Category: Strategy

Predicting the future is hard. Predicting the second and third order consequences of your first prediction is much harder – but it is those consequential effects which really drive the wider social, economic and other impact. This post is about what happens when vehicles are electric and autonomous, and teases out potential changes ranging from reduced tobacco consumption (because in the US most tobacco is bought at petrol stations) to changing patterns of land use.

It’s a characteristically interesting read – but the reason for including it here is less to do with the cars and more to do with its being an example of a way of thinking about the future. It uses a challenging assumption as a starting point – in this case that autonomous vehicles will change cities as much as cars have done. It focuses less on the initial change and more on the ripples that causes. And it recognises that this can only be a way of exploring possible futures, not of predicting a specific one.

Ben Evans

A useful diagram with quite a good article wrapped round it. If there is strategic value in organisational alignment, whose responsibility is it for ensuring that that alignment is achieved? Everybody, nobody and the chief executive are all unsatisfactory answers – and the article raises, but doesn’t really attempt to answer, some important questions about how to achieve alignment in a complex organisation under constant pressure to focus on short term issues.

Jonathan Trevor and Barrry Varcoe – Harvard Business Review

Echoing some of the same themes as Simon Wardley’s approach, this post argues the need for strategies to be developed with an understanding of movement and direction, rather than position – and to forge strong connection between the long term question, ‘where do we want to be?’ and the short term question, ‘what are the key choices we face now which will determine whether we are on the trajectory to get there?’

John Hagel – Linkedin

Jeff Bezos has a recipe for success. And since it is a recipe which has brought Amazon to a position of dominance, it is one to be taken seriously. His basic message is to avoid ever reaching day 2  – for him a company is either innovating or dying, and even if the death is long drawn out, the process is close to irreversible. Government organisations tend not to feel the same existential threat (which is not to say they are immune to it, or indeed necessarily less vulnerable to it than Amazon realistically is). But his basic principles – resist proxies, embrace external trends and high-velocity decision making – all seem very relevant.

Jeff Bezos – Amazon

Strategy can be an elusive concept, and it’s tempting to some to conclude that it doesn’t really exist.  This post, written firmly from the perspective of a an agile product owner, takes a simple but quite useful approach of positioning strategy as the layer between the vision or mission, at a greater level of abstraction, and the plan and delivery, at a lower level of abstraction. Perhaps not surprisingly, there’s a strong resonance with some of Simon Wardley’s approach too.

Vince Law – Medium

Strategy is not the production of documents (still less the document produced). It is an evolving response to the situation an entity finds itself in. Delivery is not a strategy, or at least not unless it is based on a high level of situational awareness. Doing what everybody else is doing, or latching on to trends or buzzwords is also not a strategy, since it is necessarily not distinctive to the entity concerned. Simon Wardley has long challenged – or rather scorned – conventional approaches to business strategy development, this video is a good introduction to his way of thinking.

Simon Wardley