Management lessons from pushing on a string

You are leading your company, your school, your organization, your community. You’ve found yourself giving effort and feeling response, but getting nowhere. That’s described by the classic ‘pushing on a string’. It’s different than pushing against the immovable object and feeling no ‘give’ whatsoever. But it’s no more productive. We’ll use insight from the physical illustration itself.

Consider three sorts of responses, with examples, to start making some progress with that string.

1. Pulling, not pushing. That’s the ‘duh’ response. But thinking specifically of how to do that can actually help. First, notice that you’re in a ‘pushing the string’ situation. Then, creatively and intentionally decide how to move around in front of the effort and help to pull it along.

Example from business. A great example of turning the effort into a pull instead of a push is Seth Godin’s “permission marketing” which shows itself today in one stellar example of content or inbound marketing facilitated through Dharmesh Shah’s Hubspot. It’s not magic, but still pretty wonderful to see the customer begin to request that he be communicated with, informed about product features and availability, and eventually be sold the product at his request (which we call “buying”).

Example from my experience. School curricular changes (and hopefully improvements) have to carry some element of being ‘pushed out’ into the classroom and onto the teacher to maintain coordination and alignment with shared learning objectives. But over the years, my most successful curricular moves by far have come from ongoing discussions among and with teachers about what growth needs they are seeing in their students. If as an instructional leader, I am working to serve teachers with tools and support (curriculum) which meet these student needs, I not only avoid a fair number of ‘pushbacks’ from my string pushing but, more importantly, teachers are prepared from day one to employ these curricular tools to meet the student needs they have seen and are committed to addressing.

 2. Cut the string. I don’t mean just once. Into a hundred smaller pieces. Put it into a hundred different hands and watch it move forward. Not without leadership, but the leadership is vision-casting and motivation, not autocratic direction. Treating it as one string and pushing to move it forward is getting you nowhere. Here’s how it might look.

Example from my experience. Leading a growing school with almost constant capital development needs, I saw several steps move forward, getting us a build-out in a shopping center and then purchase of land and a first installation of a modular building for the upper grades of the school. The fundraising was hard work but successful and didn’t feel like pushing on a string. We in leadership, along with most families in the school, were pulling together toward recognized, shared objectives. We didn’t have relatively large donations, but we did have a small group of folks leading out with their comparatively larger gifts and had great participation of the whole school community.

We prepared the next phase as a larger, two-story, multi-division building which set a financial objective about three times what we’d done before. Our giving leaders were still involved, but not able to scale up their gifts to triple previous levels. The plan made sense and was in line with families’ expressed desires, but it had switched over into pushing a string with a reasonable, desirable future but no one really to pull from the front. We unveiled the plan. It was pitifully undersubscribed. We had to go back to square one, not losing all the progress we’d enjoyed together, but realizing that our further movement forward had to look more like our progress so far.

We cut the string into multiple pieces. We divided the plan into more phases of fundraising and building and grade relocation than we had hoped and imagined. Our lead donors were able to step back into place with gifts which scaled to the plan. Others saw strength and success in this, and joined again through great percentage participation.

We would have loved to find a new, major donor to move us forward faster and seamlessly, but we may very well not have kept the cohesion of a school community which saw its efforts move steadily forward by shared sacrifice. Over the course of a decade, we grew from 300 to 1200 enrollment, from rented space in a church into ownership of 50 acres and 150,000 square feet of space we’d built in eight different phases. We cut the string into pieces which most everyone was able to grab onto and carry forward.    

Example from business history. IBM introduced the PC in 1981. By 1984, IBM revenue from the PC was $4 billion. In 1984, Michael Dell was a student at the University of Texas, and thought stock component, individually customized computers sold direct to customers was the way to cut this string into pieces. He couldn’t push the string of PC-compatibles marketed like the IBM behemoth. But he could sell to customers out of his dorm room, quit school, ramp up with demand like crazy, and end up with Dell Computers on the Fortune 500 by 1990.

3. Freeze the string. Here’s the fun one for a guy with a physics major. We’re not talking about a dip in liquid nitrogen. Too radical and bound to shatter. Just a good solid water freeze for our string. You get the picture.

We’re pushing on the string. The given conditions weren’t working. Things were connected but so flexible and directionless that it moved nowhere; things just meandered around. How do we apply this to leadership? Think of changing the given conditions of a no-win situation. For you Star Trek fans, think of Kirk reprogramming the Kobayashi Maru.

A frozen string has a latticework of ice crystals making it not just hardened from the outside but, more importantly, connected on the inside. When one portion moves, they all move, and they all move in the same direction. All parts moved in the pushed string; they just didn’t move in a coordinated and progressive direction.

Example from business history. The string pushing example which speaks most loudly in our culture of technological connection is that of Univac, Big Iron mainframes, Crazy supercomputers, and the power of the isolated super-brain. These really are part of the successful history of technology along with the imaginings of science fiction. But power from technology for the human race of the 21st century and beyond can never be seen in isolation again.

The most powerful computing inventions for petaflops (a thousand trillion floating point operations per second) are massively parallel arrays of thousands of microprocessors. We are expected to hit exaflops 1000 pf) by 2020. The power to model nuclear reactions is dwarfed by the power necessary to model the weather. And these hyper-connected computers are the path toward those objectives.

Far beyond any special purpose computing machine, however, is the special reality of today’s Internet. Connected humanity – for better and for worse -- is no idealist’s pipedream. Real community of connection is still on the list of problems to be solved, likely using a little Artificial Intelligence from the supercomputer arrays but more likely using even more of the ethical-relational ‘right stuff’ from human beings joined in common purpose. This is the frozen string of tomorrow’s cooperative human connection.

Example from my experience. Don’t confuse the ‘freezing’ of the illustration with what you actually do in leadership to unite and connect your team, your organization, your community. It often is a matter more of ‘firing them up’. But I don’t mean just by superficial cheerleading or even motivational speeches. The frozen string is connected by a crystalline matrix of relationships. That’s what your leadership can and should attend to in connecting your company.

I took a school turnaround assignment several years ago where internal conditions were bad and external conditions were quickly deteriorating. We had no money to even try to ‘push’ with, and wouldn’t have gotten anywhere if we did. To move through the maelstrom of challenge and trouble, we had to unite and connect as never before. We had layoffs to live through, even as we needed to build up the quality and value of relationships. Pretend wasn’t going to get it. No one was missing the reality. We were in trouble, and the future was unknown.

But there were shared values and vision. We were there for similar purposes, and those purposes ran deep. There was powerful motivation in uniting around a commitment to life-changing difference-making for kids. We would weather the storm if that was clearly our shared priority. If artificial organizational goals interfered, we were sunk. This “freezing” of the string had to go to the very heart of why we were in this work together to begin with. And it worked, not because it was wily strategy, but because it was real.   Real conviction shared among real folks who loved kids and cared about them. Leadership meant being clear at each turn how our plans, decisions and actions contributed to those shared foundations. We saw it through together. In our city, 2 similar schools each year for 5 years went out of business while we were graciously allowed to continue on, seeing lives changed for the better. 10 schools in 5 years went away. We entered the period weaker than most, but exited stronger than any in our category. The givens of the circumstances called for reprogramming those conditions. As given, they were going to mean failure. As a connected string of values, relationships and community, we saw the other side of a very rough time.

 So, recognize and remember:

• Recognize when efforts are doing something but not moving forward. You’re pushing on the string.

• Don’t bark out orders. Move around to the front line to model, to serve, to pick up and pull.

• Distribute the effort, making it the work of all making the right difference in their little piece of string.

• Change given conditions. Get connected relationally, visionally, missionally. Move toward the goal.