Tue 11 Feb 2025
By Katie Driver
The balcony and the dancefloor are the places between which leaders must balance their time, according to the metaphor crafted by Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky in their book, Leadership on the Line.
It’s a neat encapsulation of a key tension faced by leaders at any level: how to be strategic about the future, whilst also getting things done today.
Leaders must spend time on the dancefloor being part of the action and making things happen. This is where they attend to the operational, short-term parts of the role. It’s the space in which to build relationships, respond to crises, and nudge the work along.
But leaders also need time on the balcony to work with the bigger picture. Only by getting away from the here-and-now of the dancefloor can they get a clearer view of reality, gain some perspective, and find some breathing space in which to plan the next move. The balcony is the space in which to figure out which relationships need attention, how you might get upstream of the crises, and how you might make your next nudge more successful.
The balcony, in other words, is the place to work on strategy.
However, getting to the balcony isn’t always easy. Leaders sometimes enjoy the adrenaline rush of problem-solving on the dancefloor, or there may be so many people and immediate challenges it’s hard to get to the staircase. And once up there, the scene below can appear so fast-paced and confusing that making sense of it seems an impossible task. It’s tempting to simply go back down and join the throng who are probably calling for you anyway.
It's because that temptation to return to the immediate, the familiar, the short term is so very strong that boosting strategic thinking skills can be so valuable. These skills help leaders feel confident going up to the balcony, staying there a little longer and making better use of their time there. Strategic thinking skills are particularly valuable for middle leaders wanting to cement sustainable foundations for their career.
Typically, our strategic thinking events help people to:
- recognise the value of strategic thinking as a route out of firefighting and towards ways of working that are more sustainable and add real value;
- establish more clearly long-term goals and outcomes for their work and the fit with the government’s Missions, which helps guide day to day decision-making and improves prioritisation;
- understand how their work relates to the wider system and how to start making sense of that system, to help determine which connections to focus on and what sorts of approaches may or may not be helpful; and
- consider the value and effectiveness of their current relationships within and beyond government and how these need to evolve to achieve desired goals
We aim to give people simple, practical tools and models they can use to guide their thinking. Our goal is to make strategic thinking as easy as possible, even when the topic of that thinking might be hard!
We also explore how leaders can create the space and time to think – how they can be on the balcony more often. We recognise the real challenges of working at pace with fixed deadlines and demanding decision-makers, whilst observing that these are the very conditions in which strategic thinking can add the most value.
And, finally, we encourage leaders to use their ‘balcony time’ to reflect on their own behaviours and ways of working: in essence, are they spending the right amount of time on the dancefloor and on the balcony, and are they as effective as they can be in both places?
To find out more about our Strategic Thinking training, get in touch: customer.service@dods-training.com
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