For fun here are the post-op instructions for any company that has just survived Open Heart Strategy and would quite like to avoid dying of its own habits. đź«€
If your company is showing signs of:
- comfortable decline
- strategic numbness
- innovation theatre
- chronic legacy attachment
- allergic reactions to messy progress
- executive-grade denial with a polished finish
Here is what you should probably be doing.
1. Build courage into the operating system
Do not keep treating courage like a rare personality trait found only in founders, rebels, and that one exhausting person in strategy.
Make room for it. Create thinking space. Reward people for surfacing signal. Teach risk assessment, not just idea generation. Let more people notice, think, invent, and test.
If only the boardroom is allowed to have original thoughts, the company will always learn too late.
2. Revisit old decisions without acting like someone insulted your ancestors
Normalise this sentence:
We made the best decision we could with what we knew then. We know more now. So we move.
That one line could save half the corporate therapy bill.
Build formal review points. Question legacy assumptions. Treat changed information as a legitimate reason to change direction. Stop making frontline teams carry the cost of outdated logic because nobody senior wants a bruised ego.
3. Read the edges, not just the dashboard
Averages are charming little liars.
Go where the discomfort lives:
- repeat defects
- edge cases
- weird workarounds
- rising explanation load
- customer effort
- low-volume irritants that keep returning like unpaid emotional debt
If the edges are muttering, do not wait for the centre to burst into flames before you call it strategy.
4. Stop expecting real change to arrive looking moisturised and linear
The squiggle is not a scandal. It is often the work telling the truth.
Expect:
- backtracking
- rework
- revised assumptions
- ugly middle stages
- pilots that teach rather than flatter
- charts that behave like they have unresolved feelings
Do not confuse messy progress with failure. Do not treat every defect like a character assassination. Do not let ego climb into the driver’s seat just because the graph got wobbly.
5. Treat defects like clues, not crumbs
Do not brush them off the table before visitors arrive.
Go full detective. Cluster them. Trace them. Ask what they reveal about the design. Look for recurrence, not only severity. Build defect elimination into strategic foresight.
A defect is not just something that went wrong. It is often the future trying to leave a voicemail.
6. Make revision socially safe
If changing your mind still feels like public humiliation, people will cling to bad ideas long past their sell-by date.
Build a culture where:
- updating the plan is maturity
- backtracking is intelligence
- being wrong early is better than being elegant late
- learning in public does not end careers
You cannot ask for adaptability while punishing revision.
7. Stop mistaking comfort for protection
Just because the experience still “works” does not mean it is safe.
Ask:
- Is this experience easy to outperform?
- Is customer patience hiding the problem?
- Is the journey technically functional but increasingly effortful?
- Are teams holding it together with charm, glue, and low-level heroics?
If yes, congratulations. You are not stable. You are being propped up.
8. Pay attention to numbness
This one matters.
Not all denial is loud. Sometimes it is what happens after too many small stabs.
When:
- the same issues recur
- nothing meaningful changes
- friction becomes normal
- workarounds become part of the wallpaper
- people stop raising things because “what is the point?”
You are no longer dealing only with resistance. You are dealing with learned futility.
That is when leaders need to reintroduce motion, hope, and consequence before the whole place starts confusing resignation with realism.
9. Interrogate the soothing language
Watch for these little corporate sedatives:
- “Let us watch it a bit longer”
- “We do not want to overreact”
- “This has served us well”
- “We need more certainty”
- “Let us not disrupt what is still working”
Sometimes those phrases are wise. Sometimes they are Xanax for dying business models.
The trick is to ask: Is this judgment, or just delay in a blazer?
10. Test belief through action
If you say you believe the shift is real, prove it.
What changed? What stopped? What was redesigned? What capability are you building? What assumption got pressure-tested? What old model lost protection?
Because if nothing meaningful changed, then the organisation does not have conviction. It has mood lighting.
11. Turn the frontline into an intelligence layer
They see the nonsense first. They hear the customer tension first. They spot the repeated friction first. They know where the scripts sound absurd. They know where the process has started needing interpretive dance.
So stop treating the frontline as a shock absorber and start treating them as a sensing system.
12. Reward honesty before polish
If the only people who rise are the ones who make the update sound smooth, the company will get very pretty lies.
Reward:
- signal spotting
- thoughtful challenge
- clear naming of risk
- practical experimentation
- honest revision
- useful discomfort
Not chaos. Not drama. Just adult truth-telling with operational teeth.
Stop embalming the current model and calling it leadership.
If I had to boil Open Heart Strategy down to one line, it would be this:
Build an organisation that can notice earlier, think better, revise faster, tolerate mess, read the edges, and act before comfort turns into decline.