The recent AI badge fiasco is an excellent example of Silicon Valley’s inability to be the breeding ground for any real value for the planet’s future. Thirty million were thrown at the ‘Rabbit R1.’ The AI badge designed by real ex-Apple designers is useless to the point where a ten-year-old could tell you, yet millions have been given to these ideas seemingly without any common sense or reality checking.

Hype or not, we have been here before and would be more critical these days. Some argue that only specialists can assess harmful products, but that is absolute nonsense, and our more significant problem is the myth that tech can solve problems. We have designed the human component of a solution out of most business cases I have seen in the last ten years. Time and budget for “Should we ask them?” or “What do they need?” have been absent. All the Thinking or opinions went to “Give them cheaper tech because it’s cheaper, and they will do as we say.”. Then those projects fail on adoption or rejection or make things worse.

This flawed process exists at various levels in every organisation I have worked in over the last twenty years, yet I managed to get a room full of non-technology people to break that spell within an hour.

What we did.

As part of a three-day workshop on critical Thinking based on MIT models, I gave the group an exercise to examine the Rabbit R1 commercial and deconstruct what it claimed to be able to do. This task was both simple and complex. I gave every three-person team the brief to pick just one of the five statements in the ad and list three premises needed for the service to work. I asked them to consider what it would take to accomplish the advertised task. Many tech companies claim magic. This was a perfect example of the same type of assessment.

What we found.

For even a single claim to work, the team quickly found that many things needed to be in place. Initial simple tasks cascaded into a very complex and heavy requirement for a user to be engaged with the badge, which was far from as simple as the ad made one believe. Apps, accounts, and settings must be in place to do basic things. The amount of essential user information and application integration was considerable for every task. For a single chained-up task, you would need a varied and customised set of information from the user and its context (work, out and about, etc.); several app tasks must be lined up in a particular way, some owned by Rabbit, most of them not. If you need to list, let’s say, three apps, you then list three steps and three pieces of information. You quickly get to the 27 pieces you need, some needing customisation in every task.

It felt like magic when the teams deconstructed the product so quickly. I have seen consultancies pay hundreds of thousands to do this process, but the team did it in an hour.

How we assessed.

The amount of things that need to be in place was documented and mapped. Requirements can have an exponential effort attached to them. The more we built a logic network, the more likely it was clear that data and information were unique to any task. Taking the technology aside, the human scenario and the need to describe a situation was exponentially complex. It would not be able to be predicted by an AI because most scenarios are unique, and predictions need repetitive patterns.

Even a team of non-technologists understood that technology can not predict the future.

Why is that?

AI is good at repeating a scenario and putting down variants. It can not predict the future, but it will likely predict a softer version of what existed before. It is like the middle ground. It is excellent to order pizza for everyone who wants a basic salami pizza. Anyone who wants something else is at a loss. Everyone who is not a single person will need to adjust it. Getting AI off the central road takes a lot of work.

Why isn’t everyone doing this?

Most companies have cut down their strategic or discovery teams. This means most organisations are on a track where cookie-cutter is the myth that is sold to the executive board. Therefore, most companies will limit themselves to the area that makes them less competitive.

Summary

Critical Thinking, or treating the real world like it is, a bunch of complex assumptions, is something that we need to re-introduce into organisations to increase resilience and de-risking progressively. The silo-ed world of industrial revolution de-skilling is less and less a growth factor for any company, manufacturing or service. Building up new cycles of checking in width reality and understanding context is necessary for the market or business fit of any investment to succeed.

Organisations are still people-driven. The best technology is used differently by people. You can only automate with people understanding what people need. Understanding context is understanding opportunity.

How to crack AI nonsense in 1 hour was originally published in The Wicked Company on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I ran a process mapping workshop for CRISIS, a homeless charity, two weeks ago. They identified that they had been running for three years without reviewing their venture process. CRISIS wanted to do what most larger companies with more money rarely do:

• Review how their process works and enables their business targets.
• Improve how their process works for ventures they work with.
• Engage with stakeholders to scale and accelerate the growth of the organisation by activating teams.

It does sound surprising, but the bigger the company, the more abstract reality is described by their internal documentation. I have seen this in 9/10 programmes, where silos are chastising improvements. One primary practice or viewpoint often leads to describing the complexity or reality.

The outcome is that:

• Specialists design processes in a room without aligning business values or checking in with reality. They assume that “We know this,” even though reality evolves every quarter.
• Processes are described on a topline level but not on the ground level, where people interact with systems and each other.
• Processes are implemented out of the box, which creates a gap in organisational reality.
• Target audience or stakeholders are disengaged as they “Just want stuff we can’t provide, so we better not talk to them to get their hopes up.” (I heard this multiple times in different companies.)

This leads to:

• Specialist processes do not capture gaps and risks towards end-user interaction.
• Value chains need to be prioritised based on business benefits.
• Out-of-the-box minimalism does not fit into organisational processes or culture.
• The needs and pain points of end users never get discovered or assessed.
• Assumptions never get tested and the wrong things get fixed.

These days, it is quick and cheap to do discovery.

I have seen 200 million investments fail because they weren’t made. The discovery would cost 2 million and six weeks, which is 1% of the costs.

We have excellent tools today to check in with reality.

Every C-level I ever talked to would agree that knowing their business better is a valuable investment.

A consultant coming in for six weeks will do a different job than your employees, collaborating on a walk-through of the existing way of doing things.

I usually get a quote in any workshop: “Why haven’t we done this earlier?”

With CRISIS, we discovered an enormous potential for restructuring activities, enabled more junior team members to relieve senior managers, and found ways to significantly accelerate the process’s speed and increase the outcome’s quality.

Especially for smaller companies, this can significantly affect effectiveness, quality improvement and growth.

If you want a rapid process review workshop, please get in touch.

marcus@thewickedcompany.com

The Wicked Company book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CBWD1GJB?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=thewickedco03-21&linkCode=ur2&linkId=b8fec85ceaf51b3769fc1da373ea62ff&camp=1634&creative=6738

Zooming out to transform processes was originally published in The Wicked Company on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“30-minute meetings were covering her calendar. As a senior member working closely with the C-Level, I was not surprised about the full calendar she had but that nearly all meetings were the same length. Reporting, project conversations, and work sessions will surely take different formats. A few years later, when I worked with her, I realised that the meetings weren’t just a way to list contact points with as many people in a week as possible but could have been more effective. Given intro time and end-of-meeting decision points, 30 minutes left little time for decent updates or context descriptions. I have since then seen it in other companies. 30-minute meetings should be shorter and shorter at the same time.

We are still catching up, aren’t we?

Apart from 1:1 meetings, which do not scale well, most meeting types need to work better with 30 minutes.

The average 30 minutes has about 5- 10 minutes of Hellos and intros at the beginning and 5–10 minutes of actions at the end. This leaves a practical 10- 20 min discussion of the problem context. By observation, some people enjoy small talk and socialising at work more than others. If we average this at 15 minutes, that leaves about space for 2–3 question-and-answer conversations. My experience from doing over 100 episodes of podcasts got me to about 5 minutes for a question and an answer with a guest, including follow-ups for clarification.

How does this then compare to types of meetings?

Weekly or Fortnightly team progress

Assuming not just the manager and the senior manager but team members are involved, this usually includes a slide or two showing progress and several issues to address or the senior manager picking pieces of the progress to be added to senior reporting.

• presenting 1+ slides
• discussing 3+ items displayed in more detail
• follow-up on old issues
• ask from manager

Will all relevant items get enough time to share the correct information, and will the manager be able to understand enough context?

Project presentation to senior

I won’t go into detail here. This is a pitch scenario that works best when presented quickly.

• The team presents a few slides
• Senior response (some pitches cut the response part and discuss outside of the pitch)

This is not a problem-solving scenario; it is fast, top-line reporting for initial intent decisions (funding, etc.).

Cross-departmental meeting

Even in a small circle, this one is taken up by updates from each side, so it usually has double the items to cover. Plus, people need to become more familiar with each other’s work, which requires longer explanations.

Programme-wide updates

The 20+ people meetings, where information is too top-line to include problem context discussions. They just added some level of completion here.

I will stop here and only mention meetings such as Supplier or external meetings, individual reviews, etc. I am sure you get the idea.

Externalise items

I have both done, tried and experienced the idea of externalising information to fast-track problem-solving in meetings. Sending elaborate bullet point lists or risk descriptions in Excel form to meeting participants in advance is what we all have done to various benefits.

Often, they had no time to read those as their calendars were packed, or they opened up more questions. Communicating problem contexts well in documents is a skill not many have. A more straightforward process or format is needed to do this sufficiently.

Externalised items are less effective than we think.

What do we do?

If we look at 45 or 60-minute meetings, we will see that they provide 200 and 300% more effective time by only adding 50 and 100% of observed time. This is the linear benefit. What is often missed is the exponential benefit of having more time. Suppose you are familiar with the three WHYs activity, a method to get to the root causes of problems. In that case, it is easy to understand that just being able to ask one more question can be the hit or miss of finding the root cause of a problem instead of treating a new symptom once every month.

Can we eliminate the 30-minute meeting by putting smaller items into emails and diving deeper into the project aspects that matter or have more risk attached?

How do we change this?

We are all busy, and by definition, we should be if we do a good job. But busy is a non-value term. Having an entire backlog is not a badge of pride or success.

In most projects, items and value creation tied to strategic targets are quicker, more easily discussed, and safer. It also helps prioritise them when ten items fight for attention simultaneously.

In an era of business where transformation is ever present, and clarity is a value that exponentially benefits teams and has a significant halo effect, we might want to consider creating more clarity every day by giving ourselves just that extra time to dive into a subject matter rather than scraping past 100 items and never seeing the forest for the trees.

What is your experience with mid-sized meetings?

#lovetheproblemnotthesolution

The Wicked Company applies wicked activities to better solve modern wicked problems.

Kill the 30-minute meeting! was originally published in The Wicked Company on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dear CEOs, CFOs and CTOs, are you doing this?
I have found that business and IT departments were at odds more than once. The reason was that IT was asked to cost-cut services, and the business needed to expand to win more customers and clients.

Is building a contradiction within your organisation working out?

Underinvested IT is usually asked to cut costs. The result is services everyone hates and no one wants to use, resulting in additional adoption costs and cost-cutting targets that cost more than they save. Furthermore, they tend to damage IT’s brand and recognition as an entity that can deliver value and giving your teams bad tools will make your best talent leave.

This is leadership damaging the backbone of their organisation.

In 9 out of 10 projects I have been involved in, i have seen this contradiction and it made different areas in an organisation just work against each other.

On the other hand, businesses are asked to increase sales and expand. They demand customisation and special services from IT because their clients ask for it. It is often a deal-maker to provide tailored service to a client.

IT often says no to any of those services being provided. The business has small teams at best to research clients or customer needs, and because they act in silos, the insights are not shared collaboratively to shape what services need to be created and what targets they need to serve.

Business growth takes a hit because sales or client services can not provide the value they need to deliver.

Essentially, business is asked for growth by providing new and better offers, and IT, on the other side, is told to limit the tools that the business needs to save some money in the short run.

Leadership is creating friction in its organisation.

How do we solve this?

Recognise IT as a supporting revenue creator. If you want to increase value, you will need to invest in the cost of a service. If the service helps you gain more clients and customers, it is damaging to reduce the costs of running it.

This can be as simple as having the right communication apps, collaboration platforms, meeting rooms that don’t glitch when you present or have meetings, and enough data to send big attachments.

Engaging the client and customer is part of the product.

Create a clear value model that connects any IT investment to business outcomes as a supporting entity.

— — — —

Marcus Kirsch has over 20 years of experience in end-to-end product and service and process innovation and delivery on a single and portfolio level. He has globally built and managed teams and trained senior leadership. He has successfully led transformation efforts and helped create and risk-mitigate millions on operational costs and business value.
He is a Royal College of Art alumnus and former MIT Medialab researcher. His clients include BP, British Telecom, GlaxoSmithKline, Kraft, McDonald’s, Nationwide, Nissan, Science Museum, P&G, Telekom Italia, and WPP, as well as non-profits and startups. He is a keynote speaker and author of ‘The Wicked Company’, a book about how organisations can better solve wicked problems.

From my book:
“ Marcus Kirsch’s superpower is to see problems at both the macro and micro scales. The Wicked Company surveys the landscape to help us understand how, when and why change happens; then he dives deep to help us figure out how to capitalise on it.”
 — DOUG POWELL, VICE PRESIDENT DESIGN, IBM

You can contact him on LinkedIn or follow ‘The Wicked Podcast’ on Apple and Spotify.

His second book will be published later in 2024.
Marcus is available for workshops and contracts.

Cost-cutting kills client-serving was originally published in The Wicked Company on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Are centralised large-scale enterprise software projects the cost-benefit we think they are? After dozens of transformation programmes, there is evidence to the contrary, and we should treat our services more like small children.

Over the last few years, I have been in several transformation programmes that spent hundreds of millions on big software deployments like Workday, ServiceNow, SAP, etc. Many struggled or failed to create business benefits. The premise is reduced costs and simplification of service. However, the ‘out-of-the-box’ costs never end up as out-of-the-box. It often sounds like someone managed to sell a simplified version of reality that doesn’t exist. “One big tech solution will solve it and save us millions.” How are intelligent people buying this nonsense? Maybe the most worrying thing is that there is often no baseline or AS-IS data on which to build an improvement case. If you do not understand the context of your problem or the reality you need to engage with, what chance do you have to create the right solution? This makes most enterprise solution promises empty at best.

Why this doesn’t work?

It is a theatre of shifting delivery responsibility to service providers. However, I wonder how the board reacts to a chain of failing investments or unrealised business benefits and asks what part is missing from making projects successful.

I learned that smaller providers and organisations flexible enough to build solutions based on actual needs do better with their solutions but lose to cheaper, more generic providers.

The catch-all, cookie-cutter myth that never manifests in reality is what big solutions are selling. Reality is messy and keeps moving. Big entities cost more to move. Why are we not seeing those costs included?

If you don’t structure your solutions based on this (reality), you will lose customers, talent and profit.

Anyone who has ever worked in big platform deployments will know:

• For the initial deployment, big consultancies are often used and add severe costs to the programme that could be covered internally and cost-effectively instead.
• Most companies have transformation programmes yearly, meaning outsourcing to consultancies costs multiple times more than having a permanent internal team.
• Deployment context or AS-IS of the business is felt to take too long to assess; discovery is cost-cut, so most programs run essentially blind or easily miss significant problems or the reality of the deployment context. This lowers adoption or results in costly fixes post-launch and, at times, stops programmes altogether.
• The initial out-of-the-box deployment must be revised six months after going live because of the above point but is never budgeted in.
• Customisation is still happening as every platform needs to suit the organisation’s processes. Even processes called industry standards, e.g., no gas or oil company runs the same process, will run differently in every company. Companies avoid using custom or bespoke, even though every deployment is customised. This creates low quality and confusion, leading to lengthy meetings, blurry targets and extra costs.
• Organisations evolve every quarter, and clients and partners expect tailored treatment. Big platforms don’t provide the flexibility to evolve accordingly. This hinders business growth. Cheap platforms will damage your real business growth, therefore.
• Big platforms and their providers have tight contracts. Post-contract changes can be impossible or take so long that business value, effectiveness and brand can take big hits.

I don’t think I have ever seen all these costs in one business case. And I am not surprised that organisations struggle to create value from programmes that ignore these realities.

A few years ago, I worked for a global company network. The UK branch had boldly custom-built a solution from scratch. The budget was 6 million pounds, and they created a very bespoke solution with a development partner. The solution did not connect to reality. The user experience was confusing and created terrible data because of it. The governance system built into the solution did not represent the reality of the process. While the custom build was failing, the Australian team of the company built the same service with a 50K budget, and it worked. Not only did the Australian team build the system based on actual needs instead of fancy diagrams based on wishful thinking, but they also chose a set of services that they could easily chain up themselves.

What model works?

A complete custom-built vehicle driven by a small leadership removed from reality is a misinvestment.

Cheap, under-featured enterprise solutions seem to be a misinvestment as they will always need customising later. Therefore, their cheaper initial costs are outdone by the custom job they need to fit.

A mixture of small suppliers and connected services seems to cost a fraction and deliver better than the other options. Smaller suppliers are more likely to customise and help you evolve their offer. A modular approach can also easily swap out parts without the end user noticing, keeping the business competitive and resilient.

Why does that model seem to be so effective? Maybe because digital and the internet always worked well like that: a modular decentralised system with alternative routes, de-coupled and systemic.

It would help if you used your organisation’s smartness to understand what ecosystem you need. De-coupling has been an influential principle in computer code for decades. APIs enabled easy chaining and access to features and capabilities, creating innovation and growth. As tech specialists, this should be our daily philosophy. Do we need more proof for this to be a more financially sound model?

So what should we do?

Insights about context reality need to come from internal. (Invest in baselining)

Outside insights cost a fortune, often more than the benefits or business value created. Outside insights are often not documented centrally, so most silos will not have shared access, and costs are duplicated by different silos paying different companies for the same work.

The bigger the platform, the bigger the cost for change. (Be Modular)

Big projects take an average of two years to reach maturity. This is too long to create value. While you deploy, clients ask for more, and within nine months or less, requirements will change, and your business case will crash. Investing in projecting client and user needs always pays for itself.

There is no such thing as industry standard. (Iterate the known)

Industries are all challenged and evolve every year. Doing what everyone is doing is not a safe strategy anymore. While you are adopting old processes without improving them, others take over. How about establishing better industry standards and seeing others fail to match up?

De-couple those silver bullets.

If your solution does not let you improve within a six-week cycle, it is a liability, not an asset. Automation platforms like Microsoft PowerApps, Zapier or, Make.com, and general no-code platforms enable your teams to build customised automation and business benefits. It also helps to share the effort and enables non-IT and non-designers to contribute.

Is it obvious?

The fact that changes to a solution later in a project cost more was established a long time ago and is project costs 101.

Short-term savings do not work in systemic, networked or wicked problem scenarios. 10% savings in the short term with an inflexible and fixed contract will quickly eat up the savings through later customisation, fixes or delayed improvements. Your business is not a guarded science lab. The outside reality has demanded quicker changes from organisations for a while now.

Your digital infrastructure is a wicked problem.

Smaller platforms chained together by you will make you more flexible and enable your teams to create more effective processes than any big platform can produce. Partnerships should evolve every quarter, not sweat the asset’ for five years.

A service or experiential layer is an investment, but it will let you swap functional modules underneath with less disruption. Invest in talent that can quickly build connections between systems.

Outsourcing only works on the most commoditised of processes; these days, technology revisits commodities faster than you can identify them.

The reality of organisations has become more like nature because organisations are more exposed to a constantly changing reality. This might sound scary and unpredictable, but as human beings, we live with it every day.

Maybe the best metaphor is if you look at raising kids. Children evolve every day. There are critical moments of support and clarity. In between, it is a quick learning curve, and you are never fully prepared for what will happen next. Some behavioural psychologists have said that taking your kids to art museums and making them read books, etc, will not make any difference. Building their confidence does. If we translate that, we can see that a system in the long term should be able to buy new shoes they grow out of every few months, change their hair colour weekly and not be punished for it. If they don’t like the lunch we just made, we might have to cook an alternative even if it will make us late for the airport. There is no such thing as perfect, and that’s the beauty of it.

Marcus Kirsch has over 20 years of experience in end-to-end product and service and process innovation and delivery on a single and portfolio level. He has globally built and managed teams and trained senior leadership. He has successfully led transformation efforts and helped create and risk-mitigate millions on operational costs and business value.
He is a Royal College of Art alumnus and former MIT Medialab researcher. His clients include BP, British Telecom, GlaxoSmithKline, Kraft, McDonald’s, Nationwide, Nissan, Science Museum, P&G, Telekom Italia, and WPP, as well as non-profits and startups. He is a keynote speaker and author of ‘The Wicked Company’, a book about how organisations can better solve wicked problems.

From my book:
“ Marcus Kirsch’s superpower is to see problems at both the macro and micro scales. The Wicked Company surveys the landscape to help us understand how, when and why change happens; then he dives deep to help us figure out how to capitalise on it.”
 — DOUG POWELL, VICE PRESIDENT DESIGN, IBM

You can contact him on LinkedIn or follow ‘The Wicked Podcast’ on Apple and Spotify.

His second book will be published later in 2024.
Marcus is available for workshops and contracts.

Too big to not fail! was originally published in The Wicked Company on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The British Post Office (BPO) scandal is unsurprisingly big news in the UK. Their accounting software, supplied by Fujitsu, led to 700 sub-postmasters being wrongfully convicted of fraud. The news is focussed on BPO’s wrong behaviour in suing sub-post managers; I would argue that the case shows a more significant and widespread problem that many other organisations already face.

One wonders how an organisation can miss an IT bug, especially when 700 postmasters reveal and report the same pattern. How can an organisation miss this to the level where they rather assume a scammer epidemic within their organisation?

I have seen three particular behaviours in every company I have worked in over the last ten years that could explain this to some extend.
Organisations should try to rid themselves of these behaviours as it costs them a ton of money and often makes them chase the wrong reality.

A summary of the scandal as reported:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdQQib3rmkE

Uncritical trust in technology

The BPO reporting states that the company, for a long time, insisted the software is solid. We do not know the details, but I had several projects where software did not perform well, and people were blamed for not using it right. In most of those cases, it was the software that was flawed. Given that configurations are complex and that contracts with software service providers are restrictive, companies themselves rarely get to see the details of a system.

I have seen many times that post-deployment testing leaves out the human usability factor many times to cut costs. Human-centred practices like change management and service design are often under-invested as contextual impacts and costs are not often enough part of the budget for projects. Skill silos often contribute to this not-so-hidden cost being missed in decision-making.

The supplier has a tendency to claim, that the system works perfectly, and the business has to take this at face value. Worse, dozens of senior IT managers told me they believed the service providers knew what they were doing or even worse told me that they are aware how low quality the solution is, but buy it regardless.

More recently, I discovered a situation where a warehousing solution did not seem to provide the value and improvement it was promised. The local team wasn’t using it much, and the business complained about the non-adoption. As it turned out, the solutions features were not robust enough to deal with bad internet connections. Data was lost and flawed, so employees stopped using it. Being a global solution, it was surprising that low internet was never considered to be built into the system. It was standard in 2005 when I created travelling exhibitions for prominent museums in London. The supplier in the above case is a well-known global supplier. It shows they sometimes do not get the basics right or develop for real-world contexts.

Outsourcing is supposed to make your life easier and reduce the time to quality check what is going on with your services. The reality is that no process is ever stable, so needs iterative improvement. The world is full of wicked problems because people evolve while using services as well. Technology upgrades are often the only investment put in the budget.

As an organisation, testing the technologies you use more deeply is essential de-risking. Features aren’t always fit to serve the people using it, even though they look valid on a diagram.

We know technology changes fast. As a company, we should maintain the insight and ability to see what that means. Outsourcing needs to be done with the right type of partnership. Contracts and engagements must evolve into a shared collaboration that de-risks both sides. Some companies have started to re-visit their contracts and the way they collaborate with partners. Collaboration and sharing are becoming vital aspects of progressive partnerships.
Shared teams can be a valid solution for this. They more easily share insights and both partner’s targets are clearer and better aligned when working like this.

Cheap IT providers

Cost reduction has been a priority for many companies and is still one of the main drivers of investment. The BPO story mentions a cheap contract with Fujitsu. For me that can mean a variety of things.

In my experience, choosing a cheaper provider can have various downsides that will cost a company more sooner rather than later. Cheaper providers are less progressive, meaning their setups can be outdated, have less data transparency or take longer to provide a service or an update. It also limits the adjustments or fixes a supplier can apply.

When I worked for one major brand, they told me that the supplier needed six months to consider any updates or changes for a service.

In another project, the service build failed so badly that it made it onto UK breakfast TV. Whilst the brand took damage, the organisation and the supplier were still arguing about where the flaw was. The supplier refused to check their system. Only when the damage got bigger did the supplier check and find a bug on their side. The negotiating and time investment to do simple testing was massively increased because the contract made everyone avoid costly actions.

Short-term reductions in costs often don’t consider contextual costs. Regulations and expectations change faster than ever. More expensive suppliers often provide more flexibility and faster upgrades or better customisation. Few bids from suppliers are considered towards a future scenario.
Include a future scenario in the brief to test the flexibility of your supplier. Consider that the value of flexibility and iterations is a multiple higher than initial deployment costs. Because everything is systemic now, steps later tend to inflate exponentially, not in a linear level.

Disconnect and blindness between business and IT

Reporting in many businesses is incredibly simplistic and lacks significant levels of insight. Given that most larger organisations have complex systems, reporting only shows budget numbers and traffic light levels of context. Even the descriptions of progress levels are often tech and feature focussed, rather than exploring the human and adoption aspect.

For limitations of time and attention reasons, reporting is simplified, and numbers do not represent the business’s underlying value or reality. Every abstraction level is a reduction in problem-solving value.

We have come a long way to measure and create more data. However, the C-Level often cannot turn arbitrary numbers into qualitative narratives that could help make better decisions. Many organisations keep being ignorant towards knowing what a million here and a million there means.
I have met financial officers, who never asked for the value return on a budget request.

In the BPO case, hundreds of observations from the factory floor never reached the senior level, or so it seems. I would assume the narrative aspect of mismatching numbers was incredibly absent from the reporting style.

What contributes to the disconnect is a historical gap between IT and the business. Goals should be aligned, but often are not. Consider that IT costs are supposed to be reduced within IT, yet the business wants to use the same digital services to grow the business and do an excellent job for employees and clients. IT reduces costs and quality; the company needs to increase quality and only gets low-quality services and tools to do so.

I would like to know if leadership sees the paradox they are creating.

Business and IT should not be sitting in different silos. It reduces transparency and doesn’t make digital tools a value driver, even though they are. It also makes it harder for the business to gain insights and understand IT and its decision-making.

Companies should work hard to merge IT and business. We all use digital tools like we use electricity. Why is it a separate department or even a separate business? We are designing organisations to prevent collaboration. This needs to change.

Yet again, business and IT should be merged teams. Outcome is achieved by a combination of ambition and the tools that enable it.

I would not be surprised if BPO leadership had little to no access to the accounting system within IT and the ability to ask for an assessment.

The below interview pretty much supports many of the above assumptions. This happens in som many companies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a0b9Q7JMuc

So….

All these three factors contribute to a lack of transparency for the senior management level about what the problem is made of, a delay or inability to assess or fix things quickly due to contractual limitations and opposing incentives between business and IT.

If we look at these in combination, we might understand how companies can get things wrong to a level that is absent of reality.

It does not absolve suing employees. It is important to understand that the above discrepancies exist in most organisations that i have worked with over the last 10 years. This is a risk that should not be ignored. It is essentially an inability to connect with reality.

How could we make sure that IT and Business gets a better understanding of reality?

How much do we need to redesign organisations to bring more transparency to problems?

— — —

The Wicked Company provides modern support for leadership and strategic product teams across innovation and transformation.

https://www.thewickedcompany.com

We also run The Wicked Podcast, where we always look for C-level people and thought leaders to talk about better business, teams, problem-solving, and how to get there.

https://www.thewickedcompany.com/podcast/

If you want to contact us, feel free to ping me on LinkedIn or add in the comments.

#teamops #lovetheproblemnotthesolution

The new book will come out in 2024.

The British Post Office (BPO) scandal is unsurprisingly big news in the UK. was originally published in The Wicked Company on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the 90s, IT was known to me and maybe yourself to say ‘NO’ to anything you would request. I remember back in 2004, when I was working at London’s Science Museum, we managed our computers and software outside of IT because otherwise, we would not have been able to design and build interactive galleries for our exhibitions. Installing new software and code on a weekly basis needed a crippling level of sign-off. At Leo Burnett London, IT could not do anything because Paris and Publicis, the mothership, centralised it, and many requiests never even got a response. That was in 2009.

No employee functions without digital tools and services; IT still provides all of it, yet what the business needs and IT provides is often at odds. It’s like a Formula One driver being refused a full tank.

Across industries I have seen businesses make similar critical mistakes to create this scenario and it is costing them millions. Those are easy to fix though.

Value vs cost savings

“We want you to buy app X.” said business to IT in one of the projects I was involved in. “We have platform Y that does the same; X doesn’t fit into our IT strategy,” said IT. “App X has been signed off by (some director person), so we will have to consider it.”

Sound familiar?

If business had included IT in earlier conversations about the value that needs to be created, IT could have proposed platform Y before app X was considered, or the approach would have been signed off. By design IT doesn’t always have to consider those business values, so you can’t even blame them.

On a personal note, I find non-digital business people ignoring the expertise of digital specialists to be one of the best ways to create a condescending and toxic work environment that will cost the business a lot of money.

IT has to propose platform Y because one of its targets is cost reduction. It is a strategically smart move to keep an infrastructure clean and straightforward. IT is doing its job to disagree.
It should only amend and elevate the solution when creating a business or customer value that tops cost savings. Those kind of horizontal business cases rarely exist in companies. Trust me, I have seen the excel documents.

This is where cost savings as a target can damage value creation, and I have seen it in 10/10 of the last transformation programmes I was involved in. Companies like HSBC, BP, WPP, Nationwide, Imperial College and many others are losing customers, money and frustrated talent over this. This is not industry-specific.

This is the silo and de-skilling effect at its best. On the reporting sheet, everyone is doing what they should be. The business is often damaged for years by being stuck with a wrong solution or contract or with the non-competitive improvement cycle of its services and processes.

The solution is simple: Create joint targets and assessment models.

This means the business needs to check in with IT before it picks a solution. It also means that IT needs to check with the business on what targets the IT solutions need to support the business. Create caveats for cost reduction. Cost reduction can significantly damage any effort of value creation. If you can’t measure how one affects the other, you must create a model that does. Or you can watch Businesses damage IT investments and vice versa.

As a business, do you have someone who could show me on one slide how these different parts of the business affect each other? The answers of some of the ones I worked with were: “It is too complicated.” or “We don’t consider that to be part of the §vaule creation.” That is not a good enough answer in our modern digital data world.

Giving your business the time to understand itself makes all the difference between a growing or dying business.

Cross-disciplinary teams

Any business proposition should have a mix of DVF in their team!

Research has shown that diversity de-risks investment. Google has researched high-performing teams and found that it is not about specialist knowledge but a team that can listen to each other. In the previous example above, I pointed out that not asking, hearing, or involving damages the business. Google agrees.

So, when a business wants to understand an opportunity, it should demand a mix of business and IT people in the proposition team. You should also add customer or employee views if you shift the dial. Plants only grow on welcoming soil.

Our challenge today is that many areas are far removed or use abstracted data points. This makes investments miss risks and additional costs that exceed the value proposition.

I saw an IT systems-upgrade solution programme that completely ignored the employee process part of the solution. They had not assessed how well the system would work for employees, and not getting that step right would mean none of the upgrades would happen. This a massive oversight that, if our cross-disciplinary teams hadn’t looked into it, would have led to an 80% failure rate.

Another project replaced a paper-based voucher system with a digital credit card system. It was overlooked that every existing user had to re-apply to the system. This dropped the participant numbers to a level where the service struggled to reach previous success rates. Essentially, a drop of over 50% in customer engagement. People were confused and, at worst, rejected when they applied even though they were previously eligible. The poor quality of service reached UK breakfast TV levels — another considerable damage to the brand and reputation.

When I joined, the damage had outdone the benefits, and there was still no end in sight to catch up with previous numbers of people served, the primary measure of programme success.

All because the human side of the project had not been considered at the point of the business case.

IT and digital features have to stop being considered without context. It is no surprise that these digital transformation efforts are failing. They rarely check in with the reality of human behaviour.

A balanced team can see this from a mile away. A typical tech and business-biased team will think people will fall in line like bots.

I won’t start discussing the paradox of human beings not considering human behaviour that they are familiar with themselves. That is for another time.

For now, I would love to hear from anyone authentically, considering that a new narrative and conversation needs to happen.

Go on, who wants their IT to work better with business?

Battle beyond (the stars of) IT and Business was originally published in The Wicked Company on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I was two months into my latest transformation programme. Jonathan (name changed to avoid crucifixion) walked right towards me on one of my first post-9-to-5 work drinks. “You need to change your name; we are service design; we were here first,” he announced, very short of introducing himself. Let’s figure it out, I said. I was familiar with ITIL and easily brushed off the cultish attack.

At this point, I had met ITIL service designers, enterprise architects and many others who came from a different angles, trying to do the same thing. Shouldn’t we all rather combine our energy?

“Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.”

― Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do

I prefer learning to truisms, and the two service designs have an amazing potential to grow and impact businesses.

I can imagine how two practices called Service Design are confusing to senior leadership. Thankfully, they are close friends or should be. ITIL comes from IT and is slowly opening up to the end-user side of things; Design Thinking/Service Design comes from Stanford.

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) and Stanford Service Design are two approaches that focus on managing and improving service delivery within organisations. While both aim to enhance the quality of services, they differ in scope, focus, and methodologies.

ITIL is a widely adopted framework for IT service management. It provides a set of best practices and guidelines for designing, delivering, and managing IT services. ITIL focuses primarily on the IT infrastructure and its alignment with business objectives. It emphasises the importance of service availability, reliability, and efficiency. The framework consists of processes, functions, and roles enabling organisations to manage their IT services effectively. ITIL comprises five core publications or lifecycle stages: Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation, and Continual Service Improvement. The Service Design stage in ITIL focuses on designing new or modified services and ensuring they align with business requirements and customer needs. It covers service catalogue management, service level management, capacity management, and availability management.

On the other hand, Stanford Service Design is an approach rooted in design thinking principles and methodologies. It focuses on creating and improving services from a user-centred perspective. Stanford Service Design takes a holistic view of the service experience and considers all touchpoints and interactions throughout the customer journey. It emphasises empathy and understanding user needs to co-create meaningful, desirable, and usable services. Stanford Service Design uses various tools and techniques, such as user research, journey mapping, prototyping, and testing, to iteratively design and refine services. It encourages collaboration and interdisciplinary teams to bring together diverse perspectives and expertise. Stanford Service Design is not limited to IT services but can be applied to various service industries, including healthcare, finance, education, and more.

In summary, the key differences between ITIL and Stanford Service Design are as follows:

1. Scope: ITIL focuses specifically on IT service management, while Stanford Service Design can be applied to various service industries beyond IT.
2. Perspective: ITIL is process-oriented, ensuring efficient and reliable IT service delivery. Stanford Service Design takes a user-centred approach, prioritising the needs and experiences of users throughout the service journey.
3. Methodologies: ITIL provides a structured framework with defined processes and functions. Stanford Service Design employs design thinking principles and methodologies, emphasising empathy, experimentation, and iteration.
4. Focus: ITIL focuses on aligning IT services with business objectives, while Stanford Service Design focuses on designing services that meet user needs and create meaningful experiences.

The obvious move is what you might have guessed:

• Design Thinking needs more business focus to balance the value between business and customer.
• ITIL often misses the end user’suser’s needs. I have often seen end users reject technology and services because their needs weren’t met.

They both have flaws. Put them together. Mix it up. You will only get synergy.

How do you reach out to your brothers and sisters in ITIL or Design Thinking to collaborate and thrive?

#teamops #lovetheproblemnotthesolution

Exciting times ahead!

ITIL and Stanford should make up! was originally published in The Wicked Company on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the 1960s, Bill Bernbach created the modern creative team for advertising. Previously copywriters and art directors did not even work on the same building floor. Bernbach put them in one room and had them run ideas back and forth so that the creative output between text and image could be enhanced, he revolutionised the industry, and seven years later, every ad agency had a copywriter and art director as a team. Some of these teams, and I have met a fair few, are longer together than with their life partners.

The creative industry has not updated this recipe for decades, but maybe, with AI, the time for a new type of innovative team is finally here to hyper-drive creativity.

Over 15 years ago, digital technology had advanced enough for advertising to take digital more seriously. I worked in the industry for about 5 hrs and have been doing jobs along agencies here and there since then.

Back then, I was hired as innovation director to support pitches, which meant I either supported creative teams to help them make ideas more digital or created innovative prototypes and ideas with a small team for pitches for clients such as P&G, McDonald’s, Virgin Atlantic, Bacardi, Patek Philippe, to name just a few. It was tough to be the new kid on the block. A mix of being a show pony for pitches, the mad professor you pull out of your sleeve when needed to look innovative.

The real challenge was to integrate more digital into the creative process. Even then, digital builds were either specialist builds with new tech that the industry was too immature to creatively exploit more complex ecosystems like experiences that no one in the agency would understand how to draw a storyboard for. Agencies have been and are still struggling to run product teams instead of short-term campaigns.

It was the equivalent of black and white vs colour TV in some sense, and like most industries, they are still playing catch up.

What I thought I could contribute to progress was to add a third member to a creative team, a technology viewpoint, that would enhance ideas towards all the opportunities modern tools and toys bring. But after a few years, I did not see much progress and looked for other projects.

A few months ago, AI happened, and the world of ideation just changed. We now have AI-based scripts, music lyrics, ads and graphics happening through tools that can create things within seconds without prior experience. The two significant skill sets, copywriting and visual drafts(what an art director does), collapsed into one junior person writing explanations from the client into a tool. I am oversimplifying here but:

The synergy effect and competitive edge that Bernbach created and then everyone copied is finally gone. The Adland people had time to be creative about their main selling point, the creative teams. Technology just decided for them yet again.

The edge is gone

If a single person can now create 1,000 treatments and ideas in 1 hour, why do we need two people teams? How will our collaborative offer to our clients change?

What is the upgrade? The obvious answer is that campaigns and products have become exponentially more complex through technology and tools. Discovering new tools is a full-time job now more than ever. The faster teams get ideas in front of the client and out there in all their complexity, the more successful a creative service will be.

During social media’s heyday at the peak of the Oreo Superbowl campaign, the speed of creativity and variants were finally recognised. I remember working on an Olympics campaign for Mcdonald’s, where the biggest challenge was to convince the client to choose and sign off multiple proposals within an hour. What was previously unheard of was suddenly necessary. We have entered another step-change.

Two sides of an old coin
We finally need a recognised systemic technology mind
joining every creative team.

Story Leads are storytellers and explorers. They shape the communication part of an idea with text and imagery. The team will still collaboratively explore those, but the story lead will help experiment with translating the story into text and imagery. They will also lead on testing those with clients and end-users.

System Leads are pattern recognisers, tool masters and behavioural advisors. They anchor the story into reality by knowing which channel and tech can be brought together and how an experience is shaped based on where people engage with what.

Together they can come up with and test a mock campaign or website within 48 hrs and tell the client how successful an idea might likely be.

For the clients
The aim is not to show the client 100 ideas because you can produce them but rather the opposite. Ideas will have been tested more, and decisions should move more to the team than sit with the client. This will ensure that clients get more output and impact with less bottleneck. Clients, after all, should have more time to explore impact and direction strategically.

The argument for new and improved governance is manifold, and I will write more on it in connection with my new book about TeamOps. Enabling teams to hyperdrive and being able to create variants is where the future lies for organisations. Yes, this will make the work of strategists and account managers both more important and different.

Epilogue

Teams are changing, and what I have seen working well for service and product teams in the shape of TeamOps is equally valid for the creative industry. A revolutionary idea over half a century old should finally get an upgrade. Ask me about teamops and new teams. When are you building your new teams?

Exciting times ahead!

Please like, share, buy my book and follow my podcast. Every little helps. And by all means, feel free to say Hi!

Marcus Kirsch is a liminal traveller, problem-solving, innovation and team-process-building specialist. He has worked for over 25 years for global companies, large and small, to help them activate and enable their people and leaders to move more sustainably into the future. He has trained hundreds, inspired thousands and created millions in value for the people he worked with.

Invite him for advice, speaking opportunities or practical guidance or ask him about his miserable attempts on pottery.

#lovetheproblemnotthesolution

AI killed Bernbach’s Creative Team was originally published in The Wicked Company on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s the weekend, and I just popped into my local pub early to sit down and write on my second book, which feels more challenging than expected, plus it is one of the first sunny days in London this year, and they still haven’t been able to build laptops with screens unaffected by sun glare. So I ordered a coffee and sat in a bright corner of that place just a minute up my road.

When I sat down, I noticed I had done two things I rarely do when I come here. One was ordering a coffee. I usually come here in the evenings and have a glass of wine when I write. Yes, it’s the cliche image of a writer; how uncreative am I?

Secondly and more importantly, I ordered at the bar and then walked over to my table, expecting the coffee to arrive when done.

I had just engaged in a small but crucial aspect of what often hinders change and an open mindset. I am sure by closer observation, the smaller and more significant number of things keep us from actively understanding what is in front of us rather than seeing things for what they are.

! Sometimes, learned behaviour kicks in without us realising it. It can feel similar to expectations that are often not verbalised, just silently expected, and if the other side isn’t in the same space, one or both sides will be confused or disappointed. This can significantly affect trust and communication, which are essential to collaboration and developing relationships. Do you recognise that? I am sure we all do to some extent.

So what just happened in this most mundane of moments?

There was no reason for me to expect to have the coffee delivered or for the bar to serve the coffee to my table. Why?

I have come here for five years, and I have observed how things work here:

• Drinks, including hot beverages, are ordered and delivered at the bar. Only food is served to the tables and ordered at the bar.
• Essentially, there is no table service for orders.
• As I only come here for evening drinks, I always get my coffee at the bar and pick them up there.
• Most pubs do this similarly; I had no reason to expect a different service this time.
• I wasn’t told that the coffee would be brought over.
• When I asked the bar staff why he brought it over, he said he hadn’t made a conscious decision; it had just felt right.

I am using a simple low-value example to make a more significant point on what can go wrong as well:

• I could have gotten annoyed having to get back up and pick up my coffee at the bar.
• I could have shouted at the bar where my coffee was and annoyed the staff.
• Any of the above would have confused and impacted my relationship here, even as a frequent local.

In over 20 years of innovation, change and transformation projects, I have seen the above damage, sometimes leading to failure or multi-million projects and contracts. Despite all the diagrams and established industry standards, I have never seen a single business context like another. This also means none of us should expect anyone involved to know or copy over project characteristics from one project to another.

So where does that leave us?

• Especially in new relationships, treat every expectation as an assumption that others might not share.
• Not seeing things the way you do or knowing things the way you do is an absence of expertise or intelligence. It is a reminder that all of us are unique beings with unique backgrounds and languages.
• Expected behaviour can be a trap. All roads lead to Rome. Our new reality means that there is no one best answer. Even the best ones will lead to some adverse effects that might make your idea’s slightly more positive results less beneficial than the second most positive ones.

I run one of the most successful icebreakers called ‘How to Make Toast’. It is a popular service design and design thinking activity where you ask people to create instructions for how they like their toast. Its aim is that even in a small group, you will see the difference in style and details to something everyone likely feels is ‘obvious’ regarding its requirements. It exposes bias, assumptions and personal preferences.

As you can see above, you can use toast, coffee, or many things.

I ask you to be brave enough to call out these assumptions in business. You will see you are not the only one looking at things differently and having expectations that no one else shares. This simple fact should connect us more than it sometimes separates us as individuals.

For some reason, I am now getting my wines served to my table. Talk about unexpected outcomes once you discuss what you observe with everyone involved :)

Exciting times ahead!

Please like, share, buy my book and follow my podcast. Every little helps. And by all means, feel free to say Hi!

Marcus Kirsch is a liminal traveller, problem-solving, innovation and team-process-building specialist. He has worked for over 25 years for global companies, large and small, to help them activate and enable their people and leaders to move more sustainably into the future. He has trained hundreds, inspired thousands and created millions in value for the people he worked with.

Invite him for advice, speaking opportunities or practical guidance or ask him about his miserable attempts on pottery.

#lovetheproblemnotthesolution

Thought: How you like your business coffee? was originally published in The Wicked Company on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.