by Roger Dennis

Bringing Strategy to Life

Strategy.

The word means so many thing to so many people, but I prefer a simple definition provided by my friend and colleague Patrick Harris of thoughtengine. He crystalised the meaning of the word as “the plan that gets you from where you are now to where you want to be in the future.”

It’s simple but not simplistic.

I use this definition to guide my work in the area of strategic innovation.  Often though there’s a need to make your strategy more than just a pile of black and white A4 documents.  And, before you make the obvious retort, I’m also talking  about those strategy documents that use colour.  And, what’s more, those that use  – gasp – graphs.

The challenge is to make a strategy come to life so that people can not just understand it, but experience it.  At the end of last week I ran a process to do just that – bring the Board of a NZ$1.3billion organisation up to date on the strategy.

Working with my colleagues we developed a concept where we mocked up an example of what the current service was like.  We had real people talking to small groups from the Board about how things were done today and what the problems were with the service.

We then walked them through the strategy, but bought it to life.  We mapped out the next twelve years from a customer point of view, and from an employee point of view.  We used three points along the way (the years 2011, 2014 and 2017)  to show how things could change and why they needed to change.  By interacting with two scenarios, the Board were able to see what would happen if the organisation continued on it’s present path, and what would happen if the organisation was transformed.

At the end of the walk though we then had a mockup of what the service might look like in the year 2020, and why the mockup was a better outcome for the organisation, for the employees and for the customer.

The result was exactly what we had hoped for: a Board that was galvanised by the challenges that it faced.  The Board not only understood the issues, but also had an excellent grasp of the complexities that were inherent in the strategy.

Now that’s something that you can’t do with paper.

by Roger Dennis

The importance of strategy in downturns

A quick post to point to a thought provoking article on the Booz site. The summary excerpt is as follows:


All industrial corporations face downturns and periods of retrenchment. Successful strategists promote upturn thinking even during the deepest downturns. Techniques such as crafting an upturn SWAT team, implementing long-term strategic planning, and requiring upturn thinking during restructuring help companies develop their own Marshall Plan to stay one step ahead of competitors when better times return.

by Roger Dennis

A Chinese recession and the World Economy

Although I’ve been looking around recently, there’s hardly any discussion about the scenario that China’s economy could nose dive.  The prospect would be interesting to say the least, and would have a dramatic effect on the world economy.  However yesterday The Independent published a piece looking at the possibility of China slowing down post-Olympics.  The most riveting statement was this:

The basic point is that Chinese consumers have taken over from those in the US as the main drivers of additional demand in the world economy. […] All eyes will be on China over the next month. It will be the first time for most of us in the West that we will have to contemplate a world where China takes over from the US as the largest economy. That tipping point is probably still 25 years away, but long before that the shift of power will shape our perception of global economics.

by Roger Dennis

Science fiction as an influence

A recent issue of Wired highlighted yet another instance where science fiction is an influencer – especially on those that have the money to fulfill their childhood dreams.

Sonny Astani, a 55-year-old real estate mogul is planning to bring 2019 Los Angeles to life in the form of two 14-story animated billboards modeled on Ridley Scott’s opening sequence. “I saw Blade Runner at least five times”, says Astani, whose empire encompasses thousands of Southern California apartment units. “The billboards always struck me.”

copyright Wired

by Roger Dennis

Excellent summary of discontinous innovation approaches

If you are after a good overview of disruptive/discontinuous approaches to innovation, then look no further than the UK organisation Advanced Institute of Management.  It has compiled an Executive Briefing that is comprehensive in its coverage of the field. The blurb reads:

In a fast moving world, one of the biggest challenges facing organisations is dealing with discontinuous innovation (DI).  This briefing document  focuses on at what some leading organisations are doing in this area it suggests 12 different strategies for developing a search capability to detect triggers of discontinuous innovation. These strategies are also useful for more conventional innovation, and all organisations should employ some at least, if they aim to remain both competitive and durable.

The Futures approach we use at Innovaro with clients such as Shell and GM (Europe) is referenced, although not quite in the full context.

Direct download of the PDF is also available.

by Roger Dennis

The Economist on Alternative Energy

I’ve been flat out with clients over the last couple of weeks, but my attention has been drawn to an interesting special report in the Economist about the future of energy. It makes the same points that have come out of the Technology Futures workshops that we’ve been running for the Shell GameChanger team. In a nutshell, these are that the hydrogen economy will never take off (too much infrastructure to build), the jury is still out of biofuels and that ‘electronification’ (an electron economy) is one of the most likely paths for energy.

One of the articles also succinctly states the case against wind power:

The ultimate goal is to harvest the sun’s energy directly by intercepting sunlight, rather than by waiting for that sunlight to stir up the atmosphere and sticking turbines in the resulting airstreams.

Recommended reading.

by Roger Dennis

A question with William Gibson

I’m really interested in science fiction as a predictor of technologies. As Paul Saffo remarked in his (highly recommended) Long Now speech, science fiction starts “meme bombs” in the minds of teenagers. These bombs detonate when they’re in a position to do something about them – usually when they are going through a midlife crisis soon after they reach 40.

If you Google on the term “science faction” you’ll find a rich sampling of material that refers to this (meme bombs that is, not midlife crises).

So when the opportunity came to put a question to William Gibson – the originator of a science fiction genre called ‘cyber-punk’ – I was interested to know his views on the extent to which science fiction is an indicator of the future. His response (in part) was as follows:


“I don’t actually see science fiction influencing the future much now […] Science fiction was a big part of the culture of our future in the previous century but the previous century was a century where we actually believed we had a future. We took it for granted that we had a future and in the 21st century we can’t take it for granted in the same way that we have a future.”

Gibson then goes on to talk about how if he went into a publishers office in 1981 – the year he started writing – and proposed a novel based on the destabilisation of Earths weather systems, AIDs, terrorists flying planes into buildings in New York and the USA invading the wrong country – they would have said “too much!”

He makes the point that actually the world is much more complex than this, and

“…we don’t have the luxury of dreaming of a Star Trek future because we have too much ‘how do we get there from here’ going on to make that realistically possible. You can still do that kind of science fiction but it require far too much wishful thinking to convince me.”

You can download the entire William Gibson interview here.

(As an aside he says a similar comment in this Rolling Stone interview)

by Roger Dennis

Gladwell on Insight (The New Yorker)

Over at the New Yorker Malcolm Gladwell has written as essay on insight – more specifically – how to cultivate it artificially. Besides being a damn fine read, there’s some great sections on cross-sector discovery.

Surgeons had all kinds of problems that they didn’t realize had solutions, and physicists had all kinds of solutions to things that they didn’t realize were problems. At one point, Myhrvold asked the surgeons what, in a perfect world, would make their lives easier, and they said that they wanted an X-ray that went only skin deep. They wanted to know, before they made their first incision, what was just below the surface. When the Intellectual Ventures crew heard that, their response was amazement. “That’s your dream? A subcutaneous X-ray? We can do that.”

Insight could be orchestrated: that was the lesson.

For many people the concept that they can look across industries and learn from others is an amazing discovery. I’ve used it to great effect in learning workshops where I’ve had C-level executives looking at a massively diverse set of industries. The results are always incredibly rich in all sense of the word.

by Roger Dennis

The importance of Edges

A quick pointer to a highly recommended post (and article) from John Hagel (and John Seely Brown) about how changes on the edges impact the core. John Hagel writes:

Instinctively, I have been drawn to various edges because of the opportunity and challenge they represent. Over time, I have focused more sharply and explicitly on the importance of the edge as a source of value creation and strategic advantage.

On a different and slightly facetious note when people – including myself – talk about edges it always reminds me of the term “cutting edge”. This is the sort of phrase that got rolled out during the dot com bubble – as in “We’re on the cutting edge of ………….. (insert industry name). Except companies like boo.com who weren’t so much on the cutting edge, but more on the Bleeding Edge…