I love the National Basketball Association (NBA) playoffs.
I'm sad one my great heroes Lebron James is out and at 41...surely he can't do 23 seasons?! But I'm genuinely intrigued to watch the New York Knicks in the Finals. They've swept their way through the East under a coach in his first year with New York (after being fired for mediocrity prior...), a city with inflated expectations and long tortured fans.
The pressure is on and Coach Mike Brown is making it all about the players, which is the subtle undertone of this article.
The best coaches of any sport will tell you: at this point in the season, you can't squeeze your players any more. They are in the conditioning that they are (extra training sessions more likely to tire them out, then help) and brainstorming entirely new plays or strategies will create headaches and confusion.
The moment calls for something different: for letting the players you've prepared all year...play their best at the exact moment it matters most.
I'm in my own "playoff series" right now. A long awaited organisation project approach "go live" — the part where senior stakeholders are looking at us, the timeline tightens...and the temptation is to squeeze harder. To out-think every permutation. To add another working group, another steering committee, another slide deck.
Instead, we repositioned what the team could deliver and where the value actually sat. We stopped trying to outmanoeuvre every stakeholder objection in advance. We created space for the team to develop what is needed, when it's asked.
Unlike the NBA playoffs, June is just another month; for those leading complex change, the game is constant...so it's more energy effecient to out-position, rather than grind yourself down with overthinking.
Out-position, don't overthink.
The instinct under pressure is to think harder. More analysis. More scenarios. More tasks. More cognitive effort applied to the problem. More work, dammit!
The risk here, is that you run really fast in the wrong direction and make your team tired. What instead, if you thought strategically and positioned better?
(Bit panicked by that last line? Check your positioning for free at app.pragmaticchange.com.au)
Michael Porter argued in 1996 that strategic positioning, which I'll paraphrase as: performing different activities from rivals, not just doing the same things better...is what produces sustained outperformance. Structural distinctiveness beats cognitive superiority.
For leading complex change, there's a salience in Dan Heath and Chip Heath's Switch presented as 'shape the path': if you want different behaviour, change the environment, not the person. As a leader, you can both actively create that environment or (if it's not happy times at your place of work) at least help filter what might be polluting it for your team.
Here's a fun example: Philip Tetlock's and Dan Gardner's Superforecaster research — drawn from tens of thousands of participants across the Good Judgement Project — found that the forecasters who beat CIA analysts didn't out-think them, per se...
Instead, they were better positioned; they used 'base rates' (more on them later) as a key statistical concept, took in multiple perspectives, and (most pragmatically) undertook frequent updating. They out-positioned their own cognition through structure, not smarter thinking.
Which brings us back to your people: the leaders who consistently navigate complexity well tend to be the ones who build the conditions for good decisions, rather than making all the decisions themselves. You still have a coaching role, but those 'in the game' are the ones who can deliver for you.
What this looks like in Australian business - inspired by the tech stack I'm using in Playoff mode
I'm an unashamed Atlassian Ecosystem product fan and by preference would live in Jira (providing I've got some help with config...), which I admit might be a bit naff in the Tech world.
But back in my own SME realm, I have to admire how Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar wove together the Team Playbook, so that management cognition wouldn't bottleneck distributed product teams. The result was a product culture most enterprises couldn't replicate through management effort alone.
Though I picked this example not because I'm a sycophant, but for my own curiosity in terms of "next season": Atlassian's 2024-25 has been difficult. Share price pressure, scale challenges, job cuts explictly framed as due to AI, though that's been treated with some skepticism.
Is it that the model that worked brilliantly at one scale has strained at another? The architecture that out-positioned a market in 2015 needs revisiting in 2025.
Strategic positioning has to keep evolving as a continuous leadership practice, rather than a design decision made once.
Three moves for the change leader who wants to surface their positioning flair
Most senior leaders can't see their own positioning architecture because they're too close to it. The change leader's first responsibility in a complex programme, is often to make 'the invisible cage' visible. Some prompts to force clearer thinking:
The base-rate question: "What's the historical base rate of leaders in your position solving this through smarter strategy versus structural repositioning?" 'Super-forecasters' inspired thinking. Forces the leader to consider their own situation as data, not as exception or special circumstance. It's a gentle nod towards reference class forecasting, without spooking anyone.
Be courageous and map the position: Decision rights, meeting cadence, what 'war stories' get precedence over recent data...preferably rendered visually, in the (virtual) room, together. I've written before about the value of making work visible and this is its most powerful application.
Most senior leaders have never seen their own positioning architecture drawn out. The act of drawing it surfaces what cognition has overworking...when the team was just simply in the wrong place.
The counter-positioning analogy: "If a competitor structured or positioned themselves the way you're structured...what would worry you?"
Got a senior leader or Executive who is resistant to external challenge? (Of course not, not in your lovely work place...)
But say you did...I've used this 'play' as typically they can't dismiss their own strategic instincts. Flip the "smart persons" analytical strength back on themselves.
(Psssst, just for you: A fourth, covered in my upcoming book Pragmatic Change: Gary Klein's 'pre-mortem', but anchored specifically on positioning. "This programme fails in eighteen months. What structural decision did we never make?" About what went wrong and what was never set up.)
Positioning isn't just for the Playoffs
I've written previously about the difference between motion and action. The default response to complexity is to generate more motion: more activity, more effort, more consulting horsepower and more innovation theatre applied to the problem.
There's an old line in First Be Nimble which is, "Be brave, not busy". I'm a bit more nerdier and direct than my lineage so I'll say: build the structural conditions for the right work to happen...then coach your players from the sideline.
Don't squeeze harder. Free people up to move where they need to be.
Acknowledging: Porter's What Is Strategy? (HBR, 1996), Heath & Heath, Switch (2010). Tetlock, Superforecasting (2015).
P.S.: even as a Chicago Bulls fan, please win New York Knicks...and give this article longevity...thanks.