The best strategy aligns people to where they already want to go

When I was at the Ministry of Education (MOE), I had the most unenviable task of helping to piece together the data strategy for the entire Communications & Engagement Group.  

For days I would sit at my desk, alone, cooking up the most beautiful soup of what we would do. 

Topic modeling, a grand vision of how we could systematically mine survey data for patterns, test MOE narratives via online forums, and how we could automate horizon scanning for every single deskhead. 

Hurray me, brilliant know-it-all. 

When I finally brought the plan to my Deputy Director, he asked me: 

Is this aligned with what the people want to do? YK, you need to see where the values of the people are and where their service is going. A strategy cooked up by a single person is not a good strategy."

I was taken aback. I thought I was hired for the job because I knew best what capabilities were suitable and what were good use cases for data analytics.  

And I was also flabbergastered at how a strategy should be anchored on something so soft like values and service. 

Or was I terribly wrong? 

The best strategy aligns people to where they already want to go 

One of the things I have learnt is that a simpler strategy that takes people where they want to go is much more effective than a lofty strategy that takes people kicking, fighting and shouting. 

The latter often happens when we create a strategy to nudge technological adoption.  

No man in the company intrinsically wants to learn Python or use the most exciting data tool.  

No student aspires to be the best Microsoft PowerPoint user. Yet our scaling strategies often tell people to use more tools to do their work, which isn't what people want. 

Instead, people want to do their job and deliver value better.  

In MOE, my friends signed up to be advocates in the education space.  

They wanted to engage our media, parents and teachers better, and to be able to communicate complex policy trade-offs to them. 

Constantly thinking of the next-generation Latent Dirichlet Algorithm to hang on their necks was not a good strategy.  

But thinking of how we could redesign the entire engagement process, sometimes with just one data tool, so that they could show trade-offs more visually - that was a far less data-heavy strategy that I had hoped for, but far more effective than a tech push. 

The best strategy aligns people to what they have capacity for 

I had plans for every single officer to pick up Python.  

I rolled out scripts after scripts of re-useable software, with endless documentation my tech leads at GovTech would have been proud of today. I thought they had the capacity to - all knowledge workers, smart people, why wouldn't they be able to pick up basic coding? 

YK, I don't want to be a coder. I didn't sign up to be a coder. I am here to be a professional communicator, not a data analyst."

You see, capacity is not capability. Someone who doesn't want to code is not an intellectual inferior to a coder.  

They don't code not because they cannot code, but that they don't see why they should code. Their capacity for anything more than what they want to do is naturally limited. 

And the technologist's answer to this?  

Well, most of the time, we try our darndest to convince people that they should code! We extol the benefits of data-driven work and continue evangelising our gospel. 

But actually, my colleagues just wished to be better story tellers.  

They wanted their messages to land with impact, their speeches to be convincing, and for their audiences to not think they were hoodwinking them. 

They didn't need coding. They didn't even need dashboards. They just needed accessibility to data so that they could craft better stories.  

And for people who wanted to craft data stories, I should have been sending them for data story telling courses instead, not some Python programme. 

The best strategy is not cooked up on a PowerPoint deck, but over coffee chats and conversations 

It's tempting to think that one can cook up a strategy deck and then just hang it over people by tabling an EXCO item.  

It's tempting to think that by force of will of the biggest boss in the room, one can bulldoze buy-in.

But even the best, most brilliant and sharpest strategy will fail when it is not executed.  

When I was a teacher, my Head of Department used to tell me that:

Your project plans are more brilliant, but honestly I'll rather have the students execute their own 'half-baked" ideas. More ownership, more likely to succeed - I don't think they'll even get through yours halfway."

In some sense, it applies to our colleagues as well.  

A plan which they see their missions in, is an infinitely better plan that only has your fingerprint in it, even if you think it's way better than what they could have come up with. 

Well, that's assuming they've all gotten their missions right. But that's another story for another day. 

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Yeo Yong Kiat is the Head of Artificial Intelligence at the Health Sciences Authority of Singapore.  

The original article was first published on Yeo's LinkedIn page here, and then edited.