Synchronicity: Why is it important?
If your business isn't in sync you need to read this.
Let them be individuals, right? Not quite.
Imagine your business as a vessel transporting a collection of people, ideas, and intentions to a specific destination. If this were a rowing boat, you would need everyone rowing in the right direction, using a synchronised rhythm to maximise speed. In this delicate balance, even one oar not pulling its weight, or working in the opposite direction, impedes your progress. Over time, this creates a significant disparity between where you thought you were heading and where you actually end up.
This is happening within your organisation right now. At this very moment, someone who you likely value and get along with is intentionally or unintentionally working against your organisation's trajectory.
While this is usually insignificant, occasionally the ripple effects too many individuals simultaneously. The ripple becomes a wave that sets your vessel off course and into troubled waters.
The Strategy Execution Gap
In a real business, poor synchronicity is hard to spot daily. The simplest way to examine it is by looking at a business's ability to meet its strategic goals. These aren't the day-to-day shocks; these are your 3–5-year plans.
Most executives can easily recite their strategic objectives and operational plans. What is rarely considered; however, is the mountain of people required to move this mass to its destination, the skills they have, the behaviours they exhibit, and the knowledge they must use.
When you ignore the people aspect, the statistics make for grim reading:
- John Kotter (1995): [1] Found that at least 70% of businesses fail to deliver on their strategic goals, often finishing over budget, late, or with initial aspirations unmet.
- Modern Studies: Harvard Business Review [2], The Corporate Finance Institute and Kaplan Data have since tracked hundreds of businesses, determining that up to 90% do not achieve their strategic plans as intended.
Despite all our technology and seamless integration, businesses are actually doing a worse job of meeting their strategic goals today.
What Makes the Greats... Great?
In the early 2000s, Jim Collins’ book Good to Great [3] examined companies that consistently outperformed the market. One of Collin’s more fruitful insights was when he sat down for coffee with a young Jeff Bezos; it’s probably one of the more interesting parts of the book, particularly when contextualised today. Collins had Bezos as his wildcard in the book because he met certain criteria, but Amazon, at the time of print, was only doing $2 million (A small fry!).
But more interestingly what were the specific core attributes Collins used to measure great businesses:
- Getting the right people on the bus (and the wrong ones off quickly).
- Protecting your culture above all else.
- Establishing a "hedgehog mentality" (a spiky outer wall with soft innards).
- Maintaining a culture of discipline to avoid distractions.
Of the 15 companies Collins selected, 14 are still at the top of their respective fields today.
The Hidden Strategies of Market Leaders
Everything benefits from getting your strategy right. Once you have the right people on the right work, protected from the noise, the compounding effect is rapid. But many masters of strategy do not do the obvious thing; it’s usually a secondary strength that becomes the backbone of their business.
- Amazon: Most recognise Amazon for fast delivery and the "one-click" checkout. But as they developed their logistics, they needed more cloud storage. Instead of paying a premium, they pivoted, created AWS, and dominated the space. Their true strategy is being "customer-obsessed [4],” and they bought the market to solve a customer pain point.
- McDonald's: Their overarching strategy is "Accelerating the Arches [5]", getting more people to enjoy their food more often. But McDonald's is actually a real estate business. They use clever financing and strict franchising rules to leverage debt and service more locations than anyone else.
- Rolls-Royce: Famous for opulent cars sold at yacht conventions, Rolls-Royce’s actual business model is energy and turbines. They eventually sold the car business entirely and embrace [6] transformation. Today, with 13,000 commercial aircraft engines in use, their latest strategy focuses heavily on mini-nuclear modular generation platforms.
What do these businesses have in common? They have a remarkably narrow focus (Turbines, Real Estate, Customer Obsession) and work backward from it. They get their teams right, culturally embed them, and ensure they move for the business, not against it.
The Hidden Risk: Tribalism
Can things go wrong? Absolutely. The biggest hidden risk to a strong culture is Tribalism.
Tribalism forms when a culture becomes too ingrained in its past, loses sight of the future, and gets too comfortable. You know tribalism has formed when relationships cease to be professional, critical voices dissipate, and you hear the dreaded phrase: "This is the way it has always been done."
When a "cult" culture becomes too dominant, it destroys the business:
- Nokia: Once holding 50% [7] of the global mobile phone market, Nokia lost its dominance in just three years. They had developed touchscreen technology well before Apple but shelved it out of fear that it would cannibalize their existing models.
- Blockbuster: Blockbuster famously laughed Netflix [8] out of the boardroom. Because a massive portion of their profits came from late-return fees, executives didn't believe their 9,000-store monopoly could be disrupted. Today, only one Blockbuster store remains.
The Antidote: Engineered Obsolescence
Look at Gillette. Despite their market dominance, Gillette dedicates huge sums to R&D with one specific challenge: put their own products out of the market within two years. This ambition keeps the competition at bay and prevents tribes from forming. Nothing is too sacred to challenge.
Achieving Synchronicity: Where to Start
Synchronicity is about balance. Real businesses are not machines with seamlessly moving gears; they require constant maintenance, rebalancing, and lubrication. A balanced system doesn’t allow any one narrative to become too dominant. It creates feedback, drives innovation, and develops momentum.
It doesn’t have to require a revolutionary transformation. Start by asking these questions to get the foundation right:
1. Who is on the bus?
- What does your current makeup of staff look like?
- Does your organisation have a dominant personality type?
- Have you measured how well your strategic ambitions align with the skill sets your people have?
- How technically gifted are they in their respective fields?
- Do professional behaviours and customer-centric attitudes shine through across all departments?
- Have you mapped your strategic planning tools to maximise the output from your people?
- How quickly can you get the wrong people off the bus?
2. Define the culture you want
- How do you define your people? Is this by behaviours or principles?
- Is this definition consistent throughout the organisation at all levels?
- How do you keep it simple, whilst remaining powerful and on topic?
- Are there territorial stakes between departments that could interfere with your strategy?
- How are decisions formed? (Hint: It shouldn't be strictly top-down or bottom-up).
- How welcomed is the critical voice, and is it presented in a solutions-based manner?
- What does your business celebrate, and what impact is that having on your people?
Next Steps
There is plenty of support available to help you build synchronicity, but you have to stick to the process. Imagine a farmer stopping halfway through the season and blaming the tractor for the crops not growing, this happens in businesses every single day.
Your first port of call should be to read. Once you start with one book, it will open up the channel for you to read many more, most authors point you in the direction of the next book so reading is a fundamental benefit you should enjoy (since you got this far, we think you probably have this nailed).
The second is developing a culture that you want. Not one all your people will buy into, the one you want. The way your business should be. This should be unconditional. If you want a good case study on a business that does culture well, we would recommend Google. They have spent decades nurturing a culture with their main mantra of ‘don’t be evil’ which sounds ominous at first but given their market position and dominance it’s probably something you do have to say that loudly.
Finally, if you’re really struggling to identify and nurture your businesses personality and culture you can download our free framework here (Our Model), or contact a delegate today for a conversation on how we can help your business today, and tomorrow.
[1] https://strategyu.co/do-70-percent-of-change-initiatives-really-fail/
[3] https://www.jimcollins.com/index.html
[4] https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us/leadership-principles
[5] https://www.mcdonalds.com/qa/en-qa/career_mcd/training-and-education.html
[6] https://www.rollsroycefirstnetwork.com/other-rr-engines
[7] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23947212
