How we arrived at focusing on outcomes
For my own experience working as the CTO for SEEK Asia, there was a mix of what myself and the leaders brought with us and what the situation called for that lead us to the collection of practices we adopted. We experimented with and applied a variety of practices as part of a transformation effort that our market context and that our acquisition and integration of two top brands in the region demanded.
We approached the challenges that our organisation faced with a mix of conventional solutions where the approach to solving was well established and some novel approaches where conditions meant an approach forward was not obvious. Where solutions to challenges were less obvious we experimented with ideas that aligned to the following principles and assumptions :
- Product fit problems are complex and require adaptive approaches.
- Complex problems are still best addressed by people and therefore approaches to solutions needed to be people-centric. Getting to a state where an organisation can do that well means a lot of change and the approach to change needs to be cognizant to address the human needs of the organisation.
- People are inspired by the purpose of things and make better decisions when they understand why deeply. That means they need to be able to understand the value of what they are delivering and how what they do affects the intended audience of their product. To understand the value and how to improve it means thinking in terms of outcomes.
- Modern products have very high expectations as consumer sophistication increases suggesting agility, while critical, won’t address all needs.
Our approach was also informed by the failure modes that are prevalent at most organisations:
- Context is key; one-size-fits-all solutions are doomed for failure because they are blind to situational conditions of an organisation and rarely adaptive.
- Conventional wisdom commonly resulted in the selection of practices that were a poor fit to the nature of the problem. For instance, inappropriately applying approaches to managing the work of many teams by applying similar ideas one may use for managing a personal task list.
There were a few things we learned along the way about what contributes to these failure modes. There are some human aspects which reinforce the use of activity-oriented approaches. Two, in particular, seem to have contributed more than I’ve seen acknowledged elsewhere so I will deep-dive into in future posts:
- Rush to solve bias — organisations often don’t do the things they need to do because of very human biases which if unaware of would be doomed to repeat even if the consequences were known.
- Certainty bias — organisations also would consistently make choices against their interest if they did not have mechanisms to make uncertainties visible and have a structured approach to tackling uncertainty.
I write about the evolving set of practices that help organisations unite in making their customers and themselves more successful. Methods that support aligned understanding of an organisation’s vision, strategy and priorities such that the maximum amount of effort can be applied in a common direction. Share your own experiences and perspectives in the comments.
