The Social Strategist

And the tradeoffs between resources and time

For many years I believed a strategist could get away with distance from others. My logic—if your ideas are brilliant enough then you can simply roll them out to everyone and they'll catch on.

But that's not really how ideas work. Nobody listens to you unless they grant you an audience. They only permit that audience if they connect with you.

Let's hang some meat on those bones. Once I was in a leadership position and the leader of an adjacent organization, with which we had a partnership, made a decision that would certainly increase my organization's workload overnight. By a large margin.

Not the worst problem to have, you might think. That's what I thought too, for a moment.

But the impact was like expanding our responsibility by fifty percent without time for planning or an injection of resources to deal with the newly expanded workload.

Imagine a police department being told to cover an adjacent city tomorrow, in addition to its existing work. Or an army that's to widen an attack to include a far greater front or objective.

This isn't whining about a newly expanded mission. Missions can be accomplished with any amount of resource, given creative-enough planning.

But creative planning takes time, and time was taken away by this half-cocked decision.

There was a moment in World War II when Gen. George Marshall noted that before the war, they’d had all the time and none of the resources—and now while at war, they had none of the time and all of the resources. Successful planning requires one or the other. Lack of time can be compensated with resource; lack of resource can be compensated with time.

Which brings us back to social bonds and how they work (and sometimes don't work) for the strategist. If a strategist cannot trust a colleague to discuss important decisions prior to "go," then that's likely not a workable relationship. You don't have to like one another, but you must connect on key decisions.

If you are working with someone who doesn't connect in this way, doesn't connect on the social level, then they're not listening and not likely worth working with. Never pick up a gas can in haste, but sometimes there’s good reason to sprinkle it on that bridge.