us.
As I read that research I wondered how it was possible to activate somebody else’s intrinsic motivation.
Isn’t that just a crapshoot?
After all, we all have our own interests and the things that drive us to pursue learning something or completing a task.
In my garden, I will happily work until my hands are frozen into cramped fists and sweat stings my eyes. All of that to make a lovely bed for a rose bush. Most people would not find that activity intrinsically motivating. But it motivates me because I feel a connection to the ultimate outcome, the rose blooms that will fascinate and delight me over the next decade.
The “Right” People?
Is that a replicable phenomenon or just a personal trait?
If it’s a personality trait then business leaders are in trouble, because the odds are strictly against your stumbling onto those few individuals who are intrinsically motivated to write your code or serve your customers.
But, as I said, it isn’t digging and moving dirt that I love. It’s the future rose blooms. That’s what pulls me forward. I dig holes, and heft wheelbarrows as an expression of my inspiration. And I am inspired by the garden I see in my mind’s eye; the garden that will be in full bloom next year, and even more so, next decade.
Pieces of the Puzzle
This isn’t my opinion. We understand the psychology of intrinsic motivation and what causes it.
Connection to a Purpose
Connection to Others or a Mission (or both)
Autonomy
Curiosity and the Opportunity to Satisfy It
If you can create those conditions, then the rest is simply a matter of structure—of crafting the nudges, triggers and incentives to sustain discipline.
Connection to Purpose
Let’s look at a few of those bullet points:
Connection to a purpose.
Being connected to others on a mission.
On the surface, again, it looks like you must just seek out those who share your mission. But maybe there’s another way.
Creating the Future
What if your strategy was created with your people? And what if it started with a long-term aspiration? A vision of a future state that was profound, moving, and inspiring.
I know a lot of business leaders and start-up founders. And they all have an expansive, inspiring vision of what they are building and the possibilities it will create for the world or for their stakeholders.
But they rarely bring that to their strategic planning.
Instead of creating strategy as a path to their truly inspirational and moving vision, they strategize to hit some interim metric, like next year’s ARR.
That is a missed opportunity.
The Energy of Inspiration
Here’s what I have learned from leading many, many strategic planning retreats:
When everyone in the room has an opportunity to participate in creating some aspect of a long-term, inspirational vision, they become intimate with it and moved by it.
They put their stamp on that vision, cast it in terms that individualize and clarify it.
It’s the same vision, but they are seeing it through their own eyes.
If they are given an opportunity to speak about how it moves them, or what they see as its implications, they become even more inspired by it.
Strategy From the Future
When you start your strategic planning there—in that vision—with everyone present to that palpable future—you build a richer strategy: A game-changing, long-term strategy.
You will still hit that interim ARR goal.
But the work that people do every day—the work that leads to that interim goal—will be energized and intensified by the vision.
They are working to create that future.
When we are part of a team that shares a mission to create a viscerally inspiring future, intrinsic motivation soars.
Going back to the psychologist’s bullet points, we have created a shared mission, and a connection to an inspirational purpose.
That is just one of the many benefits of creating a long-term, game-changing strategy.
People care deeply and work as though their future depends on it. [Click to tweet.]
Why? Because it is their future—the one they helped to create—that is pulling forth their effort and engagement.
Structure, Stamina and Moonshots
Fundamentally, there are a lot of moving parts to running an organization that thrives economically in the short term and creates unprecedented breakthroughs in the long term. But it all starts with a shared, long-term vision. Something big enough to inspire. A future that people can see themselves feeling proud of having created.
Very much like the explorers of the 13th century, we are sailing into the unknown without immediate feedback assuring us that our intended future will be fulfilled. Land may not be in sight. So, we must know that our destination is worthy of all it takes to get there.