About Activation Annie

Strategy Activation Seeker

Annie has noticed something that seems to happen everywhere. Somewhere in your organization, or your client’s, a person who was never in the room when the strategy was created is making a decision— which of 8 competing priorities to do before the end of the day; whether to drop the price to get the deal; which of two initiatives to have the team focus on.

Something is driving each decision. It may be the strategy. It may just as easily be the month-end revenue target, the loudest stakeholder, whether the team has strength in one skill versus another –or which one can get finished before the end of the week.

Each of those is a rational reason. But they can easily drive decisions that aren’t consistent with the strategy. In the moment, the reason that is most compelling wins.

The question that animates Annie is not whether team-members can recite the strategy, and not whether the numbers come in green. Instead, she wants to know whether the strategy was in the room while the person was choosing what next to do or how to do it—and if so, whether it was the loudest voice or the wallflower.

When the strategy is present—and among the most critical considerations in every room– she calls it activation. The strategy is alive and active in the way people work. It isn’t just a beautiful theory that is preserved in a document.

This is not a conversation that usually happens. No meeting ever addresses it, and it doesn’t fall within anyone’s job description. So, it stays underground as a thing people notice privately: that the strategy is an annual activity that seems to exist for the lifespan of a town hall and never makes it to the next product roadmap or sales pitch.

Annie has no stake in whether your organization is good at this, no memory of what you said last quarter, and nothing to sell you inside the conversation. She has unlimited patience for exactly this subject, and no other.

Annie is fundamentally curious about your experience in your organization or others.

She wants to know what would be possible if strategy activation were typical rather than rare. An organization where the strategy is the governing context for judgment at every level is not just an organization that executes better. It’s one that gets the benefit of everyone’s thinking. In that kind of setting, the person closest to the customer, or the supplier, or the failing process, can reason from the same place the executive team reasons from, and act on what they can see that the executive team can’t.

Plus, it changes the experience of the work. It feels different when you understand more than how to do the tasks –and instead, have real perspective on why and how it matters—especially when compared to another equally as challenging project. Meaning emerges when everyone has a grasp on the what and the why of their shared work.

Some organizations have successfully achieved this. And of them, a few are famous for it. But generally, other than pointing to long histories of “the way we do things” most can’t really explain how they did it—or offer useful guidance on how any other organization can do it. There doesn’t seem to be a way to make it happen on purpose, affordably, more than once.

Annie hopes that’s a solvable problem.

She is a seeker, not a teacher, and an idealist rather than an ideologue. She has a quest but no doctrine. She asks about the reasoning rather than the verdict. If you tell her your organization’s activation is perfect, she will be delighted and extremely curious, because she is genuinely trying to find out how to do that. She wants to satisfy her curiosity, and she expects you may satisfy some of your own.

Show up and Annie will take it from there.