Convergent innovationthe same dayAs a sort of thought appetizer, here’s a vignette attempting to intersect…Generating ideas and strategy coherence

Growing dandelions2022A couple of weeks ago, I talked about r/K-selection and mentioned two…r/K selection and innovation2022I’ve been thinking about the different conditions under which innovation emerges, and…I’ve been talking about dandelions and elephants for a while now, and yes, it may seem like I’ve gone a bit nuts. Oh well. It’s just that it’s such a good framing and I keep finding uses for it nearly every day. When applied to ideas, r/K-selection strategies seem to be uncommonly generative.

Framing and solving diverge-converge exercises2021There’s this fairly common technique: the diverge-converge exercise. I first heard about…It all begins with a question: what kind of new ideas do we want to produce? Do we want a collection of different, independent ideas or do we want each idea to improve upon some larger idea?

A strategy and a plan2021A colleague asked me this great question: “What’s the difference between a…What I like about these questions is that they are objective-agnostic. They don’t ask “what do you want to achieve?” or “where do you want to go?” Instead, they require us to choose the means to generate ideas. And strategy is all about the means. In the field where I work, strategy is also about generating new ideas.

Separating cargo from the train2023I’ve been puzzling over a problem that many engineering teams face and…The rewrite count2021As a software engineer, I often see a struggle that both teams…Why AI orchestration2023Getting to that next gate has little resemblance to the maturation process…Here’s the thing. In software engineering (as likely in many technology fields), more often than not, we don’t know what the path to our objective will look like. Heck, most of the time we don’t even have a clear sense of what the objective will look like. This is assuredly not a “let’s plan all steps in advance” process. The fog of uncertainty is right there in front of us.

Growth and control biases2023When we don’t recognize that growth and control are in tension with…Innovation frontier2023First, we need to know what our embodied strategy is. We need…Continuously Integrated Strategy2022Somehow, these amazing ideas don’t seem to extend to strategy. In the…If we are to navigate toward it, we must be prepared to shift course, to adjust, to learn on the spot about the next step, make it, learn again, and so on. And to do this well, we need new ideas. Our strategy must count on us continuously producing these new ideas – and applying them. In this way, my ramblings about dandelions and elephants aren’t fun side metaphors. They are the essence of business.

Embodied Strategy2022I was having a great conversation with a colleague about organizational learning…What the heck is strategy work?2022We turn the mastermind toward frameworks. The key objective of this role…Being Strategic2022What does it mean to be strategic? It is a sort of…Summoning my inner Rumelt and putting things perhaps overly bluntly, an organization can only be effective at setting a strategy and actually following through when it is intentional about creating conditions for generating ideas. While it’s not the only crucial ingredient, the organization that doesn’t have it will suffer from strategic incoherence.

A team may accept as a truism that bottom-up cultures are superior to top-down cultures. And yes, if we are setting out to explore a large space of unknown untapped potential, then we probably want to create conditions for a dandelion strategy. The bottom-up culture has them: individual incentives (Interest), small teams, short-term objectives (Legibility), independent decision-making (Velocity) and non-hierarchical structure and mobility (Access).

Enumerating constraints2021From the bottom, we are supported — and limited — by our…

Caring for elephants2022This is a fairly common occurrence when caring for idea-elephants with our…However, when we’re endeavoring to care for one big idea, we likely want the conditions to encourage the elephant strategy: more structured and predictable organization and incentives (Stability), care and accountability in decision-making (Breadth), comprehensive processes and long-term thinking (Rigor), and concentrated points of organizational control (Power). These are a depiction of the top-down culture.

Nudging Embodied Strategy2022The whole concept of the cone of embodied strategy is a bit…Dandelion or Elephant?2022The discovery of the dandelion/elephant framing was exciting and my fellow FLUX…If we set out to do something that calls for an elephant strategy, yet the culture we have is a bottom-up one, we will have strategically incoherent outcomes (I called them the “pappus elephants” in the previous post). Our bottom-up culture will suddenly snag us like a trap, with coordination headwinds becoming universally felt and recognized. Things that worked really well for us before, like emphasizing individual impact in our incentive structures, will become a source of pain: why are our teammates acting in such a self-interested way?! Well… maybe because that was a good thing when we needed a dandelion strategy?

Vision-oriented and impact-oriented mindsets2022Impact-minded folks tend to fall into the trap of opportunism. When I…Even when the need to pursue a multi-year objective becomes existential, the dandelion conditions will keep blowing us off course: multi-year ideas will be simply swept away by the churn of the quarterly objective-setting and obsessive focus on individual impact. In a dandelion culture, when given a chance to make a dandelion move, most folks will take it. When strategy is incoherent, one can be a superstar while directly contributing to the team’s demise.

Perhaps even more bizarrely, by all accounts of witnesses, these efforts will look like elephants – until they disappear in a puff. It is in everyone’s interest to create a perception that they are indeed operating in an elephant factory, despite all the dandelion moves they are making.

Shadows and Curses2022Even if we’re somehow able to transform ourselves again and recreate favorable…The language frames the story2021Suppose you’ve said to me that “the falling maple leaves whirl in…When caught in this condition inconsistency, the long-term projects within this organization will inevitably find themselves in a weird cycle: set out to do big things, fail to articulate them clearly, struggle to do something very ambitious, get distracted, then quietly discontinue the effort, unable to examine what happened due to the deep sense of shame that follows – only to try again soon thereafter. When underlying conditions allow only dandelion-like moves, trying to choose an elephant strategy is a tough proposition.

Why will this be hard for us?2021I was working on a strategy and helping review another this week,…Dandelion/Elephant Strategy Rubricsix days after, links hereHaving impact in pursuit of elephant strategy means contributing to gaining momentum.…The variables and symptoms might vary, but the equation will remain the same. If they sound at all familiar, consider asking different questions to get to a more productive conversation about incentives, culture, structure, and practices. What are our current conditions for generating new ideas? Do they lean dandelion or elephant? How might they be inconsistent with our desired outcomes?