The Ingredients Of Intentful Companies
And how Intent falls apart if the are missing
Let me open this series by sharing why I care about intent - and what to expect (and not to expect).
My Trigger Signals
First of all, there is a latent trigger which is that my writing and thinking and work are grounded in product but went beyond the category into product strategy, company strategy, leadership and org design. A majority of my work is indeed being an advisor to CEOs, CPOs, COOs and their companies in strategic transitions. I was looking for a container or format to write across all these topics for a long time. The Intentful Company is now that container and I am happy you are here to join me on that journey.
Besides that eternal, internal underlying trigger, there were a few trigger signals which motivated me further and had influence.
Crisis (Gut) Reactions
I was partially involved, affected or observed a couple of management reactions to the crises of recent years that are understandable from an emotional and “human” perspective but which still left me underwhelmed and - at times - even angry and disappointed.
We are probably all more affected and worn and torn by those effects than we probably want to admit. It gets problematic, though, when management makes decisions, being similarly emotionally torn. That led to a load of gut reactions, based not on the reasoning that is required by management, but really just surprise and emotions.
mass layoffs - some of them grounded in reality, some simply predicting a worse future than happened, some sheer following a trend, some a combination of those — simply the mindset of cost control dominating strategy and finally becoming the business. Actually a really risky positioning, defying differentiation and quality potentially.
The pendulum swinging back and micro control taking over, such as Return-to-office mandates, enhanced time tracking, top-down OKR push. This opposed to following what we learned and focused on in the last years: a focus on collaboration, the insight that alignment, communication of context and coordination across teams rather than simply handing over tasks helps build better offerings. The insight that we require slack in a system so that innovation and quality can happen and finally feedback systems ensuring all of this can be established. And none of that is really the insight of the last 10–15 years, we know it from the good old days of the Druckers, Ackoffs (known for their work on systems thinking and management practice. My overblown statement is that we know everything on these topics since their publications.) It’s not just written down, we know some of this as truths.
One of the deepest, most under-addressed problems: the disconnect between what’s been known in theory for decades - and what actually gets practiced under the label of ‘management’ today.
Why Intent
The first impulse on how to counter the above described newly emerging irrationality and magical thinking (basically the idea that you can wish for things and they will just happen if you wish for them long and deep enough or project your wish upon others) was to counter that of course with rationality. And what higher level and expression of rationality than enlightenment. Basically the western turning point from magical thinking to more rationality. And finally Kants definition of enlightenment as the epitome of it:
”Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit.” Immanuel Kant, Beantwortung der Frage “Was ist Aufklärung?”, 1784
”Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity”
But soon enough I thought that this also is just opening a moral playground. And also: I have to confess that there is more to it than rationality. An Intentful Company is a form of craft and art combined. It needs elements beyond rationality such as creativity, intuition.
But rationality alone felt insufficient. Something else was missing. That finally brought me to Intent.
When experiencing 10 companies, maybe a maximum of 2–3 of those radiate something special. I think it is Intent. Realising how hard it is to get any company started and alive — at whatever level — I take it for certain that 99% of all companies started with an insane level of intent, sleepless nights, this being the blood and soul of the founders and even the first employees. But somewhere along that journey, in 7–8 of the companies Intent seems to slowly die and you see it from miles away.
And I do not measure success by size. A lot of companies excel at what they are doing, stay on intent. Some grow, some scale insanely, some stay small — all on intent and every size fits.
Size is no marker of intent.
Intent means exactly this: you have a direction you want to follow and you do that. You create, you don’t react. So let’s forget the shallow measure of size and scale as a measure of intent.
Roger L. Martin often warns about ‘small market share’—not because small is bad, but because vague is. His point: define your market so sharply that you can dominate it. It can be a very small market. But the smaller the market, the more concrete your insight and knowledge and mapping of that market has to be to be able to dominate it — aka have a big market share in that exact market.
Why does Intent fall apart
I take it as a given that most (nearly all) people are motivated at their jobs and at least have patience and resilience to give the best. There are different boundaries to what one wants to “give” for their own company or employer. And, of course, there are natural differences in interest between an employee and the employer. But I honestly do not think that we should even consider this dimension as what breaks Intent. We know too much about systems and it would be too cheap of an excuse to make this stick.
Which means we need to look at systemic issues for reasons why Intent falls apart.
Exhibit A
A couple of weeks ago I had a health issue. I ended up in the emergency room. It was a high blood pressure issue. Don’t ask. Long story short, in the follow up I had to visit two doctors: my family doctor (general practitioner) and a cardiologist.
The family doctor decided on first medication, a 24 hours blood pressure (RR) protocol and a follow up at mentioned cardiologist for a visual screening of the heart. She then told that to her assistant who then gave me a date for the 24 hrs protocol 4 weeks down the road (all devices are in use). Background here is that my sports doctor sent me to the emergency room with the diagnosis that made him pale which was that he measured acute, life threatening levels of RR and he even doubted I should go there on my own.
I was handed the referral to the cardiologist.
Exhibit B
I was email bombing every cardiologist around and received two reasonable replies. One of them a week later, already testing my patience another one in three days. How cool. The only task he was given from my family doctor was looking at my heart, if any damage was done. But he dug deeper. He wanted to know everything. At times he sat there, thinking, for minutes. Next question … and so on. When he heard about my 24 hours protocol in a couple of weeks he said “rubbish, we’ll do that this week.” He realized that on Thursday he’d go on vacation but he’d come in in the morning. He created a complete plan for me getting the protocol started Wednesday morning, getting rid of the device next day. Then me getting blood tested on a ton of values, and then him looking at my protocol to finally fix medication, for him then to leave to his vacation. He not only came up with the plan – he went out to the assistant with me, making sure it will all work out exactly like this. He took care and I felt taken care of.
So why didn’t my family doctor act similarly? I am sure she loves her job, she was empathetic to me. She did not have the organisational tools of quality control available ending up in me not feeling taken care of. It’s a lack of knowledge, not motivation or actual care. Care broke down for “technical reasons.” Intent existed but was not “delivered.” For me it could’ve been the same.
Exhibit C
It happens all the time. You have witnessed it. A meeting. A visionary CEO, a very intentful employee, laying out a vision, a plan. The plan needs to be filled with life, questions need to be asked, gaps filled. What happens? Silence. No one takes over, no ownership to be seen.
Are people in this room unmotivated? No, it’s another example of a group not having the organisational tools to keep Intent alive. In the meeting example, very probably a lack of both – focus and alignment was the reason for people not stepping up. We have all been in those positions already. Overwhelmed, we would know what’s the right thing to do now, but stepping up means taking on yet another task in an already overburdened middle management life.
Everything has the same priority. Urgency over importance – killing intent.
There are a ton more reasons why Intent falls apart. What have you seen?
What The Intentful Company is not about
To be clear: I strictly want to stay away from moralising.
The Intentful Company is not about the idea of an individual failing, being unmotivated “not bringing everything to the table.” (It’s about the system that causes the persons acting in that system intelligent way.)
Other things I will focus on:
Intent is not Hustling
Intent is not looking for the shortest path without effort, the best hack at all times.
Intent is not about cheap tricks or overnight success
Intent is not about pressing more things onto people in even less time.
Intent is deeply caring about outcome, caring about a problem, a customer problem. As shown in Exhibit B.
What The Intentful Company is about
Here is a short (to be growing and emerging) list of topics I see as relevant for staying on intent:
Once we have found a problem in the world that we truly care about, we are intentional on, we should learn about the following topics:
Strategy
Strategy is an awkward word with millions of overloaded definitions. Mostly it gets overcomplicated and overthought. It even led me to define my own framework – Markers / Options / Work – to enable an easy start into the topic.
Often strategy is mistaken for the future, the vision. Or it is simply a wishlist. But neither an imaginary future or a wish list materialize themselves. They need work, discussion, communication and a ton of friction to come to life. All of that is strategy.
Some go a bit further and make a plan based on a vision. But again, that’s not a strategy. Worst case, now the plan becomes a goal. So, we will have to talk about strategy.
Execution
A huge word. There are five million ways or more on good execution. Good execution can only be based on the existence of a good strategy that creates clarity. Without strategy, even flawless execution is nothing. But vice versa, bad execution can kill any clear strategy. Execution can be broken down into at least the following:
Prioritization and Focus
Cadence and Feedback Loops
Clarity of Goals and Deliverables
Capacity Awareness / Load Management
Execution Literacy / Transparency
Tooling as an enabler only (yes, Kanban, Scrum, OKR, MOW, Play To Win, this is your place)
The next topics might as well be sub topics of Execution but I simply give them a bit more praise by giving them a heading:
Portfolio Management
Most non-trivial companies will need to take care of having an explicit overview of visualizing and managing their portfolio. A million ways to do it, but often overlooked. Everything, every project or product play on the same level. There is only one way of doing things, but a huge variety of things that have to be done.
Signalling Systems
For a company to stay alive and to be able to navigate internal and external change, signalling systems are required. Signalling systems send market and internal signals to the right places in the company so the company is aware of the market, the world as such and the things going on in the company. Without signals, the company does not know who it is, where it is and has no awareness.
Communication Systems
A living, changing company always needs to be in communication. Knowledge and context can not flow randomly but needs open channels:
bottom up: the value creating teams and the teams at the boundary of the company know what is really going on. No theatre. Brutal realism. This is where we get grounded. If this channel does not exist, we are flying too close to the sun. Our vision of the future will carry us away and we will become decoupled from reality. Painful, but necessary insights.
top down: This is how we set direction. No direction means everyone does their best but to no effect. The company is like a football team running behind ten balls, following ten strategies. Short term this feels like high agency, high autonomy. Mid term latest, the insight will be: There is no outcome.
horizontal: The more relevant something a company creates, the more probable it is that a couple of teams need to work together, aligned. This only works, if we also have defined channels for information and knowledge to flow horizontally and in coordination.
serendipity: the best companies also embrace serendipity in information flow on top. Not everything follows structure, but we invite randomness as this is how we discover new opportunities.
Multiple operating systems
Finally the insight (as teased above) that projects and products and initiatives follow very different goals and outcomes: From innovation to maintaining, from exploration to exploitation, from finding to grinding, from managing to designing new opportunities.
Most companies “found” one operating system. More mature companies know how to operate multiple operating systems in parallel and throw the right initiative into the right OS. One of the main reasons I see Intent dying is that companies proudly found one valid OS and stick with it for all purposes.
These are some of the topics I will write about in more depth. On a weekly cadence. Mondays, if my life leaves that space. What else would you expect? What am I missing? Tell me in the comments or via mail. Any feedback helps getting this triggered and structured.