Strategy in a Time of Explosive Change

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

May you live in interesting times – Chinese Curse

Interesting times indeed, no? The reasons are too long to recite here – changing technology, customer expectations, internationalization, rapid cultural shifts, the explosion of information…

Technological change, for example, is so rapid and severe that in many industries we can no longer confidently define value.

The ‘Eight Essential’ technologies – Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, AI, Blockchain, Robotics, Drones, Internet of Things, and 3-D Printing have exploded the ‘design space’.

Only by developing deep empathy with our customers & their customer journeys can we begin to understand what’s important to them. And even then, value is a moving target.

So it goes…

How to manage one’s business (and one’s life) in such times?

Let’s focus on the most important things first: How do we develop and deploy strategy in ‘interesting’ times?

Quick & ‘Easy’ Strategy

Keep it simple – if you can’t tell the story with one-page, do you understand it?

Accept that when it comes to strategy, perfection is impossible - and not even desirable! Remember, there is no right answer in strategy – only a right process!

Ensure, therefore, that purpose & logic are clear so that when you inevitably ‘pivot’, you’ll know what parts of your hypothesis were sound or not, and why.

Choose!

Strategy is not about deciding what’s important. All the ideas your team proposes are likely ‘important’. But you can’t do them all – you have to choose.

Too often, leaders try to hedge their bets by choosing too much, with predictable results. Choose the critical few, check frequently, and be prepared to pivot.

Please don’t misunderstand the great Henry Mintzberg’s ‘emergent’ strategies concept. Just because you’re prepared to pivot, doesn’t mean you needn’t articulate a hypothesis!

Failing to do so, of course, condemns you to the limbo of endless reaction & limited learning.

Avoid Boring Strategy Docs

The typical corporate strategy comprises a ‘Mission’, ‘Initiatives’, and in effect, a ‘Budget with Prose’. (Tip of the hat to another great, Dr. Roger Martin, for this.)

These are deadly dull and have a soporific effect on your team. ZZZZZZZZZZZZ…..

Keep your strategy to one page, tell your story, and answer the Big Questions as simply and clearly as you can:

1. Who are we and what do we believe in?
2. Where are we going?
3. How do we get there? (What’s our underlying logic?)
4. What’s preventing us?
5. What capabilities do we need to develop?
6. What management systems do we need to develop?

These are difficult questions, of course, which require deep experience and reflection. To develop a good strategy we need to bounce between the worlds of action and thought.

As the saying goes, get out of the building.

And finally, even though we live in times of explosive change, remember that some things are eternal.

Reflection, experience and the intuition gained thereby are innately human, and unlikely to be replaced by technology.

More likely, in my view, technology will enable the strategist, just as a horse enables the rider.

But that’s the topic of another blog.

Here’s to interesting strategic journeys.

Best regards,

Pascal



In case you missed our last few blogs... please feel free to have another look…

The Function of Leaders is to Produce More Leaders
Complexity is a Crude State, Simplicity Marks the End of a Process of Refinement
Can Lean & Agile Help to Fix Our Courts? Part 4
Can Lean & Agile Help to Fix Our Courts? Part 3

The Function of Leaders is to Produce More Leaders

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

In an era of breath-taking innovation, is there anything more important?

The ‘Essential Eight Technologies’ – Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Drones, 3-D Printing, Big Data Analytics, and Distributed Ledger Technology (‘Blockchain’) – make disruption almost inevitable.

Prosperity, and in some industries, survival, depends on an organization’s ability to continuously solve complex problems.

And that entails leadership at each level. The internet, our era’s central metaphor, is in my view, an appropriate model of the successful organization.

There is no ‘center’ directing the actions of the myriad nodes. Instead, there is intelligence everywhere solving the relevant problems.

To be sure, Strategy development and deployment, remain core responsibilities of senior leaders. The core questions have to be answered:

Where are we going? How do we get there? What’s preventing us? And the deeper questions: Who are we? What do we believe in?

What is the purpose of the Human Resources function?

1. To grow more leaders
2. To create flexible, capable team members always looking for a better way

Let me suggest that core HR processes – Recruitment, Training & Development, Compensation, Performance and Succession Planning – must evolve accordingly. And so must corresponding methods.

It has to be easy, for example, to measure capability, so we can answer the core problem solving questions: What should be happening? What is actually happening?

A big challenge, given the secondary role HR plays in many organizations!

Deepening & extending the mindset of senior leaders is another big challenge. Most have grown up in a very different world, where developing more leaders was rarely recognized or rewarded.

Much of our LPI practice entails coaching senior leaders. The very best are those who have internalized these ideas. A salient quote: “My job is to develop capability – of people, processes and machinery.”

So what to do? A good start would be to explicitly include ‘Growing Other Leaders’ in performance contracts, and succession planning. (If I may suggest, providing capable coaches also makes sense.)

At our old Toyota plant, if you hadn’t ‘left a footprint’, promotion was out of the question. And so, we focused on creating capability – of people, processes and machinery. It’s how you got promoted.

Toyota’s superb internal senseis helped immeasurably. As did Toyota’s HR processes and policies. It was easy, for example, to measure capability of people, processes and machinery.

Thus, we could apply the Plan-Do-Check-Adjust cycle and practice root cause problem solving. We could run experiments and learn what worked and what did not.

Building the capability of people, interestingly, is not that different from building process capability.

All for now. More to come on this juicy topic.

Best regards,

Pascal



In case you missed our last few blogs... please feel free to have another look…

Complexity is a Crude State, Simplicity Marks the End of a Process of Refinement
Can Lean & Agile Help to Fix Our Courts? Part 4
Can Lean & Agile Help to Fix Our Courts? Part 3
The Role of Senior Leaders (Part 1)

Strategy in a Time of Explosive Change

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

May you live in interesting times – Chinese Curse

Interesting times indeed, no? The reasons are too long to recite here – changing technology, customer expectations, internationalization, rapid cultural shifts, the explosion of information…

Technological change, for example, is so rapid and severe that in many industries we can no longer confidently define value.

The ‘Eight Essential’ technologies – Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, AI, Blockchain, Robotics, Drones, Internet of Things, and 3-D Printing have exploded the ‘design space’.

Only by developing deep empathy with our customers & their customer journeys can we begin to understand what’s important to them. And even then, value is a moving target.

So it goes…

How to manage one’s business (and one’s life) in such times?

Let’s focus on the most important things first: How do we develop and deploy strategy in ‘interesting’ times?

Quick & ‘Easy’ Strategy

Keep it simple – if you can’t tell the story with one-page, do you understand it?

Accept that when it comes to strategy, perfection is impossible - and not even desirable! Remember, there is no right answer in strategy – only a right process!

Ensure, therefore, that purpose & logic are clear so that when you inevitably ‘pivot’, you’ll know what parts of your hypothesis were sound or not, and why.

Choose!

Strategy is not about deciding what’s important. All the ideas your team proposes are likely ‘important’. But you can’t do them all – you have to choose.

Too often, leaders try to hedge their bets by choosing too much, with predictable results. Choose the critical few, check frequently, and be prepared to pivot.

Please don’t misunderstand the great Henry Mintzberg’s ‘emergent’ strategies concept. Just because you’re prepared to pivot, doesn’t mean you needn’t articulate a hypothesis!

Failing to do so, of course, condemns you to the limbo of endless reaction & limited learning.

Avoid Boring Strategy Docs

The typical corporate strategy comprises a ‘Mission’, ‘Initiatives’, and in effect, a ‘Budget with Prose’. (Tip of the hat to another great, Dr. Roger Martin, for this.)

These are deadly dull and have a soporific effect on your team. ZZZZZZZZZZZZ…..

Keep your strategy to one page, tell your story, and answer the Big Questions as simply and clearly as you can:

1. Who are we and what do we believe in?
2. Where are we going?
3. How do we get there? (What’s our underlying logic?)
4. What’s preventing us?
5. What capabilities do we need to develop?
6. What management systems do we need to develop?

These are difficult questions, of course, which require deep experience and reflection. To develop a good strategy we need to bounce between the worlds of action and thought.

As the saying goes, get out of the building.

And finally, even though we live in times of explosive change, remember that some things are eternal.

Reflection, experience and the intuition gained thereby are innately human, and unlikely to be replaced by technology.

More likely, in my view, technology will enable the strategist, just as a horse enables the rider.

But that’s the topic of another blog.

Here’s to interesting strategic journeys.

Best regards,

Pascal

The Function of Leaders is to Produce More Leaders

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

In an era of breath-taking innovation, is there anything more important?

The ‘Essential Eight Technologies’ – Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Drones, 3-D Printing, Big Data Analytics, and Distributed Ledger Technology (‘Blockchain’) – make disruption almost inevitable.

Prosperity, and in some industries, survival, depends on an organization’s ability to continuously solve complex problems.

And that entails leadership at each level. The internet, our era’s central metaphor, is in my view, an appropriate model of the successful organization.

There is no ‘center’ directing the actions of the myriad nodes. Instead, there is intelligence everywhere solving the relevant problems.

To be sure, Strategy development and deployment, remain core responsibilities of senior leaders. The core questions have to be answered:

Where are we going? How do we get there? What’s preventing us? And the deeper questions: Who are we? What do we believe in?

What is the purpose of the Human Resources function?

1. To grow more leaders
2. To create flexible, capable team members always looking for a better way

Let me suggest that core HR processes – Recruitment, Training & Development, Compensation, Performance and Succession Planning – must evolve accordingly. And so must corresponding methods.

It has to be easy, for example, to measure capability, so we can answer the core problem solving questions: What should be happening? What is actually happening?

A big challenge, given the secondary role HR plays in many organizations!

Deepening & extending the mindset of senior leaders is another big challenge. Most have grown up in a very different world, where developing more leaders was rarely recognized or rewarded.

Much of our LPI practice entails coaching senior leaders. The very best are those who have internalized these ideas. A salient quote: “My job is to develop capability – of people, processes and machinery.”

So what to do? A good start would be to explicitly include ‘Growing Other Leaders’ in performance contracts, and succession planning. (If I may suggest, providing capable coaches also makes sense.)

At our old Toyota plant, if you hadn’t ‘left a footprint’, promotion was out of the question. And so, we focused on creating capability – of people, processes and machinery. It’s how you got promoted.

Toyota’s superb internal senseis helped immeasurably. As did Toyota’s HR processes and policies. It was easy, for example, to measure capability of people, processes and machinery.

Thus, we could apply the Plan-Do-Check-Adjust cycle and practice root cause problem solving. We could run experiments and learn what worked and what did not.

Building the capability of people, interestingly, is not that different from building process capability.

All for now. More to come on this juicy topic.

Best regards,

Pascal