Think about what it’s like to learn to ride a bicycle, or play the piano, or hit a fast ball, or to coach a group of middle schoolers to do the same. If asked to explain how you stay balanced on a bicycle, you probably couldn’t do it. If you tried to think about each finger finding the right piano key, you could never play a series of chords let alone an entire song. A fast ball reaches home plate in four-tenths of a second, two-tenths faster than your conscious brain can register it. Yet somehow, you still manage to ride a bike, play the piano, and hit that fast ball, often with considerable skill. What’s going on here?

A new book out by David Eagleman entitled, “Incognito – The Secret Lives of the Brain”, investigates these types of abilities and explains how much, how very, very much of what we do and what we think is managed by subconscious processes completely outside of our conscious control and often beyond our conscious awareness (i.e. temperature control, digestion). It was Freud who first described this “iceberg” of mental processes, with 90% of it below the conscious surface, now further advanced by modern science, which has discovered that your subconscious makes its own decisions several tenths of a second before the conscious mind is aware of that decision. The “you’ of your subjective conscious experience is a minor player when it comes to most of what it is your body does, primarily brought into action only when there is a tie vote or a conflict among your subconscious processes. How do we know this is true, that the brain really works that way? Because you can hit a fast ball. Some part of your brain made the decision to pull the trigger and swing away before your conscious self was made aware of that decision.

The organization you run, manage and lead is a lot like your brain with its autonomous subconscious processes. For the most part, it functions day-after-day, minute-by-minute, without your active control or even your conscious knowledge. R&D adds features, account execs make sales calls, bugs get fixed, equipment gets replaced, customers hit submit online, paychecks get deposited, the lights come on in the morning and the bathrooms are cleaned at night. Don’t call this ‘delegation’, you haven’t delegated anything at this level of detail – this is an organization that has long since learned what to do and pretty much runs itself. If it’s running well it not only doesn’t need you, it doesn’t even care if you are there or not.

But when it does need you, it’s probably crucial. You might only set or change strategy once a year or so, but without adjustments to strategy the organization will just merrily sail itself off towards the edge of the world. And when the problem is big enough that you have to be called in to break the tie or resolve the conflict, it can’t be good news for anyone.

All of this talk about subconscious processes has been a set-up for this question: What is the best way to implement major organizational or strategic change? What is the best way to change a corporate culture before the old one eats your shiny new strategy for breakfast?

The answer is related to how you would teach any complex “organism” a new skill. The early stages are going to require a lot of visible, hands-on leadership from yourself with a focus on the obvious, or as the legendary Vince Lombardi used to start out each summer camp, even with a roster full of veteran players – “Gentlemen, this is a football”. You are going to attach training wheels to the bike, or put a little red sticker on Middle C.

After that, though, you are going to rely on your own body’s, or your student’s body, or your organization’s innate ability to learn by itself. Coaching becomes more nuanced, pointing out the little things, making minor adjustments, trying out variations and interpretations, clarifying the rules. Repetition, repetition, repetition; or, simulation, simulation, simulation (i.e. training exercises).

In the final stage you have backed away even further. It’s now about asking questions and getting the student to question themselves, about encouragement and critique. It’s about game strategy and pre-game preparation and off-season training, situational awareness, developing their baseball or marketing or research IQ. Come game time, once they take the field, they are pretty much on their own, out of your control (I once described my role as an off-season parent coach of my sons’ lacrosse team as someone whose job was to focus them on the task at hand before they took the field to do whatever they were going to do anyhow).

Our final step in this imaginary journey is to establish what sort of feedback would be most appropriate, and if I’ve made my point clearly enough, it should be obvious that the right type of feedback will vary with the learning stage the individual or organization finds themselves. Early on it will undoubtedly appear quite authoritarian and autocratic, disruptive of established norms and accustomed behaviors. As the learning continues the feedback becomes more fine-tuned and focused, and the thresholds/window for acceptable results narrows, corresponding to the standard metrics and KPI’s that we typically employ in performance management.

What about that final stage where the organization is running on autopilot? We too often ignore the information, feedback and metrics that our organization needs at this point. It doesn’t need to be ham-handed or punitive as if there is no trust in our people. The business intelligence, metrics and feedback that the mature organization needs at this stage are what the employees themselves feel they need in order to assess and adjust their own performance, not what we decide we want for the more limited purpose of monitoring. Have you ever considered deploying metrics and feedback that play no part whatsoever in an employee’s or an organization’s performance evaluation?

I’m not advocating abandoning performance monitoring metrics; the captain still needs to know speed, direction, fuel consumption and dangers up ahead. What I am saying is that with so much of your organization running itself without your awareness or involvement, you need to make certain that they are provided with what they need to properly function. It’s no longer about you controlling the organization, it’s about the organization controlling itself in alignment with the big picture strategy you’ve set, communicated, coached and led. It’s about trust.

So where does this leave you, the strategy-setting executive? Free to take your hands off this bicycle and start working on your next big challenge, the next goal, the next transformation, the next strategic direction.