The Ambidexterity Challenge – What’s Our Overall Approach?

Ambidexterity is the senior leader’s Job One & entails developing the ability to both:

1. Protect the core business with the proven methods of OpEx/Lean, and
2. Ignite new Growth using Digital methods & thinking

It’s an immense challenge for senior leaders and the Board. Let’s imagine they're are fully aligned & agree to move forward.   What’s our overall approach?

Based on our experience in multiple industries, the following generic logic is a good starting point: 

1. Take out the waste & variation, 
2. Get close to the customer, and 
3. Get Digital to the core

You'll of course tweak, refine, and adjust what you emphasize based on your business situation, but you can’t go wrong if you start with this overall logic.

Take Out the Waste & Variation

It’s not unusual to do dozens of process improvement events (PIEs) in the first few years. OpEx/Lean principles have made major inroads the past few decades but companies that practice them consistently are in the minority.  Bluntly stated: OpEx/Lean is hard. Much ink, tears & vitriol have been spilt debating why this is so. 

Please note that I’ve included Variation in the formula.  Variation degrades the management system. In fact, W. Edwards Deming called it a ‘virus’ that infects everything. PIEs must not devolve into mere ‘scavenger hunts’ for waste – that’s comparatively easy. The challenge is finding the root causes of both waste & variation and eliminating them with OpEx/Lean basics (including standardized work, visual management, quality in the process).

Get Close to the Customer

This is where things start to get interesting. In my experience, many companies believe they know the customer even though they have little direct contact or knowledge of him or her.  For example, an otherwise capable & thoughtful senior leader team comprising predominantly male, Gen Y, English-speaking Engineers & MBAs living in Chicago confidently proclaim this or that about a female, Gen Z, Chinese-speaking and deeply Buddhist persona living in a small east Asia city.

How do they know who she is, what she values and why she buys or does not buy their offering?  ‘We hired a local marketing firm to do a series of focus groups’. Good luck with that. This is where Growth Hacking & other elements of 21^st C marketing comes into their own.  But it’s a very different way of thinking & behaving for most organizations.

Get Digital to the Core

This means embracing so-called ‘exponential technologies’ like AI, Data, Cloud, RPA, AR, VR, Drones, and Blockchain. It also means embracing Digital methodologies like Agile Ways of Working, Design Thinking, Lean Experimentation, and the afore-mentioned Growth Hacking. Here’s the challenge: how to turn these methodologies into an integrated way of working?  One that makes sense for the business challenges you’re facing. Otherwise, you risk getting lost in a forest without a compass.

Each step of course, lays the foundation what follows. For example, if you digitize bad processes you will, as an RPA & Agentic AI executive told me, ‘create garbage at the speed of light’. And the three steps are cyclical, not linear. As your business challenges evolve, you’ll have to keep cycling back to step one.  As the poet said, ‘Rust never sleeps.’ Next time, I’ll talk about the nature of the journey.

Best wishes,

Pascal    

E: pascal.dennis@leansystemss.org