Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences:
What is in our box (our brain) influences what we build externally, from the way we interpret what is happening to the decisions, actions, systems and results that follow. When those results are not moving us toward our vision, tracing them backwards can help us examine the thinking from which we are building.
I had a simple thought today.
What is in our box, our brain, is what we build externally.
Our vision is what we are working toward. And if what we are building externally is not moving us toward that vision, perhaps one of the places we need to look is back inside the box.
Everything we build externally has an internal starting point.
We observe something. We interpret it. We make assumptions about what it means. We connect it to what we already know. We decide what matters. We make choices about what to do.
Those choices become actions. Actions become behaviours, processes and systems. And those eventually produce results.
So there is a kind of decision tree running from the inside out: what we believe and understand influences how we interpret; how we interpret influences what we decide; what we decide influences what we do; what we do influences what we build; and what we build produces results.
The result is external, but its architecture began inside the box.
That does not mean everything we experience is of our own making. Circumstances change. Other people make choices. Markets shift. Life interrupts. There are forces over which we have little or no control.
But we still meet those circumstances with what is in our box.
I started thinking about many of the tools we use to understand organizations and problems.
We measure KPIs. We map processes. We look for bottlenecks. We examine value chains. We study markets. We conduct SWOT analyses. We look at what is happening competitively. We analyse results.
In different ways, these tools help us examine what has been externalized. They tell us something about the business, system or environment that now exists. They allow us to make visible what is happening outside the box. In other words, they give us different ways of examining what our thinking, decisions and actions have produced once they have entered the external world.
But seeing what we have built is only part of the picture. We also need something against which to evaluate it.
Enter Vision – stage left
Vision gives us a direction against which to evaluate what we are building. It says, in effect, this is what we are trying to build toward.
That creates a useful comparison. Here is where we intend to go. Here is what our current decisions, actions and systems are producing. Is what we are producing aligned with, and moving us toward, where we intend to go?
When they are, we have useful evidence that what is inside the box is enabling us to build in the direction we intended.
When they are not, the gap becomes information.
The temptation to immediately change something externally becomes problematic when we do so without examining what is inside the box.
If the results are not moving toward the vision, we don’t have to begin by changing the result. We can trace the decision tree backwards.
- What actions produced these results?
- What decisions produced those actions?
- How did we arrive at those decisions?
- What interpretation of the situation informed them?
- What did we assume?
- What did we believe we understood?
What’s in the box?
Tools such as root-cause analysis, systems thinking and issue trees help us travel backwards through what we can observe rather than stopping at the first plausible explanation.
Hypothesis-driven testing takes us further.
Once we think we understand what may be driving the result, we can test that explanation rather than immediately treating it as fact. And SCQA, which stands for Situation, Complication, Question and Answer, gives us a way of articulating what we have discovered: what is happening, what has complicated the situation, what question now needs to be answered, and what the evidence suggests we should do.
Seen this way, these are not simply separate consulting tools to pull from a toolbox. They can form part of a learning loop: what is in the box influences what we build, what we build produces results, and those results can be compared with where we are trying to go.
And when those things stop lining up, we can follow the trail in the other direction: results back to actions, actions back to decisions, decisions back to interpretations, interpretations back to assumptions, and assumptions back to what is in the box.
What we learn feeds back into the box. We reconsider, update what needs updating, and build again.
An assumption that once made sense may no longer make sense. Something we learned in one environment may not translate into another. Our understanding may be incomplete. We may be holding a picture of reality that the reality itself has outgrown.
Perhaps that is one of the reasons organizations can work incredibly hard and still struggle to move toward what they say they want. The amount of effort being applied may not be the issue.
We can only build from what is available to us inside the box.
Strategic Reflection Prompt
Think about a result that is not moving you toward what you are trying to create. If you traced it backwards from the result, through your actions and decisions, what might you discover about the thinking that produced it?
About Giselle
Most costly decisions begin with a wrong read of the situation.
I’m Giselle Hudson — The Pre-Fixer. I help leaders see the real problem before they act, in my writing and in my work. I don’t fix; I pre-fix. Most advisers jump to solutions before they’ve found the real problem. I find it first — the part that isn’t fully visible yet. Once we see that clearly, everything else falls into place, and confident, right action can follow.
Through my daily Strategic Alignment Journal, I explore leadership, decision-making, and the patterns that shape organizations — helping leaders make sense of complexity before they commit significant time and money to the wrong thing.
What’s the one thing about your business that frustrates you most — the thing that, despite your best efforts, you can’t seem to resolve?
