Issue 02: Do you have a Big Foot Challenge?

Leaders often face the Big Foot problem.

They are able to conceive of, design, and communicate the larger purpose, goals, vision, strategy, etc. to their entire organization.

This is the Big Foot.

But they soon realize that people in the organization pay lip service to the Big Foot and are continuing to keep moving in their own directions.

This is what happens:

Now, their deeper and more challenging goal is to get every ‘small foot’ aligned to the larger goal.

But that cannot happen through diktat and memos. Even incentives and punishments have their limitations.

The small feet will align with the big foot only if they choose to do so, i.e. use their agency and commit to the larger foot.

If this can be done, then the organization looks like this:

How is this state of alignment to be achieved? The big foot is top down. The small feet are bottom up. The alignment is the thread that keeps it all together.

Alignment means mass-individualized change, i.e. change is not ‘driven’ in the organization, it is discovered and accepted by each individual.

The challenge is to achieve alignment at scale, speed, measurability, and reasonable cost, so that organizations can re-calibrate quickly to a changing world.

One example from our work:

A Fortune 500 company wanted to introduce new business and operating models to unleash the potential of its ecosystem of dealers & partners. This needed ‘buy-in’ and ‘commitment’ from the members of the ecosystem.

A ‘vivid-visioning’ exercise, scaled across thousands of ecosystem members, enabled each individual business to discover the value of the model, ‘vivid vision’ how it would transform the business, and commit their time & resources to the new initiative.

The initiative not only scaled up but also accomplished sustainable outcomes.