leadership

What’s the Point? Getting Strategy Right

Alistair Russell · April 19, 2023 · Leave a Comment

Prompted by reading and reflecting on a recent article “Getting strategy wrong and how to do it right instead” published in McKinsey Quarterly, we concluded that the best place to start is with the “what’s the point” question.

Real, open, informed discussions amongst senior leaders are essential if you are going to get strategy right. In all our experience, the fundamental, “do not pass go” questions flow from this perspective including:

how will the strategy be used?
what will people do differently as a result of the strategy?
what effect will that different behaviour have?
what benefits should flow from the use of this strategy
who will recognise those benefits?
what differences in what things will key stakeholders notice?
how will those effects be measured?

We find these “what’s the point” questions useful at all levels of our strategic work. Both in defining what we do with, or on behalf of, our clients, what is produced and how it is produced all provide the foundation for getting strategy right.

Whether it’s working across the organisational leadership team interrogating organisational strategy and what it might mean for digital systems, data and technology. Testing for coherence and relative priority of strategic goals and objectives. Or working to review an application portfolio to inform strategic decisions to say invest, migrate or retire key systems. Or developing the set of enterprise architectural principles that technology and organisational leaders will use to test prospective solutions for both business and technical “fit”. All of these strategic activities depend for their success on a clear articulation of what they are for – their point.

Developing key relationships to enable delivery of value

Alistair Russell · March 16, 2023 · Leave a Comment

A recent article in Harvard Business Review identified four elements of the playbook that differentiates organisations that deliver class-leading productivity improvement. The ability to capture value from digitisation was the first of the playbook’s elements.

Based on cross sector research by a team from McKinsey, the playbook’s other elements were “investing in intangibles”, “building a future ready workforce” and “adopting a systems approach”. It prompted us to come back to an enduring issue in our work. How does an organisation develop the ability to capture value from investing in digital technology? What should you do as CIO or senior technology leader to enable, prompt or improve your organisation’s’ ability to deliver value? Where should you start? How do you make the difference?

We have previously shared our insight on the tool we use to focus and motivate teams to deliver value, “the Personal Measurement Framework” – see connecting to value . However, whilst the tool can and does make a difference; through the conversations it prompts and the actions that result. However, our insight is that there is something more fundamental that has to be addressed to provide the fertile ground for such tools to work.

The fundamental thing seems to be the senior executive team sharing a deep, comprehensive, non-transactional view of how digital technology works for their customers, their teams and the organisation’s stakeholders . The senior team understand the specific benefits that digital investments can deliver and the critical success factors in the delivery of benefits.

And in our experience, the foundation for that deep understanding is the CIO and their team investing time and emotion into the set of powerful connections, engagements and relationships with their colleagues both inside and outside the organisation. And the first step is to establish those relationships and importantly to never stop developing them – it’s a critical part of your work. In our view, it is the foundation for the delivery of value from investment in digital technology.

In building, developing and sustaining those critical relationships, the important steps, include:

Focus, identify the key players for the delivery of value through a stakeholder analysis process;
Invest, take time to understand what value means for each of your c-level colleagues and beyond that for customers, for your board, shareholders, make explicit the value statements and the evidence that will be used to demonstrate value delivery;
Challenge, identify and address the difficult questions, confront those questions with data, engage in constructive debate with colleagues to deepen the mutual understanding;
Deliver, take action, lead your team through delivery of changes at the appropriate frequency – anything from by the minute and the hour through to more traditional weekly or monthly reviews;
Don’t stop, developing these foundational relationships should not stop, it is work, it may not feel like it when you start, but in our experience it is the source of value delivery.

And in telling stories about what you do, in the language you use, putting value creation “front and centre” matters. As CIOs you have the platform of your enterprise view and awareness of the change agenda, you are extremely well placed to enable decision making based on value. As CIO, you understand value and know how your organisation can deliver. Enable your organisation make the right technology investments to deliver long term productivity gain.

Connecting to Value

Alistair Russell · November 25, 2021 · Leave a Comment

In our experience, focusing and motivating your teams to deliver value for your organisation remains one of the most considered challenges for leaders. Especially doing it in a way that works. In a way that is both efficient and effective. We know that sustaining teams and individuals to do the right thing is critically important and yet it remains hard work for us all. This challenge is heightened in our context of enabling clients to deliver value through the power of digital technologies. In our dynamic and developing contexts, we continue to work at making sense of which managerial and leadership approaches and tools will deliver the right outputs, let alone make sure that the outputs do really enable the value desired.

Addressing this challenge is made more complex in many of our client organisations because teams and individuals are typically ‘citizens’ of many units. Units that have a digital product or service focus, units that have a strategic business focus, units that have a professional focus such as programme and project management, business analysis, quality assurance, user experience etc.. We find that now more than ever, generic objective, KPI driven models rarely deliver for the individual, team or indeed the organisation. Sometimes such models can even work against the delivery of true shareholder or stakeholder value.

In response to this enduring challenge we developed an approach – the “Personal Measurement Framework”. We have used this successfully many times with clients, guided by three important axioms. Firstly, to design an approach that connects with value as perceived by the relevant stakeholders, connects to why your role, your team and your capability exists. Secondly, to provide structure and framework, yet empower individuals to develop their own measurement framework and thirdly, to balance the measurement framework across the full range of measures, not just on the traditional metric of output delivery.

The Personal Measurement Framework starts with the idea of a value proposition from the Business Model Canvas – see Business Model Generation. The process invites leaders and teams to teams to start with ‘end in mind’, to start with the job that their ‘customer’ or indeed their customers’ customer is responsible for delivery and what are the pains and gains for them in delivery of that job. Then the process gets the leaders and teams to make explicit the value proposition of their product or service in terms of the pain relievers and gain creators that they deliver. If appropriate you can add in a step of using the value proposition to structure and engagement with ‘customer’ or agent of ‘customer’ to validate the value proposition.

The next step is to use the gain creators and pain relievers identified in the value proposition to develop measures of delivery of value. And to develop measures through challenging leaders and teams to hold onto the tenets of Kaplan and Norton’s work on balanced scorecards – see Harvard Business Review article. Developing measures that don’t just measure output e.g. tested and integrated code, but also measure development of capability and learning e.g. codified process improvement alongside measures that are meaningful for the customer e.g. transaction speed, volume growth.

The Personal Measurement Framework delivers benefits through explicitly connecting your teams to value delivery with additional benefits delivered through the process that builds ownership and commitment leading to increased effectiveness and efficiency. As with all ideas and models our Personal Measurement Framework is only as good as the leadership that assures implementation, learning and development. And when deployed fully, with appropriate support and collaborative coaching amongst the team the Framework can and does deliver sustained value.

References:

Business Model Generation: Osterwalder and Pigneur, Wiley 2010

The Balanced Business Scorecard, Kaplan and Norton, Harvard Business Review 1992

Show don’t Tell: A new (to me) perspective on change leadership

Alistair Russell · January 12, 2021 · Leave a Comment

As an experienced consultant with a professional heritage in engineering, I have absolutely no academic credentials in literature or any other media. However, with children that studied film and literature at first degree level and also as someone that enjoys films, I have come to understand the idea of ‘show don’t tell’ as used in the criticism of films and all story telling media. As I’ve explored the idea, I’ve come to realise its value as a new perspective on what we do as leaders. The value of leadership that does much more, leadership that shows how rather than just telling you how. And building on our recent insight piece ‘stories matter’, consider how much more powerful you and your team could be in leading change if you did more showing how things are and could be different and less telling.

Taking the ‘show don’t tell’ perspective into our work in the design, delivery and leadership of change enabled through digital technology, it’s clear that its more powerful to demonstrate change in practice rather than just communicate about the change. Both demonstration and communication are important, but I notice that perhaps because it’s easier there is still too much telling. Reflecting on my own experience, a showing approach is more sustainable because of the more active engagement of the other party, in the same way that the audience is more engaged in a story if the author shows you what is happening, the approach invites the audience to work harder at understanding what is going on, rather than just telling you as reader or viewer. For me this a new perspective on the power of such things as agile development where we have seen the benefits in quality of development as well as pace though such things as the minimum viable product (mvp), the sprint etc. I think we can do more if we bring the idea to our work on leading change.

So, what does “show, don’t tell” mean? In storytelling, it is considered vital to master the art of showing. When you tell rather than show, you simply inform your reader of information rather than allowing them to deduce anything. You’re supplying information by simply stating it. For example, getting a character to describe how someone is feeling. You might report that a character is “tall,” or “angry,” or “cold,” or “tired.” That’s telling.

Showing paints a picture for the reader to develop in their mind’s eye. Rather than telling that your character is angry, show it by describing his face flushing, his throat tightening, his voice rising, his slamming a fist on the table. When you show, you don’t have to tell. Cold? Don’t tell us; show us. Your character pulls her collar up, tightens her scarf, shoves her hands deep into her pockets, turns her face away from the biting wind. Tired? He can yawn, groan, stretch. His eyes can look puffy. His shoulders could slump. Another character might say, “Didn’t you sleep last night? You look shot.” When you show rather than tell, you make the reader part of the experience. Rather than having everything simply imparted to him, he sees it in his mind and comes to the conclusions you want. More importantly they are the reader’s conclusions. What could be better than engaging your reader, giving him an active role in the storytelling, or should we say the story-showing? Clearly, it is a mistake to take show, don’t tell as inviolable. The theatre of the reader or viewers’ mind is more powerful than anything Hollywood can put on the screen. Well-written books and films trigger the theatre of the mind and allow readers to create their own visual, to be active rather than passive participants.

Our insight that if you take this maxim of ‘show don’t tell’ into your leadership you will lead more powerful change, you will lead more sustainable change, it will be everybody’s change not just yours. Looking ahead, think about:

designing the process of change to have much more time allocated to activities where colleagues learn how to change rather than are just told;
changing your behaviour to show new leadership approaches in action; and as we’ve said before,
shifting the balance of your change comms to stories that show the change in action.

Importance of the New

Alistair Russell · December 4, 2020 · Leave a Comment

Like all of us, the Laing Russell team has had many new consulting experiences in recent weeks and months. Our own learning from these new experience has prompted us to reflect on the very significant value of proactively seeking out the ‘new’, the ‘the road less travelled’ to encourage development and change. The challenge of needing to do things differently has been a very positive experience, even though at times it was uncomfortable.

The way we work has had to shift significantly during our time with this pandemic. Perhaps, like many we have a significant, natural bias towards working in ways that we are practiced and comfortable handling. Given the strategic focus and outcomes of our work, we depend critically on a senior executive team being confident and committed to a path. Delivery of that clarity and commitment has always required a team working together in sessions, lasting a few hours or a couple of days.

Classic recent challenges have been how to make that process work in this new context. Both in terms of designing and delivering workshops over a video-conferencing service or when we are all working hard to stay 2m apart in a room and manage our masks.

It’s been hard and at times frustrating. Methods, behaviours and tools that have worked in the traditional context sometimes don’t work so well in this new context either ‘on-line’ or in person. In some ways the most important thing is that we have been challenged to find new ways, forced to re-evaluate and forced back to first principles about what we are trying to achieve with our client.

Three tactical insights from recent weeks and months working in this pandemic context are:

up significantly the quality and amount of preparation you allow yourselves, winging it on the foundation of your many years of experience will not deliver what you want for these key meetings;
keep it even simpler than you may have done in the past, particularly when guiding a client senior exec team through a significant on-line session – shorter, more tightly focused discussion, taking a debate in micro-stages makes it easier to manage, easier to build steadily towards agreement and commitment to a plan of action;
mix it up and keep everyone active, building on established axioms of needing address different parts of our brains, designing and managing the detailed micro-stages of variety and importantly ensures everyone is active on their keyboard inputting ideas, answering poll questions etc..

We’d value your perspective on what you are finding works well in practice.

And to return to our initial, more abstract insight. We know that constraints prompt innovation, we know that it is new experiences that inform the classic learning cycle. We encourage you to take that step further and push yourself to seek out new opportunities to try new things.