‘Slow’ strategies for moving fast in consortium projects.
Speed!
Its all about speed.
How fast can you make decisions? How fast can you build a project? How fast can you get a new team up and running?
But, slow is smooth and smooth is fast (1).
When you take the time to build a comprehensive understanding execution is smoother leading to fast results.
Fast is about rough execution, more mistakes and ultimately slower results (2).
Patience in consortium projects
A running joke is that its only in the last six months of a five year consortium project that anything gets done.
One consistent reality is that for every consortium project I have been involved with it takes at least one and half to two years for substantial progress to be made.
In fact, as I have written before there is a sort of malaise of lowered expectations about a year into consortium project. This a major contributor to what has been previously labeled as “consortium fatigue” (3).
The project starts with high expectations of rapid progress, dips into a phase of resigned frustration and if things go well ends with a period of exponential achievement and a regret that the project is coming to an end.
The question is, how can we get to that exponential phase faster?
First, we need to examine why this dynamic exists in the first place.
People are brought together in a consortium to solve difficult and challenging problems. They are also brought together to derive benefit from the different perspectives of different types of stakeholders.
Forces holding back progress
That means you have two forces working against progress.
First, the fact that you are bringing together people who either never worked together before at least don’t work together routinely.
This is a challenge that is difficult to avoid. It is the nature of these projects. After all it is having the right mix of familiar and unfamiliar people that determines the success of Broadway musicals and moonshots (4).
The second challenge, also inherent to consortium projects, is that the goals in such projects are ambitious.
When people do not know if a project is going to be successful and they do not know what they need to do start. They delay.
The tropism towards delaying is further amplified by other factors.
First is Parkinson’s law (5). Simply stated it is that any task will expand to fill the time you have to do it. When you have five years to do a project it will take five years regardless of how much resource you have.
The trick is to create a sense of urgency. And in my experience artificial and arbitrary deadlines don’t work. We will come to a different way of creating urgency later.
The second factor is the freshness of the task, deliverable or milestone.
Two to three years down the road from when a project plan was first designed is an eternity in the current fast pace of innovation.
No one wants to be stuck working on an outdated activity. If you are fastidious to sticking with the plan it is inevitable that enthusiasm will wane.
So, how do we create the sense of urgency or rather the enthusiasm to engage and engage proactively?
Hint: the answer is not asking people to speed up.
Slow strategies for fast wins
The word strategy means different things to different people. Some equate strategy with planning. Hence the term strategic planning. In this case strategy is about how you are going to implement the next phase of a plan.
As I have pointed out before if you think of strategy only as strategic planning you can miss opportunities because you are focused on extending what you did in the past.
For a funded consortium project strategic planning is less relevant. You already have a consortium project plan.
There are, however, other forms of strategy, ‘slow’ strategies that help you to further develop a consortium project so that it can move fast.
The first ‘slow’ strategy is about new ideas. Sometimes when people talk about developing strategy, they mean that they want to find new ideas. These could be new ideas for new directions or they could be new ideas for solving a problem or a set of problems.
A second ‘slow’ strategy is making a choice.
When you begin to achieve a certain degree of success the limiting factor to your potential is how you use the resources available to you.
Success breeds opportunities. Success creates more connections.
Everybody wants to engage with a successful organization or a successful consortium.
When you reach that point it is time to be more strategic in your approach.
As you start to achieve you come to an inflection point where you have to make multiple decisions. These decisions are almost never easy because they are about projecting into the future.
Yet they are extremely important because your choices today will determine the range of possible futures.
Strategy as a choice is a ‘slow’ strategy, particularly in a consortium project, because its hard to make a choice. Its even harder when you have to make a choice with a whole host of partners.
The third ‘slow’ strategy is process strategy. In a consortium project this takes the form of what is the process of working together.
Its slow because it takes time to implement. For a consortium it is the strategy for how you work together.
For a consortium project or organizations such as disease foundation or other forms of nonprofits working in life science and healthcare research and innovation process strategy should also include engaging with stakeholders.
In collaborative endeavors innovation happens only at the speed of trust. Trust builds up social capital and difficult challenging projects require social capital to before they can achieve anything meaningful.
Its not about rushing to achieve milestones, or moving fast and breaking things.
Its about moving slow and building things. Building relationships.
Its been shown that when people work in collaborative projects where the focus is on collaborating for the sake of collaborating find collaborations more satisfying and more useful compared to those who collaborate with an expected direct return (5).
That’s most likely the case because collaborating for the sake of collaborating is building up social capital. Social capital makes accessing a diversity of perspectives to solve problems much easier.
More importantly trust opens people up making them more likely to share and collaborate. It also makes people more likely to bring their ideas forward. They feel safe.
Building relationships takes time, but relationships are essential for achieving an exponential rate of achievement in a collaborative endeavor such as a consortium project.
When people are bringing more ideas forward new opportunities arise. This is the essence of the strategy of finding new ideas.
New opportunities build excitement and enthusiasm. This is why people often get excited about strategy and view it as being about finding new and innovative ideas.
And new opportunities can create a sense of urgency that is genuine.
If your project is to collect an extensive dataset and perform molecular phenotyping on collected samples and you have only a vague or limited idea of what you are going to do with the data the enthusiasm to complete the creation of the dataset is less.
In reality there are often a at least a few ideas of what questions will be answered once the data is available. The real value comes when interaction has led to an increasing number of ideas that are concretized into plans.
Suddenly, you have an increasing set of collaborators who really want to see the dataset completed.
So, when there is a need to do quality checks as part of the curation process you will have a whole host of volunteers.
Collaboration relies upon collective effort.
This is why it is so important to be willing to go beyond the initial plan and develop opportunities as they arise. Opportunities add momentum to the effort.
To complement collaborating for the sake of collaboration there should be a process of enabling and facilitating the development of new opportunities.
This brings us back to the different types of strategy. With an increasing number of opportunities which you are actively developing it becomes important to have a strategy that is a set of choices.
Strategy as a choice or what you might call a strategic framework enables independence.
One of the problems with success and achievement is that too much starts to happen.
There always comes a time in consortium projects where there is real anxiety in the leadership of a consortium project.
“I don’t know all that is going on. I can’t keep track of it all.”
Sometimes this is blamed on communication, but the reality is at certain point there is just too much to keep track of in a meaningful way.
This where strategy as a set of choices comes into play. You can move everyone in the same direction with a set of strategic areas of focus and give them the independence to contribute on their own and do things there own way.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) (7) is lauded for its ability to be successfully innovative. The three core organizational principles of DARPA are:
Ambitious goals
Small temporary groups
Independence
In such a structure the ambitious goals can serve as the strategic framework. You can see a good example on the Welcome Leap website (8).
Their goals are like a strategy inclusive performance metrics and specific areas of focus. Yet, they use those to build programmes of multiple different research groups.
The Welcome Leap Programme was inspired by DARPA.
There however is one thing that the DARPA model misses or at least under represents.
The value of working in a larger structure is the exposure to a diversity of perspectives.
The best model for tapping into that diversity is smaller groups working and creating on their own and then coming together periodically to share what problems they are facing or what they have learned.
Without a strategic framework the efforts can diverge too far. Then there is no value of working together.
A strategic framework is also where you can also inspire others with a vision, a purpose, a mission and a set of values.
As you can see all forms of strategy are complementary. All forms of strategy are slow. This is especially true when you build strategy with a diverse group of stakeholders.
Unlocking Exponential Achievement
In the world of consortium projects and collaborative endeavors, the process of developing a strategy may seem slow compared to taking immediate action.
However, it is precisely through the careful and deliberate development of a strategy that one can unlock the potential for exponential achievement.
So, the irony is the answer to question of how to speed up the attainment of a level of exponential achievement in a consortium project is to slow down.
In my experience consortia that embrace strategy attain exponential rates in half the amount of time of those that stick to the plan as written.
Consortia projects should deliver on the project plan but they should also embrace a strategic approach.
How do slow strategies increase meaningful impact?
Meaningful impact especially in life science and healthcare usually requires transformational shifts across many different stakeholders.
The slow strategies described here are about building the critical mass needed to make those changes happen. The role of a leader in life science and healthcare does not end with the publication of a manuscript.
The best way to minimize the 17 year gap between research finding and clinical implementation (9) is consortia that execute on strategies for not only delivering outputs but for also achieving the key outcomes that will result in the impact.
How to make it happen.
Begin with implementing a strategic process of interaction. The simplest of is just assuring that the different consortium groups meet on a regular basis.
Move quickly to the slow strategy of developing new ideas. Foster the development and implementation of new ideas.
You will increase enthusiasm and create an environment where things get done quickly so as to be able to make use of what is being produced to pursue and an increasingly exciting opportunities.
Then bring your partners and stakeholders together to co-create strategy that is more of a choice so that all the individual opportunities can develop with independence while still benefiting form the synergies of interacting across the entire consortium.
Do you believe in strategy but don’t think you or your partners have the time to spend weeks in workshops developing strategy?
This is where BioSci Consulting can help.
We have ‘slowly’ built up experience and expertise over 17 years and we specialize in consortium projects.
Through our knowledge and experience we can help you shortcut the process of building ‘slow’ strategies into you consortium projects throughout their entire life cycle.
References:
(1) This is a mantra that is used by the US Military’s Special Forces
(2) From an insightful blog post by George Morris that illustrates the science and business aspects of the slow is smooth, smooth is fast mantra.
(3) Papadaki, Magdalini, and Gigi Hirsch. "Curing consortium fatigue." Science translational medicine 5.200 (2013): 200fs35-200fs35.
(4) Sawyer, Keith. Group genius: The creative power of collaboration. Basic books, 2017.
(5) Parkinson, Cyril Northcote (19 November 1955). "Parkinson's Law". The Economist. London.
(6) Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. "Collaborative advantage." Harvard business review 72.4 (1994): 96-108.
(7) Dugan, Regina E., and Kaigham J. Gabriel. "" Special Forces" Innovation: How DARPA Attacks Problems." Harvard Business Review 91.10 (2013): 74-+.
(8) Here is the page of Wellcome Leap Human Organs, Physiology, and Engineering Program. As you can see the goals are more like a strategic framework complete with quantitative metrics.
(9) Morris, Zoë Slote, Steven Wooding, and Jonathan Grant. "The answer is 17 years, what is the question: understanding time lags in translational research." Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 104.12 (2011): 510-520.
