Strategy, options, decisions oh my!
A short article this week as my incredible wife is taking me on a long weekend to Copenhagen for my birthday.
A short article this week as my incredible wife is taking me on a long weekend to Copenhagen for my birthday.
This article is a short exploration on some of the ideas / books and concepts I have explored and find useful around strategy, goals / alignment and decision making for technology choices.
Good Strategy / Bad Strategy — Richard Rumelt
TL;DR version — most strategy sucks or is super derivative, generic and ambiguous. This is a great read on how to have a strategy that helps people make decisions within an organization. Strategy acts as a set of heuristics to help guide you deliver on the strategy but without needing constant approval and validation. This is often called mission command or Auftragstaktik
If your company's strategy doesn’t give you a clear view on how you should be making decisions — then it isn’t really a strategy.
Objectives and Key Results — Andy Grove
(at Intel, formalized by John Doerr, adopted by Google and has been moving along the hype cycle ever since)
Creating strategic alignment through goal setting is a common enough problem that has evolved over time. OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are the latest of many such techniques that provide a simple but powerful way to link various parts of an organization to a genuinely prioritized set of objectives (Jon Smart of Sooner Safer Happier fame) refer to the O as outcomes instead and this does feel more purposeful and enabling.
If management cascades or hands down objectives to you, those objectives are likely to be treated as commands rather than as a north star / direction set.
On the other side, you can get OKRs that are so abstract they cease to have meaning or worse, yet they are articulated as strategic imperatives (a bunch of words that mean little to anyone trying to contribute towards a company's strategy — works like ‘client focus’, ‘date driven’ etc. — check out Simon Wardley’s ‘what is my strategy — generator’ to see what I mean).
I like the idea of 3 distinct levels: Business, Product and Team (however from my experience starting with Business and Product are only needed to get going). Starting with team level OKRs can just overly confuse and mis-align the whole point of OKRs — which is alignment and shared understanding how our work contributes to what outcomes the company is going for. This is the mission command approach implemented into a tool (OKRs).
I’m prefer Joh Smart’s language hack of calling the O — Outcomes rather than Objectives, that is rarely something you can easily change in a company that has already started calling them Objectives. Since words have meaning, changing the words or the meaning causes frustration and confusion, it also puts your efforts at risk of establishing competence.
My go to for OKRs is Christina Wodtke and her incredible book Radical Focus v2 — plain and simple, she rocks!
Purpose Alignment Model — Niel Nickolaisen
A powerful but simple model introduced to me by Chris Matts when we worked together for a couple of years. The model is taken from a book ‘Stand Back and Delivery: Accelerating Business Agility’ by Pollyanna Pixton, Niel Nickolaisen, Todd Little & Kent J. Mcdonald (Contributor). There’s some other models in the book that are also powerful around value but I'll keep this one brief.
The idea of the purpose model is simple enough, it allows organizations to take a critical look at decisions they want to make in terms of adopting technologies and products from the context of a customer / market perspective. As a recovering domain architect / CTO in a large complex enterprise, I was frequently met with users / stakeholders and often senior people simply suggesting we build something from scratch rather than even consider looking in the market. Something remarkably close to my ‘ego driven architecture’ concept, where leadership design something without the accountability of building it and getting feedback from the actual users.
Financial ledgers are a good example, would you give a company more business if you knew they bought or built their own ledger (assuming that companies primary business was also not building and selling accounting software).
A great pairing is using the Purpose Alignment model with Wardley mapping to not only think about a specific technology or product, but the underlying value chain of it as well. Specifically, how emerging or commoditized is it.
You cannot differentiate what you are doing when something is a commodity, which is where you can exploit commercial or open-source products and instead build on top and find where the real value is.
Future areas to explore…
Wardley map — Simon Wardley (Genisis, Custom, Product, Commodity)
Cynefin — Dave Snowden (Clear, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic)
Real options — Chris Matts (Options have value, Options expire, Never commit early unless you know why)
OODA Loop — John Boyd (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act)
What other interesting areas you would recommend exploring?