Extend the shadow of the future
One of the six rules for improving the effectiveness of work from the book ‘Six Simple Rules’ is Extend the shadow of the future i.e. to ensure people have feedback cycles that provide them signals of the effects their actions are having and will have in the future. It's a really interesting book, check it out.
In my experience, I’ve found that this idea can be extended further. When we think with the end in mind and in terms of the multiple goals we need to achieve to succeed and the relationships between them we improve the context we have for a decision. We can achieve this by first making explicit what the desired outcomes are for your organization so that trade-offs in any prioritization decision-making can be made. For example, answering for our leadership group; what needs to be true for us to get where we are trying to go? What risks do we need to actively manage? What needs to continue to be sustained in addition to the new things we are striving to achieve?
A common area where I have witnessed first-hand where an organisation's actions are in direct opposition to, what should be for them, desirable outcomes is in the area of quality of customer experience. In the pursuit of satisfying their customer’s desire for more features and capabilities from their product unwittingly trade-off the quality of the experience of using that product by under-investing in the health and a competitive user experience. A bias to tangibles over what can seem like intangibles. A quality death spiral.
The quality death spiral can happen when separation of functional responsibilities gets in the way of seeing clearly that these are all elements of the customer experience being affected (and that consumers of the experience will not differentiate between!). Of course, organizations already combat such unbalance by setting user experience KPIs, standards, and quality practices — all of which are important but are ultimately crude instruments in the context of this issue. These approaches can often be bandaids to flawed decision-making and trade-offs which may have been made far further upstream — in how resources were allocated and choices of what to pursue or not to pursue. This is an issue that is far better to be addressed with better upfront alignment rather than downstream patches.
Worse still, these upstream decisions can often be opaque to the broader organisation. The logic and decision-making are not transparent and cannot be interrogated such that there’s the opportunity to challenge broken thinking and reset the course. Implicit assumptions can lead to addressable challenges to feel inevitable. There can be finger-pointing and a lack of alignment on where the priority and responsibility lie. But what if as leaders we’ve been explicit about what we believe is important to our success? Would we repeatedly over-invest in areas which won’t help us win and underinvest in areas which are critical to our success?
For many of you, the above may feel scarily close to home. So what can be done differently that can contribute to improving this situation?
Analyze, determine, communicate and constantly evolve the logic of our decisions
The above tweet reminded me that the pursuit of communicating the WHAT and WHY of things is an age-old one. This example from Disney Corporation in 1957 is a noble and of course obviously flawed example. I still really like it for what it does well. The authors of this diagram, whether they were the strategists themselves or creatives whose tasks it was to try and translate the new bold vision to the rest of the organisation doesn’t matter so much to me, set out to communicate in what is attempting to be an accessible way. That is to communicate both WHAT and WHY they were embarking on major investments which without explanation would likely seem incongruous. A hallmark of this diagram which I see hints of in more modern approaches to achieve the same goal is in identifying connections between different goals along with some explanation of why those connections matter. Of course, part of what interferes with this diagram being a truly great example is that it's overly complex which in a way distracts as much as it makes the point.
But let’s assume for the most engaged employees I am committed to navigating the cognitive overload, what I like is said employee could actually engage the leaders of the organisation on the logic that has been expressed in the diagram. “Would TV be a successful channel for publicising the products of the Music division?” for example is a question I could ask and engage on. And this is likely a far more pertinent question to the strategy of a company and the logic that underpins it than maybe if I was looking at a feature sitting on a roadmap. The chance to challenge and improve this logic is democratised and potential flaws or improvements can be discovered more quickly — something which is becoming ever more important in our competitive context.
How might this help us extend the shadow of the future?
So how does this concept help us extend the shadow of the future? Well its not just the simplistic example I gave about allocating appropriately to address quality versus delivering functionality — that’s just the most obvious and painfully visible example in the software development industry.
Trade-offs against things unseen occur all the time. Companies underinvest in Cybersecurity even though the risk of being compromised has never been higher. Most companies don’t invest in thinking and acting on their strategy even though competing for market share and avoiding disruption is key to their success. Decisions are often much more about the personalities and influence capital individuals have acquired than the integrity of ideas and information itself.
From my career experience, what I have observed in terms of decision quality and successfully investing in the areas that matter most comes when WHAT is being sought to be achieved and WHY that is being sought to be achieved is explicit trade-offs can more easily be considered. Maybe a company’s biggest risk is the defensibility of its unique selling points, maybe it's retaining or growing the trust of its users — what is most important is different for most businesses and changes over time. In the example for Disney, let's make up an example. Let's say, to manufacture an example, that the licensing for the Music division’s content was restrictive such that these assets couldn’t be used easily by the TV division. Disaster if an important part of the success of the Music division is the publicity from the TV division. Such a scenario could be quite conceivable in a large organisation and I’d wager most of us don’t need to look far to find a comparable contradiction in organisations we’ve been a part of. But how long does such a restriction last when the use of these assets is clearly an important part of the company strategy and is communicated by the leadership as compared to when such connections are simply implied?
Do you have examples where better decisions were made on where to invest when the elements of what was necessary for success were more explicit? Was knowing how the different elements related to each other useful in giving people the context they needed to make better decisions? Share your experiences in the comments.
