I heard this old banger ‘Murder on the Dance floor’’ the other day, and it reminded me of the excellent metaphor that Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky coined in their book ‘The Practice of Adaptive Leadership.’
They say: ‘When on the dance floor, the observation may be very different from when on the balcony: when on the balcony, leaders take a step back and gain a clear view of what is really happening and can look at the bigger picture ‘.
As a leader, when developing the strategy for your business, you must spend time on the dance floor and the balcony.
Using ‘murder on the dancefloor ‘as an analogy: – the first step you need to take when solving the mystery (i.e., when developing your strategy ) is to interview all the witnesses (your stakeholders and your strategic population)— those on the dance floor (working at the coal face) and those on the balcony (management), will all have a different perspective, insight, views, and suggestions.
If you restrict your viewpoint to only management and exclude those at the coal face, you will set your strategy up for failure. Without everybody aligned, looking at the same picture, engaged and invested in taking action to implement it, you are assigning your strategy a one-way ticket to the morgue!
Working together, you will uncover the truth and get to the root cause of your business challenges and not waste time merely addressing the symptoms. In Strategisation, one of our golden rules is ‘Don’t develop your strategy in isolation from the key stakeholders you will rely on to implement it.’ aka ‘Interview key witnesses’ 🤣 🤣
