Part 1: Understanding your organisation’s purpose, intent, and structure
Holistic thinking and trade offs
The first part of the book will describe tools that can be used to articulate and refine your organisation’s purpose, intent and structure.
While this part will likely not tread radically new ground for management strategists, the tools are focused on clear and practical support for organisations to consciously think through why they exist, emphasise the need for holistic and grounded assessments, and build awareness of inevitable trade-offs in their structures and plans.
It will include descriptions and implementation guides for four tools:
1. Strategy canvas
The strategy canvas is one of my oldest reference tools, first developed in 2007 in discussion with Bob Lewis, a long time business strategist (with IT strategy being a particular focus). It’s a checklist as much as a diagnostic, a way to confirm that you understand the interaction between the enduring and immediate drivers of your organisation. Distinguishing between values and execution in this framework also aids in identifying mission drift and cultural conflicts.
In particular, I am often surprised by how many managers cannot articulate the difference between their broad and enduring objectives, compared to the goals they seek to achieve in support of their objectives. This tool is a valuable way to prompt the necessary thinking to flesh these views out.
[As an aside, I was sad but also pleased to see that Bob Lewis has recently handed over the reins of his long-running newsletter, ISSurvivor.com, to a like-minded colleague in Greg Mader. 32 years and counting of weekly strategy advice is an amazing achievement and Bob being Bob, he has managed the transition with simplicity and aplomb. I do note he is still guest posting though, so perhaps it is hard to ‘teach an old dog new tricks’!]
2. Process architecture placemat
The essence of process-based management thinking is to recognise that quality and optimisation must be considered end-to-end, not just within the team implementing a part of the process. For example, a team that increases its throughput by pushing work onto other teams has not improved organisational productivity at all, just moved the work to another area.
This philosophy of seeking total productivity improvements is often summarised as “suboptimise the parts to optimise the whole” — a key tenet of Deming’s work.
The placemat is derived from Roger Tregear’s methodology which separates out shared management processes and shared support processes from the core business processes that allow the organisation to deliver value. Using this tool to connect and document the end-to-end pathway from demand to value in these business processes can help to focus effort, identify silos, remove false optimisations, and find opportunities to improve information sharing and collaboration.
An example placemat for a professional consulting firm:
3. System fitness triangle
While the concepts of robustness and resilience are frequently referenced in complexity science, this tool explicitly calls out the trade-offs inherent in a system’s performance, robustness and resilience.
Robustness is the ability of a system to continue in its current configuration, either by “soaking” the impact of changes when they occur, or by exerting influence on the external environment to minimise or prevent unwanted changes. On the flip side, resilience maximises the speed with which a system can transform to a new, optimum configuration when faced with change.
Robustness and resilience are both different kinds of redundancy, and thus by definition are less point-in-time efficient from pure performance perspective. However a focus on optimising performance weakens the long-term buttresses of the organisation to survive once change inevitably arrives. Conversely, attempting to optimise for all three factors just means you will likely become mediocre in them all instead.
By posing explicit questions about trade-offs and identifying gaps between normative statements of value and actual practices in use, this tool can aid organisations to determine the relative value of each fitness attribute and to understand the requirements for improvement if they are lower than desired. Like most of these assessments, there is no “right” answer in the evaluation; the results are descriptive rather than prescriptive.
Unlike the other tools listed, I am unaware of prior art that specifically refers to the conceptual trade-off; although it obviously echoes the iron triangle of project management (time, cost, scope — pick two). Please leave a comment if you know of authors I should be referencing as having contributed to this space.
4. Results alignment test
The results alignment test explicitly considers the reason for an organisation’s ongoing existence and seeks to confirm that the results it seeks are meaningfully aligned with the results sought by its participants.
The test has a quantitative and qualitative element. The quantitative element assesses:
Relative importance of outcomes to the organisation, based on its operating context and motives
Relative importance of results that are motivating to the organisation’s participants (eg employees)
The qualitative element assesses the reward modality in use, and identifies how well management strategies map participant reward structures to the desired organisational results. This assessment and mapping may need to be conducted separately for each of the various employee classes (eg workers versus leaders).