Why your most successful policies from the past are drowning you today, and what you can do about it.
Imagine the following scenario:
You’ve got a problem. Something is going on that is making things difficult. There is friction in the office. To solve this problem you institute a policy. Financial problems necessitate a financial policy. Social problems necessitate a social policy. Environmental problems...you get where this is going. You have an objective and things are getting in the way of that objective. Your policies should help smooth over the bumps that get in the way.
Luckily, you’re a competent smart individual and your policy works! Nice work. Business can get back to normal. You keep this policy in place for a while. After all, you don’t want the problems to come creeping back. They tend to do that.
Now that your successful policy is in place let’s unpack the anatomy of policy making and implementation over time for a moment. I’m going to simplify it for illustration purposes.
You have a problem that is relevant to a specific context.
You develop a policy that solves that problem.
Put a pin on a timeline that represents the exact moment in time when the policy went into effect. Every action that enforces this policy refers back to that pin while in effect. Sometimes that context reference is explicit and written down. More often than not though, it’s implicit. Everyone knows why the policy was developed, they approve of it, and then conduct the policy willingly.
Time continues on, as it does, and the strength of that reference back to that pin becomes less and less tenuous. The awareness of the original problem starts to fade as new problems and issues make themselves known. In organizations, the problem of decreasing reference signal is very difficult to manage. Staff turnover in all areas accelerate the degenerating signal. Before too long there’s only one or two people working in the office that even remember why the policy was instituted in the first place. At least, they think they do, they’ll have to check their notes first. Before too long no one remembers that the policy even exists at all, it becomes just “what we do”.
This is the accidental construction of corporate culture.
This is a problem.
The problem is not with the policies. Policies are necessary. Policies allow us to coordinate our actions. Policies aren’t going away any time soon.
The problem is one of time.
Your policy is continually referencing a context that gets further and further away every second. The problem is that when you develop policies based on the problems of the present your policy will continually reference the past.
The context that existed when that policy was a good idea no longer exists. Not only does it not exist, but the context may have shifted so far away that your policy becomes a boat anchor. Your policy is an invisible boat anchor dragging you under. Now you need another policy to counteract this policy which will, in time, become an invisible boat anchor of its own. The horrible cycle continues. A lot of organizations can’t survive these issues, the anchors become too much weight to carry.
How do you solve the problem of policies growing into invisible boat anchors?
You develop your policies with a Future Context as the target.
As time marches on policies developed to bring about a Future Context come ever closer to their reference context. Instead of walking away from the reference context they stride forward.
Your policies will still need to solve the daily problems that pop up, but they will do so with the purposes of creating an articulated ideal Future Context. Articulating an ideal Future Context places the contextual reference point for all of your policies forward in time, ahead of you. This keeps your target firmly in sight.
Standard policy making leaves behind it a wake of policies that reference multiple points in time that no longer exist, with signals that can only get progressively weaker, and an organizational culture that looks more like cancerous lesions than healthy tissue.
Future Context based policy making creates a mosaic of policies with multiple starting points all aimed at the same target. All referencing the same context. Each policy strengthening each other in a coordinated network.
With all else being equal...which of these would you rather be a part of?