Factors of Successful Strategy | The Provocateurs: Preview of Episode 25 with Dane Jensen

‘Initially as a more junior consultant, my bias was to believe that it was about the quality of the work. That if it's a good strategy, it's going to be having an impact six months later. If it's a bad strategy, it's probably sitting on a shelf somewhere. You do enough of these things and that's not really the case. You do great strategy work that goes nowhere and you do mediocre strategy work that actually has a really significant impact on the organization.
At the end of the day, it comes back to the degree to which the strategy survives impact. It survives the journey through all the pressures that bat it around. And there are leaders in the organization that can actually get people to commit to it, that can get people to change their actions in line with what the strategy suggests.
As I got deeper into consulting, I started to think that at the end of the day where the rubber really hits the road is the degree to which people, leaders and individuals, are able to, in the face of pressure, actually execute on this stuff. Actually do what they need to do to make the choices, to provoke the future. I got really interested in the people side of things. How do individuals navigate this? How do leaders lead in a way that inspires commitment?’
How can we harness the positive powers of pressure? How can we mitigate the negative effects of pressure when the stakes are high?
Dane Jensen is the CEO of Third Factor, an instructor at Queen’s University and the University of North Carolina, and author of The Power of Pressure. In this podcast with Deloitte’s Geoff Tuff and Thinkers50’s Stuart Crainer, he explains that pressure is a function of three things: importance - how much the outcome matters to you; uncertainty - lack of surety about the eventual result; and volume - how many high-stakes situations you face.
Although pressure can be hugely destructive and lead to anxiety and burnout, Dane argues that it can also be hugely elevating. Being an emotional energy, pressure can be harnessed for peak performance. There are more world records set at the Olympic Games - one of the most pressure-packed environments - for example, than anywhere else in the world of sport.
Listen to the podcast to find out the differences between pressure and stress, peak pressure and long-haul pressure, and the meaning of the ‘third factor.’
This episode will be available on 12 June 2024.
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