The Efficiency Fallacy: Why Focusing on Process Before Strategy Backfires

I get to live in New Zealand. It is a little island on the edge of the world.

New Zealand or Aotearoa was inhabited by the Maori for hundreds of years before the British came. The Red Coats had been a dominant military force but were unprepared for the Maori Warriors.

Eventually, the British signed a treaty with the Maori people of New Zealand, which they have not really lived up to over the 150-odd years New Zealand has existed as a nation called New Zealand.

New Zealand is pretty small and for those who don’t know we are here on the map.

Sometimes, however, the maps leave us off altogether.

It is very disappointing.

As with any nation, we have a flag representing our land mass.

A Flag By Any Other Name

In 2015, the government at the time, perhaps to distract the population from poverty and housing issues, decided to hold a referendum for a new flag for New Zealand.

The current flag at the time looked very similar to many other British colonies.

This flag was widely used since 1869 but was formally adopted in 1902.

Now was the chance to make a new flag for the country. Many submissions were entered, with the most famous one being the laser Kiwi flag.

After spending $26 million, and having an apathetic interest in changing the flag, the final decision was…. no change.

New Zealand voted to keep the current flag.

So what did we learn from a lot of time and money being spent to get to the exact same spot?

Order of Operation Matters

A friend of mine, who is in the military and has been involved in diplomacy and nation-building, succinctly stated the issue with the flag referendum.

We tried to change the flag to represent some new version of New Zealand.

What we needed to do was to leave the monarchy, form a new constitution and country, and create a flag to reflect that new entity.

The referendum’s order was all wrong.

Making a flag that didn’t represent anything new was a terrible idea, many political and social commentators criticised the flag referendum as a vanity project of the current Prime Minister.

I tend to agree with them.

First Things First

So how does this bad flag referendum help you lead your team?

The process comes out of strategy. The process doesn’t create a strategy.

The challenge here, like with the referendum, making a flag design is easy and clear. Making a new constitution is very ambiguous and takes lots of work, time, and effort compared to designing a flag.

Likewise, strategy is ambiguous, you are taking a stand and saying in three years I think the world is going to be like this so we should do X to be ready for it.

You could be wrong on so many fronts and that is terrifying.

So people default to making a process which achieves some outcome thinking they are being strategic, but they are being tactical at best.

Strategy First

Always start with the strategy.

And don’t be worried, you will be wrong. No one gets it 100% right, that is not the point. The point is to have intent in what you are doing so you can learn, adapt, and improve.

First, paint that picture of where you think the world is going.

This picture isn’t created just by you, it is asking many people, many questions, you just have to be the person who puts all the ideas together and sells the story to others.

Then you make processes that work towards that goal.

As you work through the process, you will learn, and you will update the process.

The whole idea is very simple. Painfully simple. But it is not easy.

You are not only choosing what to do, but you are choosing what not to do. This is possibly the more important part.

Being very clear on that vision will make the processes so much easier to define and you won’t have the clusterf*ck of what happened with our flag referendum.