Bringing Strategy To Life
Creating Interactive Systems To Socialise & Realise Complex Business Strategies
One of the biggest challenges for any business is the critical move from conceptual thinking to execution.
There’s many reasons for this — we’ve explored them in depth elsewhere on these pages —
Barriers To Execution
To summarise them we could point to — lack of capacity, insufficient shift in focus, quality of leadership and decision making, inability to make the strategy understandable or relevant to everyone in the workforce.
There’s plenty of things that stop real change from happening in an organisation.
As we know human beings are not always naturally inclined to doing things differently — quite often it’s the simple fact that we are fearful of the unknown.
We’ve been building systems for many years to accompany our work with clients. We’ve been working with the advancing technologies to add to the development of vision and strategy creatively with teams.
The Solutions We Create
They Fall Into A Small Number Of Areas —
Systems For Collaboration
A massive topic for us.
In truth we are at the beginning of a revolution in what it means to collaborate in this new century.
There are many new products and platforms out there which claim to be the breakthrough for collaborating.
They claim to be the best way for this and that — but as we know we are creatures of habit and if we aren’t natural collaborators then no amount of technology will fix it.
It’s no longer in question that such systems are making a massive difference. As a consequence being in business these days requires knowing how to turn the technologies to your advantage.
Put simply it means maximising the biggest asset you have in achieving strategy — your people.
“Aiming at the correct target suggests first understanding what our definition of collaboration is before solving for it.”
Making Strategy Everyones Business
At Each Step Of Our Approach We Are Imagining Smarter Ways To Create And Sustain Value And Make Impact…
Getting Ready:
As we get ready to start working — we utilise platforms that assist us in sharing knowledge to prepare and stimulate conversation.
These systems enable debate, challenge, dialogue and enable us all to learn more about each other, the context and the things that matter most to everyone involved.
As our assignments progress the focus of the platform changes towards social exchange.
This means a modern way to make progress on programs of work. It takes us still further into a more sustained ‘place’ where ongoing the discussion and work can continue as strategy evolves into how the business now works.
Enabling Through Visualisation:
In the creation of these we work with teams in a very collaborative and creative way — building the architecture visually — we can get a very long way this way — but these ‘sessions and workshops’ are never the right occasions to make things concrete — there’s always major value in further reflection and additional perspective.
Often there’s more data to be obtained.
It’s also really important that we simplify the more creative process of co-creation and reduce the raw material into more meaningful deliverables.
The extra visualisation we are referring to here is of a more polished nature — turning the ‘live’ hand drawn work we do in sessions into digital representations.
Armed with these we can develop the system views show in the video below. These represent the multiple ways in which what we’ve learned can begin to tell the stories, communicate more widely or more simply explain (for example) the strategy or vision in a variety of ways to the different stakeholders.
These are lenses on the strategy and the operation.
This video shows visual structures that have been refined and developed, simplified and restructured to better communicate what was learned in the sessions themselves.
The effects of these systems has been to dramatically increase engagement and reduce error in delivery by making sure that at the right level everyone can see their role.
From that beginning it became far easier to expand on into the detailed design and encouraged input and engagement from every quarter.
Management
Advances in technology has meant that people have the power to access infinite data and knowledge about the workings of the business from their mobile phones wherever they happen to be on the planet.
The management and complex/simple appreciation of progress.
With all of these solutions we aim where possible to integrate with our clients existing systems and processes.
Our aim is firstly to add/augment their own traditional views and informational layers — bringing in more sophisticated interfaces in order to reduce the complexity.
Such systems aim to quickly translate the underlying data into visual ‘dashboards’.
These solutions are designed for people to better understand the wide variety of operational aspects of the business.
The Principles Of Interaction
There are some common principles that run through all our work in the building of these systems.
Whether it’s a colaboration zone for simple sharing or a comprehensive and enterprise wide system to manage the entire and sustained execution of strategy then the following principles must be in place.
ONE — Coherence
Our passion is for consistency in the way that information is conveyed.
It’s not difficult to understand how we take comfort from the way in which material is crafted so as to give us trust and belief in what it’s telling us. Whether it’s a map or and instruction manual we quickly know when they are working or not!
“We believe that for users to value anything in a system that the context needs to be coherent at all times.”
If at any time the user cannot understand where or why they are where they are then they will lose the relationship with the data, they will stop interacting with the information and they will stop learning in the intended way.
TWO:Clear Signposts
Subjectivity is an ever present dynamic when it comes to interacting for the first time with any application or solution of this nature.
We always aim to make the labels and navigation plain English, simple and relevant, straightforward and meaningful.
Users are now far more sophisticated when it comes to intuitively finding their way around digital tools.
The look and feel — the signage within these screens is of critical importance.
THREE: It’s Always A System
Everything is connected to everything else. In business, as in all of life, everything is implicated.
If we have a valid strategy these days then we’ve made sure that all the key parts of it are considered.
It’s hard to imagine any business today not considering how the demand of their consumers is mirrored by the supply of their solutions.
In those two concepts today’s business is one long process and our challenge is to illustrate everyone’s role in how they contribute. All dimensions of the business are effectively ‘cut-through’s’ of that idea.
Everything Changes
Because the world changes every second and nobody can guess what will happen next we need to build systems and platforms that can adapt and change as the data and information changes.
Our belief is that the frontline for strategy today isn’t so much the strategy itself but the ability of everyone connected and thinking about it becoming completely adaptive — curious about their response to such dynamics.
Our systems are designed for as much flexibility as is possible. The idea that anything remains static with these solutions for that long is an alien design concept to us.
The Videos
Everything Deserves An Explanation
In this document we’ve tried to create short videos that give you a sense of what some of these systems can do. We have to strike a balance between confidentiality and the capability of technology to convey their power.
The value of these tools is always in their unique specification in each case. As such they can appear a little superficial. We ask that you imagine that they are doing real things for each situation they are applied.
Explaining a process, bringing a strategy to life, giving the team a progress check, explaining a vision and strategy to people that weren’t present at its creation — making strategy everyone’s business.
