Whether I’m in a classroom or boardroom, some lessons are harder to teach than others. I had an example of the latter, a boardroom experience, recently that I think holds a lesson for all strategy teams. Those lessons are hard to apply but, when applied, are very valuable and, if not applied, very harmful. So, buckle up and I’ll share it with you.

It’s not unusual for me to sit quietly in a strategy meeting and simply observe what’s going on, deliberately avoiding influencing events. I’ve done it many times, both in the course of my research and when senior leaders have asked me to coach their strategy teams. Listening is a skill I use in both my researcher and advisor roles. And what I often hear is unhappiness. To borrow from Tolstoy, every unhappy strategy team is unhappy in its own way. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some issues that are common and account for most of the ineffective strategising I see. For example, poor knowledge of the basic strategy tools, like segmentation and SWOT is very common. So too are ‘agency effects’, when people follow their own agenda, not the firm’s. But a third common cause of strategy team failure is logjam, when all the details of situational analysis and strategic options collide to form a gridlock of factors that paralyses the strategy team with ‘analysis paralysis’. You might recognise this in your own teams. It’s a common issue, but it’s not universal and, after sitting quietly at many tables, I have worked out why some strategy teams have this problem and others don’t.

When I compare strategy teams that don’t get logjammed to those that do, I don’t see differences in knowledge or skills. Nor do I observe differences in the processes or methods they use. But, when I listen carefully to the team members talk, I’m reminded of a famous case in the history of neuroscience. Mr C was a retired man with a love of reading who one day, after a minor stroke, found he was unable to recognise any form of writing – a very rare condition called alexia. The stroke had affected that part of his brain, the left occipito-temporal sulcus, that is responsible for word recognition. This case, and later neuroanatomical studies, demonstrated not only that certain mental functions, like music and maths, are very localised, but that people differ in how developed those function-specific regions are. As I struggle to learn my saxophone, for example, I’m very aware that my auditory cortex is very poorly developed compared to a professional musician.

How does this relate to strategising? Strategy teams are functionally diverse. They include medics, economists, marketers and various other specialists. Their functional backgrounds betray the fact that they are also cognitively very diverse. In particular, a strategy team often spans the spectrum from those who can only see the big picture and struggle with detail, to those who find it hard to see the forest for the trees but never miss the tiniest point of detail. Just like me and a professional musician, these people have very different brains. My observations have convinced me that there’s a part of the brain for seeing the whole picture, another for spotting the details and that the two areas are differently developed in different people. Of course, a firm needs people from across this spectrum. But just as we need those who are detail-focused when implementing strategy, we also need holistic summarisers when forming a strategy. When strategising, the former are square pegs in round holes, as the latter are when implementing.

What’s the practical take-away of my observations? There are two: one negative and one positive. First, when those who are detail-focused dominate your strategising process, you will get a logjam because they have what I term ‘astrategia’ or strategy blindness. They may excel at implementation but, to all practical purposes, they lack the ability to think strategically. Second, you can avoid logjam and improve the functioning of your strategy team by letting different people lead it at different times in the process. During situational analysis, those who are detail-focused should lead. When it comes to synthesising those analyses and making strategic choices, they should hand back leadership to those of their colleagues who take a more holistic view. Once the strategy is set and it’s time for implementation, those who are detail-focused should again lead the process. When I sit silently in boardrooms, I see the ability to alternate leadership of the strategy team in the best teams and I observe the opposite in the less effective, logjammed teams. In that way, strategy teams are like football teams. The best play like a professional team with disparate, complementary skills, each playing the position that suits their best abilities. The worst are like a schoolyard of seven-year-olds who crowd around the ball, kicking wildly and leaving the rest of the pitch empty. I’ll leave it to you to say which image best reflects how your strategy team works – and how to break it to them.