Design of Strategy
Greek origins of the word strategy point to “putting the troops in the right places”. As opposed to purely imaginative future-gazing, strategy requires one to start with both feet on the ground, climb up a tree to get to a higher vantage point, look around, generate new potential directions and then come back to the ground to work out ways and means to move along those directions.
Crafitti’s Design Of Strategy (DoS) framework stitches together powerful elements of innovative thinking specifically suited to strategy creation. The macro-elements of DoS are as follows: 1. Understanding the context Elements of value engineering and systems thinking are used to capture the current needs, functions, structure and behavior of the entity or system in question (organization, team, product etc.). Past and current aspirations are understood, indicators of recent momentum or change are noted (where have we reached, how have we reached and what’s the current mood) and perceived opportunities and challenges are listed. 2. Expanding the context As the first real step towards strategic thinking, the context defined and described in the previous step is expanded along multiple directions. Value Engineering (Value Net, Value Stream) and Systems Thinking (TRIZ, Dependency Structure Matrices (DSM), Mind Maps,Vedic Principles) elements are extensively used. Interesting new directions are marked. 3. Scenario building This section flows from the previous section into the next. Scenarios are are identified and created from the expanded context. The scenarios start with “known” data and quickly meander into the “unknown” – multiple new futures are explored. While the exploration further expands the context, new directions also start to simultaneously emerge. 4. Creating new directions Elements of inventive thinking (TRIZ principles, Use of resources, constraints and contradictions, laws of evolution, Vedic principles) are used to generate new thought directions and to build on the scenarios from the previous section. New needs, functions, structure and behavior are articulated. 5. Selecting key directions Relevant criteria are identified from the expanded context – the criteria reflect expected changes in momentum identified during the course of the exercise. Strategic directions from the previous step are evaluated with respect to the criteria and relatively prioritized using multi-criteria decision making techniques like the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). 6. Charting road maps The most promising and relevant directions are articulated in time and space. Elements of Lean Thinking (Takt Time, Set-based Concurrent Engineering (SBCE)) are used to chartroad maps to implement the devised strategy. |
Story
A ten year old Information Technology Services SME, specializing in Web 2.0 technology offerings, was acquired in 2008, in a recessionary environment that was only getting worse. The acquisition was intended to provide new strategic growth opportunities. New directions had to be conceptualized and explored. The leadership was eager to start from a completely clean slate, unencumbered by the inertia of a successful IT services enteprise.
However, post-acquisition integration was taking longer than expected. Market conditions were imposing tremendous pressures on the topline and margins. All this had made employees jittery - attrition had risen to crisis levels. It was in this context that Crafitti was called upon to facilitate the Design of Enterprise Strategy. Understanding the context We started with a Six Thinking Hats session with the CXO team (the 4 Founders were friends, classmates and colleagues). As usual, the Hats provided interesting insights into fears and aspirations of the leadership team and helped generate a Common Operating Picture, something the team revealed, they had never really had, during the previous 10 years of running the company together! Expanding the context Next we expanded the context of Web 2.0 services using the System Operator (Nine Windows). We involved a larger team - senior leaders, technology specialists, business managers. As we zoomed in and out of space-time, exploring generic and specialized Web 2.0 contexts, several trends emerged from the complex web of data that was getting created. Most interesting were the domain specific trends with niche Web 2.0 product and service offerings. These were earlier, never on the agenda, since the success of services based business models had so far depended on generic and widely applicable skill sets, niche offerings were not seen as scalable. A deeper analysis revealed that many of such hypotheses were no longer true in the Web 2.0 world. We went on to explore and expand the Value Net of the enterprise - customers, suppliers, competitors and complementors. The expanded Value Net brought into focus many new players, invisible earlier, with whom new relationships could be explored. In fact, many of the business units in the larger enterprise were easily accessible complementors, suppliers and customers - an angle which hadnt seemed apparent before the Value Net was sytematically expanded. Creating New Solution Directions Having organized the information (collected and generated) in the form of "evolvable" mind maps, it was easy for interesting problem and opportunity spaces to "emerge" from the expanded context. The next step was to ideate and generate as many ideas as possible. We used a wide array of inventive principles - TRIZ, Lateral Thinking, Vedic Inventive Principles to generate non-regular ideas. These ideas were clustered into 7 stratgeic solution directions. Selecting Key Directions It is never easy to prioritize ideas. How do you evaluate in the present, something that is going to play out in the future? This is especially true for "strategic" directions. Today's parameters may not be relevant and extrapolation is way off target, in most cases. At Crafitti, we have evolved a powerful way to work through this complex problem - we play the ideas through multiple alternative futures (scenarios). In this case, we used two global scenarios - Deep Sea and Coral Reef, metaphors for two possible alternative futures. 3 of the 7 solution directions emerged as the strongest in both scenarios. Creating Roadmaps Finally, we used our proprietory Elemental Balanced Score Card (Fire, Earth, Air and Water) to create detailed, balanced roadmaps to execute the chosen strategic directions. These included near-term goals, planning and allocation of resources and immediate action items for senior leaders across the organization. Removing Execution Glitches Before the roadmaps could be put into action though, necessary resources and mind-share had to be freed from several acute tactical issues - attrition, productivity and the integration process. One of these problems is the subject matter of another case study - Stemming Attrition through Enterprise Social Network Analysis. |
