I recently attended a Q&A session with General David Patraeus at The Chicago Council of Global Affairs and wanted to share an interesting point he made regarding a lesson he has learned that apply to the private sector.

One of the 1,800 people who attended asked him to define strategic leadership.

He answered the question by explaining how he approached the Afghanistan situation. He explained that it comes down to 4 distinct stages:

• Get the big ideas right
• Clearly communicate the big ideas throughout the organization
• See your big ideas in action and visit the places they are being implemented
• Ensure that stories of success and failure are shared

General Patraeus is an extremely impressive leader and has an well known list of achievements. He clearly has one of the most challenging jobs, being responsible for managing US armed forces in some of the most hostile environments and complex situations on Earth.

As I listened to him talk, I kept coming back to some of the things we are observing on corporate meetings and industry conferences and how our customers are using Weaves. Most of these observations relate to the last three stage of his list.

• Many of the corporate meetings we are involved with are focused on strategic content. Companies spend a lot of time ensuring that senior and middle management are fully aware of the big ideas. We have seen Weaves that directly ask for feedback and views of recently developed strategies. This has often fallen within the scope of employee engagement or development programs.
• Good Leadership is not a ‘fire and forget process’ – effective leaders are constantly following up and ensuring that the front line troops are up to speed and implementing the plan effectively. They are also gathering feedback on how the plan is viewed by others and are constantly testing assumptions that the plan is based on.
• We recently developed a view and method of sharing stories with the right people at a meeting. This has been very successful. Some of our feedback has placed this at the top of the positive comments we have received. Stories and anecdotes are clearly important as a medium of sharing wisdom and practical experience. They are also more memorable.

When we started marketing our product, we thought that Weaves would be most useful to help make face to face networking more efficient but it is now clear that there are other applications, such as in assisting leaders to find the right people within their organization and help communicate their message in the right way, ensuring it permeates through the organization. A Weave can help with all these stages and in effect they can evolve with the context of use. We’re looking forward to developing the product more around these ideas.

Here’s a video of some of the talk in case you are interested in what he said: