STRATEGY CENTRAL

What are the assumptions that drive your organization?  Do you know?  I’ve written about this recently.  The trigger was Andy Stanley’s Drive talk, Random Thoughts on Leadership and the work that North Point is doing to revisit their assumptions.  I know Andy is a reader and suspect that part of his talk and the motive to revisit assumptions is based on the Harvard Business Review article When Growth Stalls by Matthew S. Olson, Derek van Bever, and Seth Verry.

One of the most helpful ideas in the article is the concept of an assumption hunt.  Based on a finding that “Assumptions held the longest or the most deeply are the most likely to be its undoing,” the authors propose a hunt designed to identify existing assumptions.  Further, they suggest that Gary Hamel and the team at Strategos have been doing some of the best work on helping organizations discover underlying assumptions.

The Future of Management

In late 2007 I wrote about The Future of Management.  Pulled it out yesterday and it’s a pretty marked up volume…always a sign of a good read.  Looking at it I realized that I had gotten busy and set it down halfway through.  Picking up where I left off yesterday I found a great chapter on the idea of an assumption hunt!  Very detailed.  Very helpful.  Exactly in line with the comments made by Stanley is his talk.

Detailing a plan for “escaping the shackles,” Hamel writes that to “get started, you’re going to have to cross swords with innovation’s deadliest foe: the often unarticulated and mostly unexamined beliefs that tether you and your colleagues to the management status quo.  All of us are held hostage by our axiomatic beliefs.  We are jailbirds incarcerated within the fortress of dogma and precedent.  And yet, for the most part, we are oblivious to our own captivity (p. 126).”

In the next few days I’ll be looking at some of Hamel’s ideas from this chapter.  Right in line with some important work that many of us need to do.  Want to come along?  Here’s a link to The Future of Management

Hoping for the best of both worlds?  It’s a false hope.  Products and designs that shoot for the best of worlds turn out to be the best of neither.  Want to be the best possible?  Shoot for the best of one world.  Find the one world that you want to make a difference in, go for that without looking back.  When you attempt to catch two customer groups by appealing to a little of this and a little of that you fail at both.

Love Seth Godin’s take on this subject today.  The challenge for many, many of us is that there is so little acknowledgment of the truth of this concept.  Instead, many organizations are led into situations where no one ever works up the courage to say, "No, we can’t be both so which would you rather be?"  Instead, many of us just sit back and watch the train wreck.  We may watch with a one-in-a-million kind of hope that it’ll all work out.  But instead of speaking the truth…we simply allow the universal truth that you can’t have the best of both worlds to pound its way into our conciousness.

What are the things that are happening in your world that are really about the false hope of providing the best of both worlds?

Today and tomorrow I’ll be at the Willow Creek’s Reveal Conference.  Not familiar?  The conference is based on a study that Willow did over the last few years that revealed some interesting things about how spiritual life develops.  Why am I talking about it here?  At StrategyCentral?  Easy…rather than just going with what they’ve always done (as one of the most effective churches in America), Willow took the time to actually look at the facts and then do something about it.  Where’d they get the facts?  From a very extensive survey (5,000 responses), designed by Eric Arnson (a former McKinsey consultant), done over a period of a couple years. 

Again, why am I talking about it here?  Easy.  Most of us are in organizations that just go along without ever really examining our assumptions.  We just go along blindly into next week, next month, even next year…doing more or less what we’ve always done…and then we are amazed when it doesn’t work out the way we think it should.

Sound like you?  Sound like your organization?

Stay tuned.

Who decides how the money gets spent in your organization?  Think it’s the forward thinking leadership on the management team?  The theory of resource dependence states that "while managers may think they control the flow of resources to their firms, in the end it is really customers and investors who dictate how money will be spent because companies with investment patterns that don’t satisfy their customers and investors don’t survive (The Innovator’s Dilemma, p. xxiii)."

What do you think?  What happens in your organization?

Love David Armano’s post on the difference between conventional marketing and unconventional marketing.  He’s got a succinct synopsis (big = big ideas, big bang launch, big budgets; little = micro strategies, big insights, rapid iterations) and his normal great diagram to illustrate.

There’s a lot packed into this diagram.  What I see that all of us need to see?  Rapid movement + rapid iterations is more important than one big idea.  There’s something here too about the difference between ideas and insights.  Great post.  You can read it right here.

All to often I’m finding that failing or faltering organizations know they are using hard-to-understand terminology but keep doing it anyway.  Sometimes they think it makes them seem impressive.  Other times they believe that using an arcane word (hard-to-understand) that requires translation demonstrates their value…when they stop to translate.  And still others never even realize that the very customers they hope to reach don’t even understand what they offer.

Any way you slice it, you need to be sure that the customers you hope to reach can understand you easily and without translation…unless you’re happy with your current results.  Steve Roesler over at All Things Workplace has a great example of a six-figure customer loss.  The reason?  One of the solutions being considered for purchase had an understandable rep and one needed translation.  Which one did they choose?  No brainer.

How’s your organization doing on this?  Need a translator?  Think you’re losing some customers?

You have a worldview.  I have a worldview.  Most important…your potential customers have a worldview.  If your strategy is based on your worldview and if your worldview isn’t in sync with your potential customers…you’re probably not going to reach them.

Unless you understand their worldview and can “package data in a way they can understand.”

Now, your worldview is not the same as your assumptions.  They need to be in sync though.  And we learned yesterday that, “Leaders must bring the underlying assumptions that drive company strategy into line with the changes in the external environment.”

Seth’s got a great post on this topic.  You can check it out right here.

Ever taken a big long drink of a carton of milk that had already expired?  I have.  Twice!  After a long day on the consulting trail, I stopped into a convenience store to pick up a carton of milk and a snack pack of Oreos.  So far so good, only when I got to my room and opened up the milk…it was sour.  Arggggh!  Bad enough that the milk was bad, it was too much work to drive back over to the store and get a new carton!

Ever taken a big long drink of an assumption that’s already expired?  You know the kind.  You’ve got a few of them in your organization and at one time they were true.  Now?  Not so much.  But nobody’s ever really examined why the program is in decline and having to be propped up by everyone with excuses.

Tracking?

In When Growth Stalls, a really helpful article over at HBR, authors Olson, Van Bever, and Verry share some powerful ideas about how to examine your assumptions.  Here are two keys:

• Leaders must bring the underlying assumptions that drive company strategy into line with the changes in the external environment.
• Assumptions that a team has held the longest or the most deeply are the most likely to be its undoing.

So you know what I did the next time I went to the convenience store to buy a carton of milk?  That’s right.  I took out my glasses and read the expiration date before I took it to the counter.

Think you might need to take a look at the expiration date on your assumptions?

I have certain tapes, CDs, podcasts, etc. that I must listen to periodically in order to stay on the right path strategically.  I found a new one last week and it is rattling my cage.  If you’re in this business to make a difference you have got to hear it.  It’s not free.  It’s $8.00.  But I’m betting you’ll get way more than your money’s worth.  You’ll find it right here.

How often have you performed a "postmortem" on a project or strategy that has failed?  Ever tried a "premortem?"  Me either.  Sounds like a good idea though!  Here’s how it could work:

1. Leader briefs the team on the project then announces that the project "has failed spectacularly."
2. The team spends a few minutes writing down reasons for the project’s failure.
3. Team members take turn reading one reason each until all the reasons are recorded.
4. Project manager looks for ways to strengthen the plan.

Think that might help?  The idea come from Performing a Project Postmortem, an article by Gary Klein mentioned in When Growth Stalls (the article source for some work on assumptions by North Point and Andy Stanley).