Product Strategy & Adventure
The book Time to Listen is available now. Chapter 4 shows you how to set the purpose of a listening session or a study about the people you support.
My partner loves to read and watch adventure blogs: people hiking, running, biking, people in multi-day races, and people just having fun with friends or doing something solo. My partner’s favorite is the author Jill Homer, and her blog “Jill Outside.” We laugh at the patterns that happen to her over and over: “And then I ran out of water.” “And then my bike broke.” “And then a storm descended.” We feel inspired that there are people whose lives are full of the non-mundane. Jill’s life is charmed. She writes about adventure for a living. Her strategy, as far as I can tell, is “earn a salary doing something I love.” Tactics about water or bike maintenance seem less important than having fun generating good stories in wild places.
Strategy is not something we all consider with regard to living our lives. We just kind of live them. When things go well, that’s a natural and lovely state to be in. When things don’t go well, we turn to the people we trust while our minds and emotions chase circles inside us. What strategies we have tend to emerge as values or personal rules.
Some orgs pay attention to strategy similarly, by stating their values. There is nothing wrong with values, but these are not strategy.
Some orgs list what they want to achieve — their mission — and think of it as their strategy. It’s not. Strategy is about people. Most of these statements completely omit the people the org is doing these things for, or else they refer to the people they support as “everyone.” These statements also omit the people who are doing the work within the org. Many of the statements use phrases that unintentionally imply that someone (or the planet) will be harmed or left behind: “groundbreaking,” “disruptive,” “empowering,” “AI.” (Hah. AI is powered by yet more server farms, and we don’t quite have solutions that reduce power and heat. Lots of orgs think it’s important to “change the world,” and they’re definitely doing that, in a very physical way.) Mission statements are not strategy.
Other orgs do have strategies, but they beg to be renewed. Economies have changed since the 1980’s, and commercial ideas like “constant aggressive growth,” “meet the demand,” and “please the shareholders” are watchwords for ideas that are out of date. They are watchwords that mean the org is the primary concern, that profit is the primary concern, and that technological innovation is an acceptable means to these ends. Old economic ideas imply that one group knows better than another and therefore gets to make decisions without input and collaboration. New ideas have grown, such as understanding how networks and ecosystems have broader affects that need to be thought through. That planning for the long future is how we forecast how these affects play out. New economic ideas emphasize relationships, creating together, and understanding people. In another generation, even more ideas will grow. Perhaps the old idea of associating behavior with demographics will get replaced by associating behavior with thinking style within a specific context.
At the core of these new and evolving economic ideas for orgs are:
- Make time to understand.
- Show signals of trust.
- Communicate clearly, transparently, and inclusively.
- Measure how well we are doing from the perspective of what the people (and planet) are aiming at.
Strategy Is About People (and the Planet)
A strategy describes a future where an org has brought specific value to specific ways that people focus their cognition, including emotional reactions and personal rules. It’s not a paragraph; it’s more like a graphic novel, with characters involved.
For example, “Understand all the complexities of caring for a parent, so we can:”
- See the various thinking styles approach the various parts of this care
- See parts of the care that we did not anticipate (such as drug reactions)
- Provide a deeper continuum of support, tailored to each thinking style
- Investigate the knock-on effects of caretaking contexts
- Provide for demographic, physiological, and financial contexts of cognition
- Measure the scale of harm we cause each thinking style
- Track how well our solutions help each thinking style make progress on each part of their caretaking
But how does an org describe this depth of detail for the wide variety of people that it serves? The way this larger description scales is to define the cognition within the frame of a particular intent, purpose, or goal people have. Rather than thinking of “everyone” as the “beneficiary” of an org’s solutions, we can study how well we support particular thinking styles the org might serve, as people with those thinking styles make progress on their intent/purpose/goal. We measure these people’s success at making progress.
An org’s tactics include its operations and how effectively it can jump right to designing a solution. It’s strategy is defined by focusing on people’s interior cognition within the frame of their intent/purpose/goal. The org can design the solution in abstract of its implementation. Strategy is setting up mental model skylines, for example, to see further into the future from the perspective of people. Strategy means fostering incremental change and establishing benchmarks of value-to-people for the org to measure against.
➡️ Strategy is about people (and the planet). Where are they going & thinking so that you can bring tailored solutions?
➡️ Strategy is knowing the long-term value you want to bring to people (and the planet), and the ways an org can pivot.
If we use the adventure bloggers as an analogy: their planning, their research, the rules they follow, and the feedback they get from viewers affect both their tactics and evolve their strategies. They might revise tactics to help them avoid forgetting their water filtration device or leaving their water bottle where they stopped for a break.
They might have compound strategies, too. For example:
- “Give more viewers a feel for the freedom of being out in the wild,” and,
- “Avoid harming [people, wild denizens, the environment] in ways that have knock-on effects for other components of the ecosystem, so that it will still be living in 50 years.”
So, the tactic of peeing in the little creek after filtering water there might get more viewers but it breaks the second strategy, so the blogger won’t do it.
But the orgs with outdated strategies have nothing to prevent them from peeing in creeks.
Writing this same notion from the point of view of people (and the planet), the creeks and the denizens/systems that interact with them have no protection against the org harming them. There are regulations, but no widespread monitoring and enforcement. Shifting the strategies of these orgs is what the new economic ideas are about. Talking about economic risk is potentially how we do it.
