Why You Should Beware The Action Trap
My friend Jessica Kriegel often warns leaders about the action trap, the mistaken belief that if we just do something we’ll get results. We’re conditioned to have a bias for action, to do something rather than nothing. Yet actions without a sound strategy are doomed to fail. We need to avoid the trap of doing stuff just to make ourselves feel better. Action is no substitute for discipline.
The truth is that good ideas fail all of the time for all kinds of reasons. The status quo always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. There are also cultural norms and rituals that are rarely obvious. And beneath the surface, there are always unseen obstacles that can derail even the best-intended efforts.
Until you identify, analyze and understand exactly what your actions are targeted at, you’re just wasting time and resources. Even worse, as you lurch from one failed action to another, you create stress, erode trust and fuel change fatigue, making future actions even less likely to succeed. Smart leaders learn to avoid this cycle. Here’s how they do that effectively.
Transformation Theater
In March of 2024, just eight months after he joined the company, Bayer CEO Bill Anderson, published a piece in Fortune about his effort to turn around the 160-year old firm. “Bureaucracy has put Bayer in a stranglehold,” he wrote “Our internal rules for employees span 1,362 pages. We have excellent people…but they are trapped in 12 levels of hierarchy, which puts unnecessary distance between our teams, our customers, and our products.”
He then went on to describe the furious pace at which he was eliminating middle management and reorganizing the company.
Most importantly we’re putting 95% of decision-making in the hands of the people actually doing the work. This means many fewer managers and layers, and replacing hierarchical annual budgets with 90-day sprints by self-directed teams. We have 300 of these teams with thousands of people already working in this model, which we’ve coined Dynamic Shared Ownership. By the end of the year, it will reach tens of thousands.
I was skeptical at the time and said so. First, nine months is hardly long enough to analyze the problems and design an effective strategy, much less to execute it. Second, it wasn’t at all clear how “90 day sprints” and “self-directed teams” would address the key challenges Bayer was facing, such as high debt, legal costs and expiring drug patents. Third, why the need to so publicly declare victory before any tangible results were in?
What Anderson was doing wasn’t real transformation, but transformation theater. Leaders often put on a show by manufacturing urgency, rushing strategy, and seeking early publicity, to center themselves in the narrative. These theatrics make success less likely, but that’s beside the point. The real goal is to signal their own status and identity.
Sure enough, last November Bayer’s stock price hit a 20-year low and remains near those levels. Earnings declined 26% and its CFO, Wolfgang Nickl said he expected “a muted outlook on top and bottom line next year with likely declining earnings.” Things could still turn around, but I doubt publishing self-aggrandizing articles will help much.
Sources Of Power
Leaders often treat transformation as if it were some heroic journey to an alternative future state. They cast themselves in the leading role, swashbuckling their way to a fabulous yonder. The truth is that change is always a strategic conflict between that desired future state and the status quo, which always has sources of power keeping it in place.
That’s why, before designing a change strategy, we always do a sources of power analysis looking at both internal and external institutional stakeholders. Which support the future vision? Which reinforce the status quo? And which are still uncommitted? Until you have an understanding of what your efforts need to be targeted at, you are unlikely to be successful.
In the case of a complex business like Bayer, you have myriad institutions that affect the business including not only internal operating units, such as research, sales, and production, but also external stakeholders, such as regulators, partners and customers. Each one will influence how the company operates and moves forward.
By moving so quickly, Anderson likely overlooked important stakeholders, like patient groups that can advocate for its drugs and environmental groups that influence the lawsuits that drive its legal costs. He may also have alienated key stakeholders, such as labor unions and scientific institutions, that he will need to make the changes work.
Identifying Cultural Triggers
A leader’s most important job is to shape behavior. Great leaders inspire people to exceed their own expectations, while poor leaders amplify their worst impulses. Many rely on incentives to influence actions, but decades of research show these can be problematic. Lasting change comes from shaping norms and rituals that underlie behaviors.
For example, when Russell Lowery-Hart became President of Amarillo College in 2014, both the school and its community were struggling. Only 19% of enrolled students completed their degrees. But unlike Anderson at Bayer, he didn’t just devise a plan and put it into action. Instead, he set up student “secret shopper” groups and listened to their experiences to better understand the problems they faced.
What he found was that students’ challenges were more personal than academic. Many were parents themselves and had a history of negative experiences with institutions. They didn’t need their school to act as a gatekeeper, holding the keys to a better life—they needed support so that they could unlock their potential and build a brighter future for their families.
Some of the crucial changes he made were simple and inexpensive, such as stationing faculty and staff at key points during the first two weeks of each semester—parking lots were a specific focus—to welcome students and offer assistance. He also set up a family room where students could take turns babysitting each other’s kids while their classmates were in class.
These were subtle moves, but they shifted the norms and rituals that defined the culture. Within five years, completion rates improved to 62%, helping thousands of its students unlock new opportunities. In 2023, the school won an Aspen Prize, recognizing it as one of the top community colleges in America.
Moving Slow To G0 Fast
When you are launching a new initiative, you want to start with a bang. You want to create a “sense of urgency,” conjure images of “burning platforms” and get everybody’s butts in gear. You will have the urge to recruit high-profile executives, arrange a big “kick-off” meeting and look to move fast, gain scale and rack up some quick wins.
While this may be a good approach for a traditional initiative, for a transformational project it’s bound to backfire. Yes, you’ll excite and inspire some, but you will also ignite resistance. As opposition forms and begins undermining you behind the scenes, you are likely to get bogged down. Ironically, creating a sense of urgency often creates the opposite effect.
That’s why when we work with an organization, we never do a full-blown launch, but rather start with a Keystone Change—a clear and tangible goal that involves multiple stakeholders and paves the way for future change. Yet instead of shooting bigger, we encourage the team to make it as small as possible.
Your first actions should be barely noticeable and focused on people who are as enthusiastic about change as you are. Any early failures should be nearly invisible to the larger organization, but a meaningful success will provide traction and momentum to move forward. You don’t need to convince everyone at once, just enough to get going.
Action without strategy, on the other hand, is doomed to fail. That’s why so many change efforts floundsert. They rush in, make noise and sputter out. Then people wonder why nothing ever changes.
Greg Satell is Co-Founder of ChangeOS, a transformation & change advisory, an international keynote speaker, host of the Changemaker Mindset podcast, bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change and Mapping Innovation, as well as over 50 articles in Harvard Business Review. You can learn more about Greg on his website, GregSatell.com, follow him on Twitter @DigitalTonto, his YouTube Channel and connect on LinkedIn.
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