Avoid the Politics of Stalemate

Originally published as part of, “The Day Before Digital Transformation” by Phil Perkins and Cheryl Smith

In 1519, Captain Hernan Cortes landed in Veracruz and immediately ordered his men to burn the ships. One of his men laughed and Cortes thrust his sword into the man’s chest. The rest of the team immediately set their ships on fire.  Cortes knew his soldiers would not commit to the quest if they could run back to the ships. By burning them, he forced them commit to the mission.

As a leader, your commitment to your digital vision and strategy must be viewed as being unequivocal or your crew will quickly run to the ships and revert to business as usual.

Even if everyone agrees on the vision, many organizations are perfectly happy to delay progress by months and years while waiting for the perfect answer that everyone agrees on. Your organization must commit to incrementally delivering new digital offerings on a regular cadence. It forces everyone to make compromises when you say: “We may not be able to agree on the goal for launch in 12 months, but we can all agree on the goals to deliver something in the next 12 weeks.” If the leadership team cannot completely agree what to do, then let the digital execution teams focus their efforts on experimenting with their own ideas and optimizing retention and referral metrics while executives continue their deliberations.  When opportunities are either delayed or constantly stopped and started, you are not just losing momentum, you are creating a compounding loss equation. If delays persist for more than a few weeks, it may be time to take a page out of Cortes’ motivational handbook.