Shipulski On Design

Archive for the ‘The Future’ Category

When the work is new, it all comes down to learning.  And with learning it all comes down to three questions:

• What do you want to learn?
• What actions will take to learn what you want to learn?
• How will you decide if you learned what you wanted to learn?

There are many definitions of learning.  To me, when your beliefs change, that’s learning.  If your hunch moves to a validated idea, that’s learning.  If your understanding of a system moves from “I don’t know” to “I know a little bit.”, that’s learning.  If you believed your customers buy your product for Feature A and now you know they really buy it because of Feature B, that’s learning.

What do you want to learn? The best place to start is to clearly define what you want to learn.  Sounds easy, but it’s not. Some of the leading thinking recommends you define a formal hypothesis.  I don’t like that word.  It’s scary, intimidating and distracting.  It’s just not helpful.  Instead, I suggest you define a Learning Objective.  To do that, complete this sentence:

I want to learn if the customer ____________________.

It may take several iterations/meetings to agree on a Learning Objective, but that’s time well spent.  It’s faster to take the time to define what you want to learn than to quickly learn something that doesn’t matter.  And define the Learning Objective as narrowly as possible.  The tighter the Learning Objective, the faster you can learn it.

What actions will you take to learn what you want to learn? In other words, for every Learning Objective create a Learning Plan.  Use the Who, What, When format.  Define Who will do What and When they’ll be done.  To increase the learning rate, define the minimum work to fulfill the narrowly-defined Learning Objective.  Just as you defined the Learning Objective narrowly, define the Learning Plan narrowly.  And to further speed the learning, set constraints like – no one can travel to see customers; no more than five customers can be contacted; and the Learning Plan must be completed in two days.  You’re not looking for large sample sizes and statistical significance; you’re looking to use your best judgement supported by the minimum learning to create reasonable certainty.

How will you decide if you learned what you wanted to learn? Learning requires decisions, decisions require judgement and judgement requires supporting information.  As part of the Learning Plan, define the Learning Information you’ll collect/capture/record to support your decisions.  Audio recordings are good and video is better.  For fast learning, you can record a phone call with a customer or ask them to share their webcam (and record the feed) as you talk with them.  Or you can ask them to shoot some video with their smart phone to provide the information needed to achieve you Learning Objective.

To analyze the data, it’s best to review the audio/video as a group and talk about what you see.  You should watch for body language as well as listen to the words.  Don’t expect complete agreement among your team and expect to create follow-on Learning Objectives and Learning Plans to answer the open questions.  Repeat the process until there’s enough agreement to move forward, but don’t wait for 100% consensus.

When you present your learning to company leadership, show the raw video data that supports your learning.  Practically, you’ll connect company leaders to customers and let the customers dispel long-held biases and challenge old thinking.

There’s nothing more powerful than a customer telling your company leaders how things really are.

Image credit – Thomas Hawk

How a company allocates its resources defines its strategy.  But it’s tricky business to allocate resources in a way that makes the most of the existing products, services and business models yet accomplishes what’s needed to create the future.

To strike the right balance, and before any decisions on specific projects, allocate the desired spending into three buckets – short, medium and long.  Or, if you prefer, Horizon 1, 2 and 3.  Use the business objectives to set the weighting. Then, sit next to the CFO for a couple days and allocate last year’s actual spending to the three buckets and compare the actuals with how resources will be allocated going forward.  Define the number of people who will work on short, medium and long and how many will move from one bucket to another.

To get the balance right, short term projects are judged relative to short term projects, medium term projects are judged relative to medium term projects and the long term ones are judged against their long term peers.  Long term projects cannot be staffed at the expense of short term projects and medium term projects cannot take resources from long term projects.  To get the balance right, those are the rules.

To choose the best projects within each bucket, clarity and constraints are more important than ROI.   Here are some questions to improve clarity and define the constraints.

How will the customer benefit? It’s best to show the customer using the product or service or experiencing the new business model.  Use a hand sketch and few, if any, words.  Use one page.

How is it different?  In the hand sketch above, draw the novel (different) elements in red.

Who is the new customer? Define where they live, the language they speak and how they get the job done today.

Are there regional constraints?  Infrastructure gaps, such as electricity, water, transportation are deal breakers.  Language gaps can be big problems, so can regulatory, legal and cultural constraints. If a regional constraint cannot be overcome, do something else.

How will your company make money?  Use this formula: (price – cost) x volume.  But, be clear about the size of the market today and the size it could be in five years.

How will you make, sell and service it?  Include in the cost of the project the cost to overcome organizational capacity/capability constraints.  If cost (or time) to close the gaps is prohibitive, do something else.

How will the business model change?  If it won’t, strongly consider a different project.

If the investigations show the project is worthwhile, how would you staff the project and when?  This is an important one.  If the project would be a winner, but there is no one to work on it, do something else.  Or, consider stopping a bad project to start the good one.

There’s usually a general tendency to move medium term resources to short term projects and skimp on long term projects.  Be respectful of the newly-minted resource balance defined at the start and don’t choose a project from one bucket over a project from another.  And don’t get carried away with ROI measured to three significant figures, rather, hold onto the fact that an insurmountable constraint reduces ROI to zero.

And staff projects fully.  Partially-staffed projects set expectations that good things are happening, but they never come to be.

Image credit – john curley

When it’s time for new work, the best and smartest get in a small room to figure out what to do.  The process is pretty simple: define a new destination, and, to know when they journey is over, define what it looks like to live there.  Define the idealized future state and define the work to get there.  Turn on the GPS, enter the destination and follow the instructions of the computerized voice.

But with new work, the GPS analogy is less than helpful.  Because the work is new, there’s no telling exactly where the destination is, or whether it exists at all.  No one has sold a product like the one described in the idealized future state.  At this stage, the product definition is wrong.  So, set your course heading for South America though the destination may turn out to be Europe.  No matter, it’s time to make progress, so get in the car and stomp the accelerator.

But with new work there is no map.  It’s never been done before.  Though unskillful, the first approach is to use the old map for the new territory.  That’s like using map data from 1928 in your GPS.  The computer voice will tell you to take a right, but that cart path no longer exists.  The GPS calls out instructions that don’t match the street signs and highway numbers you see through the windshield.  When the GPS disagrees with what you see with your eyeballs, the map is wrong.  It’s time to toss the GPS and believe the territory.

With new work, it’s not the destination that’s important, the current location is most important.  The old sea captains knew this.  Site the stars, mark the time, and set a course heading.  Sail for all your worth until the starts return and as soon as possible re-locate the ship, set a new heading and repeat.  The course heading depends more on location than destination.  If the ship is east of the West Indies, it’s best to sail west, and if the ship is to the north, it’s best to sail south.  Same destination, different course heading.

When the work is new, through away the old maps and the GPS and channel your inner sea caption. Position yourself with the stars, site the landmarks with your telescope, feel the wind in your face and use your best judgement to set the course heading.  And as soon as you can, repeat.

Image credit – Timo Gufler.

At the most basic level, business is about allocating resources to the best projects and executing those projects well.  Said another way, business is about deciding what to work on and then working effectively.  But how to go about deciding what to work on?  Here is a cascade of questions to start you on your journey.

What are your company’s guiding principles?  Why does it exist? How does it want to go about its life?   These questions create context from which to answer the questions that follow.  Once defined, all your actions should align with your context.

How has the business environment changed? This is a big one.  Everything is impermanent.  Change is the status quo.  What worked last time won’t work this time.  Your success is your enemy because it stunts intentions to work on new things.  Define new lines of customer goodness your competitors have developed; define how their technologies have increased performance; search YouTube to see the nascent technologies that will displace you; put yourself two years in the future where your customers will pay half what they pay today.  These answers, too, define the context for the questions that follow.

What are you working on? Define your fully-staffed projects. Distill each to a single page. Do they provide new customer value?  Are the projects aligned with your company’s guiding principles? For those that don’t, stop them.  How do your fully-staffed projects compare to the trajectory of your competitors’ offerings?  For those that compare poorly, stop them.

For projects that remain, do they meet your business objectives?  If yes, put your head down and execute.  If no, do you have better projects?  If yes, move the freed up resources (from the stopped projects) onto the new projects.  Do it now.  If you don’t have better projects, find some.  Use lines of evolution for technological systems to figure out what’s next, define new projects and move the resources.  Do it now.

The best leading indicator of innovation is your portfolio of fully-staffed projects.  Where other companies argue and complain about organizational structure, move your best resources to your best projects and execute.  Where other companies use politics to trump logic, move your best resources to your best projects and execute.  Where other successful companies hold on to tired business models and do-what-we-did-last-time projects, move your best resources to your best projects and execute.

Be ruthless with your projects.  Stop the bad ones and start some good ones. Be clear about what your projects will deliver – define the novel customer value and the technical work to get there.  Use one page for each.  If you can’t define the novel customer value with a simple cartoon, it’s because there is none.  And if you can’t define how you’ll get there with a hand sketch, it’s because you don’t know how.

Define your company’s purpose and use that to decide what to work on.  If a project is misaligned, kill it. If a project is boring, don’t bother.  If it’s been done before, don’t do it.  And if you know how it will go, do something else.

If you’re not changing, you’re dying.

Image credit – David Flam

In strategic planning there’s a strong forcing function that causes the organization to converge on a singular, company-wide approach.  While this convergence can be helpful, when it’s force is absolute it stifles new ideas.  The result is an operating plan that incrementally improves on last year’s work at the expense of work that creates new businesses, sells to new customers and guards against the dark forces of disruptive competition.  In times of change convergence must be tempered to yield a bit of diversity in the approach.  But for diversity to make it into the strategic plan, dissent must be an integral (and accepted) part of the planning process.  And to inject meaningful diversity the dissenting voice must be as load as the voice of convergence.

It’s relatively easy for an organization to come to consensus on an idea that has little uncertainty and marginal upside.  But there can be no consensus, but on an idea with a high degree of uncertainty even if the upside is monumental.  If there’s a choice between minimizing uncertainty and creating something altogether new, the strategic process is fundamentally flawed because the planning group will always minimize uncertainty.  Organizationally we are set up to deliver certainty, to make our metrics and meet our timelines.  We have an organizational aversion to uncertainty, and, therefore, our organizational genetics demand we say no to ideas that create new business models, new markets and new customers.  What’s missing is the organizational forcing function to counterbalance our aversion to uncertainty with a healthy grasping of it.  If the company is to survive over the next 20 years, uncertainty must be injected into our organizational DNA. Organizationally, companies must be restructured to eliminate the choice between work that improves existing products/services and work that creates altogether new markets, customers, products and services.

When Congress or the President wants to push their agenda in a way that is not in the best long term interest of the country, no one within the party wants to be the dissenting voice. Even if the dissenting voice is right and Congress and the President are wrong, the political (career) implications of dissent within the party are too severe.  And, organizationally, that’s why there’s a third branch of government that’s separate from the other two.  More specifically, that’s why Justices of the Supreme Court are appointed for life.  With lifetime appointments their dissenting voice can stand toe-to-toe with the voice of presidential and congressional convergence.  Somehow, for long-term survival, companies must find a way to emulate that separation of power and protect the work with high uncertainty just as the Justices protect the law.

The best way I know to protect work with high uncertainty is to create separate organizations with separate strategic plans, operating plans and budgets.  In that way, it’s never a decision between incremental improvement and discontinuous improvement.  The decision becomes two separate decisions for two separate teams: Of the candidate projects for incremental improvement, which will be part of team A’s plan? And, of the candidate projects for discontinuous improvement, which will become part of team B’s plan?

But this doesn’t solve the whole challenge because at the highest organizational level, the level that sits above Team A and B, the organizational mechanism for dissent is missing. At this highest level there must be healthy dissent by the board of directors.  Meaningful dissent requires deep understanding of the company’s market position, competitive landscape, organizational capability and capacity, the leading technology within the industry (the level, completeness and maturity), the leading technologies in adjacent industries and technologies that transcend industries (i.e., digital).  But the trouble is board members cannot spend the time needed to create deep understanding required to formulate meaningful dissent.  Yes, organizationally the board of directors can dissent without reprisal, but they don’t know the business well enough to dissent in the most meaningful way.

In medieval times the jester was an important player in the organization.  He entertained the court but he also played the role of the dissenter.  Organizationally, because the king and queen expected the jester to demonstrate his sharp wit, he could poke fun at them when their ideas didn’t hang together.  He could facilitate dissent with a humorous play on a deadly serious topic.  It was delicate work, as one step too far and the jester was no more.  To strike the right balance the jester developed deep knowledge of the king, queen and major players in the court.  And he had to know how to recognize when it was time to dissent and when it was time to keep his mouth shut.  The jester had the confidence of the court, knew the history and could see invisible political forces at play.  The jester had the organizational responsibility to dissent and the deep knowledge to do it in a meaningful way.

Companies don’t need a jester, but they do need a T-shaped person with broad experience, deep knowledge and the organizational status to dissent without reprisal.  Maybe this is a full time board member or a hired gun that works for the board (or CEO?), but either way they are incentivized to dissent in a meaningful way.

I don’t know what to call this new role, but I do know it’s an important one.

Image credit – Will Montague

Whether you’re a country, company, organization, or team, revolution is your mortal enemy.  And that’s why the systems of established organization are designed to prevent impending revolutions and squish those that grow legs. And that’s why revolutions are few and far between. (This is bad news for revolutionary innovation and radical change.)

With regard to revolutions, it’s easiest to describe the state of affairs for countries.  Countries don’t want revolutions because they bring a change in leadership.  After a revolution, the parties in power are no longer in power.  And that’s why there are no revolutions spawned by those in power.  For those in power it’s steady as she goes.

Revolutions are all about control.  The people in control of a country want to preserve the power structure and the revolutionaries want to dismantle it.  (Needless to say, country leaders and revolutionaries don’t consider each other good dinner company.)  And when the control of a country is at stake, revolutions often result in violence and death.  With countries, revolution is a dangerous game.

With regard to revolutions, companies are supposed to be different from countries.  Companies are supposed to reinvent themselves to grow; they’re supposed to do radical innovation and obsolete their best products; and they’re supposed to abandon the old thinking of their success and create revolutionary business models.  As it turns out, with regard to revolutions, companies have much more in common countries than they’re supposed to.

Like with a country, the company’s leadership party is threatened by revolution.  But the words are a bit different – where a country calls it revolution, a company calls it innovation.  And there’s another important difference.  Where the president of a country is supposed to prevent and squelch revolutions, the president of a company is supposed to foster and finance revolutionary innovation.  The president of a country has an easier time of it because everyone in the party is aligned to block it.  But, the president of the company wants to bring to life the much needed revolutionary innovation but the powerful parties of the org chart want to block it because it diminishes their power.  And it’s even trickier because to finance the disruptive innovation, the company president must funnel profits generated by the dominant party to a ragtag band of revolutionaries.

Where revolutionaries that overthrow a country must use guerilla tactics and shoot generals off their horses, corporate revolutionaries must also mock convention.  No VPs are shot, but corporate innovators must purposefully violate irrelevant “best practices” and disregard wasteful rigor that slows the campaign.  And, again, the circumstances are more difficult for the company president.  Where the country president doesn’t have to come up with the war chest to finance the revolutionaries overthrowing the country, the company president must allocate company profits for a state-funded revolution.

Just as revolutions threaten the power structure of countries, innovation threatens the power structure of companies.  But where countries desperately want to stifle revolutions, companies should desperately want to enable them.  And just as the rules of engagement for a revolution are different than government as usual, the rules of engagement for revolutionary innovation are different than profitability as usual.  With revolution and innovation, it’s all about change.

Revolutions require belief – belief the status quo won’t cut it and belief there’s a better way.  Innovation is no different.  Revolutions require a band of zealots willing to risk everything and a benefactor willing to break with tradition and finance the shenanigans.  And innovation is no different.

Image credit — Lee Wright

How did you get to where you are?  Was it a series of well-thought-out decisions or a million small, non-decisions that stacked up while you weren’t paying attention? Is this where you thought you’d end up?  What do you think about where you are?

It takes great discipline to make time to evaluate your life’s trajectory, and with today’s pace it’s almost impossible.  Every day it’s a battle to do more than yesterday.  Nothing is good enough unless it’s 10% better than last time, and once it’s better, it’s no longer good enough.  Efficiency is worked until it reaches 100%, then it’s redefined to start the game again.  No waste is too small to eliminate. In business there’s no counterbalance to the economists’ false promise of never-ending growth, unless you provide it for yourself.

If you make the time, it’s easy to plan your day and your week. But if you don’t make the time, it’s impossible.  And it’s the same for the longer term – if you make the time to think about what you want to achieve, you have a better chance of achieving it – but it’s more difficult to make the time.  Before you can make the time to step back and take look at the landscape, you’ve got to be aware that it’s important to do and you’re not doing it.

Providing yourself the necessary counterbalance is good for you and your family, and it’s even better for business.  When you take a step back and slow your pace from sprint to marathon, you are happier and healthier and your work is better.  When scout the horizon and realize you and your work are aligned, you feel better about the work and, therefore, you feel better about yourself.  You’re a better person, partner and parent.  And your work is better.  When the work fits, everything is better.

Sometimes, people know their work doesn’t fit and purposefully don’t take a step back because it’s too scary to acknowledge there’s a problem.  But burying your head doesn’t fix things.  If you know you’re out of balance, the best thing to do is admit it and start a dialog with yourself and your boss.  It won’t get better immediately, but you’ll feel better immediately.  But most of the time, people don’t make time to take a step back because of the blistering pace of the work.  There’s simply no time to think about the future.  What’s missing is a weapon to battle the black arts of productivity and accountability.

The only thing powerful enough to counterbalance the forces of darkness is the very weapon we use to create the disease of hyper-productivity – the shared calendar (MS Calendar, Google Calendar).  Open up the software, choose your day, choose your time and set up a one hour weekly meeting with yourself.  Attendees: you.  Agenda: take a couple deep breaths, relax and think.  Change your settings so no one can see the meeting title and agenda and choose the color that makes people think the meeting is off-site.  With your time blocked, you now have a reason to say no to other meetings.  “Sorry, I can’t attend. I have a meeting.”

This simple mechanism is all you need.

No more excuses.  Make the time for yourself.  You’re worth it.

image credit :jovian (image modified)

Doing something new is harder than it looks.

The first step to doing new is to realize you have no interest in doing what was done last time.  Profitable or not, the same old recipe just doesn’t do it for you.  You don’t have to know why you don’t want to replay the tape, you just have to know you don’t want to. So don’t.

But it’s not enough to know what you don’t want to do, you’ve got to know what you do want to do.  To figure that out, you’ve got to stop doing.  The focused, churning mind isn’t your friend here because it thinks of ideas that are too closely related to what it knows.   This is the job for the idle mind.  The idle mind has nothing to focus on, so it doesn’t.  It runs in the background imagining the impossible and considering the absurd.  And since it runs without your knowledge, you can’t get in its way.  So do nothing.  Turn off your electronics and sit.  Feel uncomfortable.  Give your mind no place to go so it can go where it wants.  Read a biography about an important historical figure.  Travel to their century so while you’re visiting your subconscious can figure out what to do.

You don’t figure out what’s next.  What’s next finds you while you’re not looking for it.  And the best way to do that is to do nothing.

Doing nothing is a lot of work.  And it’s difficult to do.   My advice – start with 15 minutes of nothing.  Anything more is too much.  Take your mobile phone out of your pocket, put it on your desk (or throw it at the floor and stomp on it) and walk to a quiet place and sit.  Close your eyes, sit and watch.  You’ll see your monkey mind search for the next big thing and not find it.  Then you’ll see it think about something that scares you and you’ll get scared.  Then you’ll see it think about an old argument and you’ll jump back into it and relive it.  Then, after a while, you’ll realize you’re not watching, you’re reliving.   Then you’ll see your mind try again in vain to find the next thing to do.  And after 15 minutes of this nonsense, you’re done with your first session of nothing.

Repeat this process over 5 days and a good idea will find you.  You may be sleeping, showering, eating or reading, but no worries, it will find you.  Something will click and you’ll put together two things that aren’t meant to be together but, once together, make a lot of sense – like a strange Ben and Jerry’s flavor you taste for the first time and eat the whole pint.

The new idea isn’t the new thing itself, it’s the first step toward finding the next thing to do.  But, you’ve started wandering down a crazy new path that’s no longer crazy, and you’re on your way.

Resume your daily 15 minute sessions of nothing and, in between, mix in some small experiments to test, refine or invalidate your next new thing. Repeat, as needed.

And don’t stop until what you’re looking for finds you.

Image credit – Figure Focus.

Growth, as a strategy, is flawed.  Draw a control volume around the planet and accelerate the growth engines: the natural conclusion – we run out of natural resources.  Not if, when.  Anything with a finite end condition is finite.  That’s a rule.  Because the world has finite resources, growth is finite.

Economists say growth is the only way.  And the analysts say you’ve got to grow faster than their expectations or they’ll penalize your stock price.  Economists say growth must be eternal and analysists say it’s never fast enough.  The treadmill of growth keeps us accelerating, and we’re moving too fast to stop and ask why.

The idea behind growth is simple – with growth comes riches.  As we’ve defined the system, when companies grow the people that own stock make more money.  And in with our consumption mindset, more money means more stuff.  Cutting right to it, company growth breeds bank account growth, which in turn breeds four cars, a 5,000 square foot primary residence, two vacation homes, closets full of too many clothes, three iPads, six laptops and five smart phones.  And from this baseline, continued growth breeds more spiraling consumption.

If the consumption was curbed, what would happen to the riches?

Growth is better when it’s a result.  Solve a societal problem and growth results, but instead of just filling the coffers, peoples’ lives get better.  Make the water cleaner, people get healthier and you grow. And because you see the societal benefit, you feel better about yourself and your work.

Stock price increases when analysts think growth will increase.  And increased stock price creates more wealth to fund more growth and fund more consumption.  And, more consumption creates the right conditions for more growth.

What would happen if there was no growth?

If we were content with what we have, flat sales wouldn’t be a problem because we’d not need to consume more.  And if we didn’t need to consume more we’d be happy with the money we make.  No growth would be no problem.

Today, increased productivity is used to support increased sales.  The incremental capacity (more units per hour) provides more products so more can be sold which creates growth.  But in a “no growth” universe where growth is prohibited, instead of selling more, people would work less.  Increase productivity by 25% and instead of working five days a week, everyone works four.  That’s hard to imagine, but the numbers work.  Instead of more money, we’d have more time.

Money isn’t finite, but time is.  If we can learn to see time as something more valuable than money, maybe things can turn around.  If we can see a growth in leisure time as some twisted form of consumption, maybe that would make it okay to spend more time doing the things we want to do.

Image credit — Michael

Podcasts are short bursts of learning curated to please your ear.  And with training budgets slashed, podcasts can be a wonderful and cost effective (free) way to learn.

The only way to battle uncertainty is to increase diversity.  Bringing together people with diverse experiences lets us see things from multiple perspectives so we can better navigate uncertain terrain.  But increasing your personal diversity helps too.  Giving yourself new knowledge from diverse fields helps you broaden your perspective and makes you better at handling the uncertainty that comes with life.

The hard part about podcasts is deciding which ones to listen to.  In my work to increase my diversity, I’ve listened to a lot of podcasts.  Some were interesting and inspiring and others weren’t.

Below are some of my favorite podcast episodes.  There’s a short description of each one, along with what I learned from them.  Click the link to take you to the episode and you can listen to each one.  No need to download.  Just find the play button and click it.

Enjoy.

9-Volt Nirvana (Radiolab) — I learned about how the brain works and how it can be supercharged (with a 9-volt battery) to learn faster.  I listened to this one on a long car ride with my daughter.  She doesn’t like podcasts, but she was captivated by this one.

The Living Room (Love and Radio) — A story about how things can look differently than they are, especially when looking from the outside.  I learned how our assumptions and the stories we tell ourselves shape how we see the world.  This one is emotionally gripping.

Guided by Voices (Benjamin Walker’s Theory of Everything) — How Kant and Kepler both tried (and failed) to record the universal harmonies Pythagoras once heard.  They struggled to make peace with the irrationality and disharmony of nature.  I learned disharmony is natural and to embrace it.  There’s a segment in the middle that’s not about Kant and Kepler that you may want to skip. To skip that segment, listen from the beginning and at 9:30 skip to 23:07 and listen to the end.

Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now (On Being) — I love Eckhart’s voice and his chuckle.  I learned how I am not my emotions; I am the space for my emotions.  And I learned about the Pain Body.  That, on its own, was worth it.  Krista Tippett is a brilliant interviewer.

Belt Buckle (Mystery Show) — A story about a long-lost belt buckle and its journey home.  I learned how we attach meaning to objects, and that can be a good thing.

The Wrath of the Khans 1 (Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History) — This is a riveting story of Genghis Khan.  Dan Carlin is wonderful – he sits you right in the middle of history.  (Listen for two minutes and you’ll feel it.)  I learned the power of personal will and how history changes over time.  To skip Dan’s wonderful introduction and get a feel for the Great Khan, start at 19:00 and listen for 10 minutes.  If you like what you hear, keep listening.  This podcast is long almost 2 hours and it’s the first of a series of five on the Great Khan.  This is one of my most favorite favorites.

image credit — mpclemens

Things are no longer predictable, and it’s time to start behaving that way.

In the olden days (the early 2000s) the pace of change was slow enough that for most the next big thing was the same old thing, just twisted and massaged to look like the next big thing.  But that’s not the case today.  Today’s pace is exponential, and it’s time to behave that way.  The next big thing has yet to be imagined, but with unimaginable computing power, smart phones, sensors on everything and a couple billion new innovators joining the web, it should be available on Alibaba and Amazon a week from next Thursday.  And in three weeks, you’ll be able to buy a 3D printer for $199 and go into business making the next big thing out of your garage.  Or, you can grasp tightly onto your success and ride it into the ground.

To move things forward, the first thing to do is to blow up the strategic planning process and sweep the pieces into the trash bin of a bygone era.  And, the next thing to do is make sure the scythe of continuous improvement  is busy cutting waste out of the manufacturing process so it cannot be misapplied to the process of re-imagining the strategic planning process.  (Contrary to believe, fundamental problems of ineffectiveness cannot be solved with waste reduction.)

First, the process must be renamed.  I’m not sure what to call it, but I am sure it should not have “planning” in the name – the rate of change is too steep for planning.  “Strategic  adapting” is a better name, but the actual behavior is more akin to probe, sense, respond.   The logical question then – what to probe?

[First, for the risk minimization community, probing is not looking back at the problems of the past and mitigating risks that no longer apply.]

Probing is forward looking, and it’s most valuable to probe (purposefully investigate) fertile territory.  And the most fertile ground is defined by your success.  Here’s why.  Though the future cannot be predicted, what can be predicted is your most profitable business will attract the most attention from the billion, or so, new innovators looking to disrupt things.  They will probe your business model and take it apart piece-by-piece, so that’s exactly what you must do.  You must probe-sense-respond until you obsolete your best work.  If that’s uncomfortable, it should be.  What should be more uncomfortable is the certainty that your cash cow will be dismantled.   If someone will do it, it might as well be you that does it on your own terms.

Over the next year the most important work you can do is to create the new technology that will cause your most profitable business to collapse under its own weight.  It doesn’t matter what you call it – strategic planning, strategic adapting, securing the future profitability of the company – what matters is you do it.

Today’s biggest risk is our blindness to the immense risk of keeping things as they are.  Everything changes, everything’s impermanent – especially the things that create huge profits.  Your most profitable businesses are magnates to the iron filings of disruption.  And it’s best to behave that way.

Image credit – woodleywonderworks