Strategy is Doing – Making Strategy Fun Again (Part 5)

 

Is Strategy the domain of the specialist, consultant and technocrat? Are general managers primarily receptors and vehicles of execution?  That seems to be the case in many organizations wherein highly trained & credentialed experts develop objectives and key results and hand them down to general managers to ‘execute’. Indeed, the last step in the corporate strategy flowchart is often ‘Execute’ – which I call ‘And Now Miracles Will Happen’.

The downsides are palpable:

·       Strategies tend to be shallow, brittle, and impractical.

·       Reflection & Action are disconnected; the PDCA cycle is shattered.

·       We lose the invaluable practical learning, and tacti knowledge which Aristotle called ‘Phronesis.’

·       General managers fail to deepen their strategy & problem-solving skills.

·       Front line morale suffers. (“Why are they asking us to do dumb things?”)

This is a core weaknesses of the popular OKR process, which often resembles1950’s style Management by Objectives.

Strategy is the Continual Interplay Between Reflection and Action

In fact, Strategy is the domain of the practitioner, line leader, and general manager. Highfalutin degrees are not a prerequisite and can be a liability. Strategy entails Phronesis, an ancient Greek concept which has been defined as ‘practical wisdom’, ‘prudence’, or ‘common sense’. Aristotle described Phronesis as the happy balance between knowing what to do – and knowing how to do it.

Strategy is the domain of the general manager who continually cycles between reflection and action, sees the concrete results of a given hypothesis, how well it was executed, and why is produced the observed results. Such a person knows how to act effectively in concrete, real-life situations, how to motivate a team, and how to harvest and apply hard-won knowledge.

The ‘W’ Model

We owe the ‘W’ model to the great Shoji Shiba (still going strong at 93) and it remains an elegant expression of Strategy deployment - and Phronesis. The W model animates effective strategy deployment systems and builds strong practitioners. ‘W thinking’ is difficult to establish and even harder to sustain. My practice entails teaching senior leaders the supporting mindsets and skillsets.

My practice entails teaching senior leaders the supporting mindsets and skillsets - through doing. We develop & deploy hypotheses together and observe the results together. Then we keep asking why something worked, or not, till we've distilled something real & true.

The continuous interplay between Reflection & Action is most dramatic when we’re trying to ignite new Growth by creating new offerings, new markets and hopefully new businesses. Here, speed and accelerated learning are of the essence. My background in OpEx/Lean has proven enormously useful in grounding our Sprints in fundamentals like visual management, standardized work and level loading. A key enabler is insisting that team members ‘toss the ball’ back so that we connect Reflection & Action and can harvest the associated learning.

That, and building the required ‘nudges’ into our management system.

 Best wishes,

Pascal Dennis         E: pascal.dennis@leansystems.org

 

The Magic Lamp – Making Strategy Fun Again (Part 4)

 

Strategy deployment & execution are entering uncharted waters.  A magical capability is emerging, a ‘big blue genie’ if you will, of awesome promise, and more than a little peril. How do we harness the Genie’s power while mitigating the risks? What does it mean for Leaders & the practice of management?

The Fundamental Questions of Strategy

Almost all strategies can be expressed in terms of the marvelous mnemonic What, Why, How:

·       What are we trying to achieve?

·       Why do we want to do this?

·       How will we do this?

Indeed, the leader’s Job One is defining our Aspiration (What), rationale (Why) and winning logic (a high-level expression of How). Up until very recently, our What has always been constrained by the How.  Do we have the workforce, technology, machinery, capacity, governance & management system, supply chain, time and energy? Do we have the financial resources to plug gaps in any of these?

My Japanese senseis always encouraged me to imagine the ‘Ideal Condition’.  What does perfection look like?  Imagine the perfect process, production line, value stream, factory, and new model launch. As my practice expanded into new Growth using exponential methods, I tried to imagine the perfect customer journey, innovation sprint, experiment cycle, MLP, MMP, MVP, senior leader playback & pitch, and the like.

But I’ve always felt the constraining How.  Just how are we going to do this, given all the blockers including our ever-present resource constraints? I know I’m not alone.  Keeping an eye on the How as you define the What & Why is an element of prudent leadership. For example, asking a team to do something that is physically impossible is a morale killer. (Do they have any idea what we have to deal with every day?)  But the How can be a dark cloud that intimidates a team & constrains our vision.

The Constraint is no Longer ‘How?’

Agentic AI is akin to a magic lantern. We now have access to big blue Genei with magical powers. The Genie is neither good nor bad, but simply carries out the ‘master’s’ wishes, quite literally, and therein lies the peril. Ask the Genie to ‘increase the value of our investment portfolio’ and he or she will come up with multiple strategies, some immoral or illegal. Most people would agree that we lack the safety systems to constrain the worst of these tendencies.  Hopefully, we’ll have enlightened regulation before too long to protect society from such risks.

In any event, the AI Genie makes the How less daunting. Case in point: our innovation sprints in the consumer goods industry entail significant social media content creation including Shorts, Explainer Videos, Landing Pages in a wide variety of channels. We use these to help answer core Growth questions - (Who is the customer? What do they value? What do they buy or not buy…?).

Repurpose our extensive inventory of assets would be great, but it’s a lot of work and many partners have lacked the resources – until now. In a recent gig we were able to quickly create AI agents that do this work quickly, easily & affordably. Net result: we can run many more experiments, harvest better insights quicker & nimbly adjust our offering so that we get closer & closer to our Blue Ocean. In other words, the How is no longer the constraint. The constraint is now…

Imagining the What

What is the Ideal condition?  My senseis’ question takes on a deeper significance. The ‘What’ is no longer our strategic constraint – our imagination is the constraint.  Can we envision perfection, can we let our imagination free unconstrained by the tyranny of the How?  The Leader’s Job One is now not merely ‘What should be happening?’ but ‘What is the Ideal?’ How long will it take senior leaders and the Board to fully absorb this? And how do we build this into our governance and management system? More to come

Best wishes,

Pascal Dennis         E: pascal.dennis@leansystems.org

 

Strategy is Iterative, There are No Right Answers – Making Strategy Fun Again (Part 3)

 

Why do smart people struggle with strategy? Because smart people are used to having the right answer – and there’s no such thing in strategy. Humbling, no?

Strategy, like Innovation, exists in Aristotle’s World of Contingency – a strange place where things can be ‘other than they are’. This is the Land of Oz, the Rabbit Hole, the Land of Lost Logic, the World Behind the Curtain – pick your metaphor. It’s a place where ‘normal’ rules, conventions, and scientific truths don’t usually apply, or they do for a while & then they stop.

We’re used to Aristotle’s World of Necessity – where there are universal truths, and a bedrock of scientific knowledge. In the World of Necessity, the laws of mathematics, engineering, production physics, OpEx/Lean, finance and accounting and the like apply in a predictable way. We can figure things out following proven recipes like root cause problem solving.  One of my favorite auto manufacturing sayings is ‘Follow the recipe, and you get a Big Mac every time!’

In the World of Contingency, by contrast, you follow the recipe and sometimes you get a cheese quesadilla or a corned beef sandwich or a plate of tofu! What’s true in Innovation is true in Strategy.

Strategy is Iterative

‘We are ignorant armies clashing by night’, said Matthew Arnold. The great military strategist, Carl von Clausewitz described the inevitability of ‘Friction’.  Secretary of Defence, Paul Rumsfeld, baffled journalists with abstruse allusions to ‘known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns’. What to do?

·       Accept that Strategy (and Innovation) live in the uncertain world of Contingency.

·       Experiment, experiment, experiment – dispel the fog through quick, cheap experiments that shine light on the path. ‘Fail fast, fail forward,’ as the saying goes.

·       I would add ‘and Learn Easy.’  Keep it light and fun – people learn best when they’re laughing.

·       Analyze using the marvelous tools of AI but recognize their limitations.

·       Thereby develop intuition, ‘taste,’ gut feel, and business savvy

Strategy is iteration, strategy is doing and learning. Be humbler and accept you’re in a different world where different laws apply. Be rigorous in your process – insist on clear testable hypotheses based on a deep grasp of your current condition. Insist on rapid feedback loops and visual management so that everybody knows what’s happening. Make problem solving and innovation thinking central to your management system. Engage everybody in improvement.  Provide continual nudges in this direction – celebrate great hypotheses, great experimentation and learning.  Promote your best & brightest learners.

Best wishes,

Pascal Dennis         E: pascal.dennis@leansystems.org

 

Strategy is Distributive - Making Strategy Fun Again (Part 2)

 

Why do so many other smart people struggle with Strategy?  Because smart people are used to being right – and in Strategy very often there are no ‘right’ answers. There is a suitable direction/aspiration, and a testable winning logic. The rest is distribution & iteration.

So what? Team member apathy is at epidemic levels around the world – and strategy is a big part of the problem.

Strategy is usually a drag, no? Flat, boring & superficial directives from on high prepared by disinterested technocrats, or even worse, by LLMs pretending to be human. No wonder people are disengaged.  What’s wrong with strategy & how do we fix it’? (This is 2^nd article in a series.)

Strategy is Distributive

Strategy is distributed problem solving; each level has to solve discrete problems that are aligned with each other, and with our overall Aspiration.  Each level has to define their ‘hot spots’, assign resources, and run experiments around the key questions of problem solving and/or innovation – (a core element in my books).

Few organizations do this well. Some hope that the AI wave will improve the situation, though I am doubtful (for reasons I’ll explore in upcoming articles).

Common Blockers to Distributive Strategy

Here are some of the many blockers I’ve observed:

1.     Lack of trust – currently spiking because of AI

2.     Lack of alignment or clarity around our core Aspiration. Key enablers: Leadership & the related arts of rhetoric, oratory, and storytelling

3.     Inadequate problem-solving skill – root causes include lack of practice, inadequate systemic ‘nudges,’ overly complex algorithms, absence of mentorship.

4.     Fundamental misunderstandings around continuous improvement vs Innovation – OpEx and Innovation live in different worlds - (see my articles on Aristotle’s ‘two worlds’ formulation)

5.     Organizational inertia – deploying and executing Strategy is usually arduous work with few rewards. Running the business consumes all our time & energy.

I’ve addressed many of these blockers in past articles. Let me briefly discuss blocker # 5 here. Even if we have addressed # 1 to 4, we need to create space for strategic problem solving - physical, financial, temporal, organizational, cultural, emotional and cultural space. This means allocating time, money, leadership and organizational energy. It means senior leader playbacks, Shark Tanks, Improvement Fairs, Hackathons and the like, wherein we observe, challenge, mentor and grow our future leaders. It means aligning HR systems, so our best & brightest problem-solvers & innovators are recognized.  It means engaging the Board in levelling up our reward systems. How many organizations have the vision, will & tenacity to do this?

Strategy is Distributive

In my doodle above, each spiral represents are capable team running rapid experiments in pursuit of some strategic improvement or innovation.  Keep these wheels spinning is the job of leaders. Ensuring the management system enables such work is the job of the Board. In some organizations it all comes together & holds – a thing of beauty not easily forgotten. I’ve experienced this beauty more than a few times, and it keeps you coming back for more.

Best wishes,

Pascal Dennis         E: pascal.dennis@leansystems.org