Preparation for an Uncertain Future

If you are a business leader then the main thing you need is a sustainable and valid strategy - one with a fighting chance of success. One that takes account of complete unknowns.

Success would mean a strategy that inspires all the audiences and the employees alike. One that gives its audiences confidence and integrity. One that’s prepared for the uncertain future but capable of being converted into tangible, positive outcomes, requires a number of things. We’ve simplified them into nine areas.

There needs to be ‘certainty of ambition’ - because that’s what should be driving the strategic direction. It starts with having purpose and that purpose has to be brought to life together with clearly stated aims. Definitions vary but they should be expressed as goals or objectives. They are the things that signal clear intention.

Ask yourselves these questions:

1. What is your purpose? - Something that you and your consumers will feel good about.

2. What goals/objectives have you set yourself to support and deliver this purpose?

3. How unique and different is it - in the grand scheme of things?

4. What is the timeline for this?

5. What do you specifically expect to achieve between now and the final outcome?

Clarity over what good means - do you know what does good look like? The answer to this will be a mix of tangible and intangible values. Values that engage, inspire and unite - tangible because there’s specific outcomes and measurement.

1. How would you know you were being successful?

2. What specific outcomes would you expect to realise?

3. How would you measure this?

4. What does the future look like if you are successful?

5. Who are the beneficiaries?

A meaningful appreciation of the wider context. 'Meaningful' means sufficient depth of understanding to ensure that our eyes are wide open, that all the realities are recognized and the dynamics/influences are identified and definable.

1. What is most important to understand in order to be successful?

2. How prepared for the future do you feel - specifically your capability to be successful within it?

3. How well do you understand the issues/challenges that are impacting your endeavour?

4. With regard to your competitors - how many others are also engaged in a similar purpose/ambition?

5. What are the biggest influencers for you and the work you will undertake?

6. How complex a challenge do you think you are undertaking?

A mix of fact and assumption. Nothing is ever certain - especially when it comes to being a leader/innovator and when it comes to the future. It’s natural therefore that any decisions made may well be based on a mix - where facts may be sparce, tenuous or limited by bias. Certain assumptions and hunches may be more reliable. In both options the supporting reasoning is critical

1. What criteria will drive decision making?

2. How are these prioritised/ranked in importance?

3. What are the main variables?

4. What assumptions will you need to make?

5. How confident are you in your assumptions?

6. What are the most important/valuable information sources you will rely on?

Having an opinion on how to take the strategy forward is important. One that can be backed up with a strong rationale and has been reached through an objective process that shows decision quality

1. What options are you considering?

2. How well does each align to your objectives and decision criteria?

3. What specific achievements/targets will these options help deliver?

4. Which measures will you apply to validate successful delivery?

5. What responses will you have to challenges that materialise?

Commitment to invest as necessary to achieve the right outcomes. Investment means time, attention, capability, knowledge, resource, budget - whatever those implications suggest is needed. Commitment is necessary from the leadership and the workforce - everyone who has a stake in the success of the strategy, including external stakeholders.

1. Does your strategy/plan have the commitment/endorsement of the leadership team

2. Have all key stakeholders been engaged?

3. Have the workforce been fully engaged?

4. Is the strategy/plan completely clear to everyone who has a part to play?

5. Is everyone who has a part to play fully equipped and invested in its success?

A viable plan and approach for implementing the strategy. Both of which have to be able to recognize and adapt to changes in dynamics and context. Plans are realistic and focused on staged outcomes. At key stages expectations and targets are reset to reflect what has been achieved and how that impacts next steps.

1. Do you have well defined initiatives with owners who have the capability and support to drive the work?

2. Do your milestones align with the outcomes you expect to realise along the way?

3. Is your current plan a true reflection of what you intend to do?

4. Is it easy to keep the plan current?

An effective feedback mechanism. Effective means that it is applied and provides real evidence of impact realised, uncovers issues and flaws in the strategy, revisits assumptions, captures key insights and helps to identify where and how to make changes to the plans

1. How will you track progress and changes that need to be made?

2. How will lessons/insights be captured?

3. Are your assumptions still valid?

4. Are you able to assess the implications of any change across the entire plan?

5. How will you know if the mindset and culture has shifted enough?

If you manage a business then you run like crazy to stay in touch.

Leadership covers a lot of territory and it’s only getting more complex. Whatever the challenge or opportunity every business needs to develop a plan. The plan has to consider all the facts. From this decisions need to be made. This plan is often called the strategy. 

Multiple Paths

The right path means the business has to think hard. We’ve developed a series of different assessments to start this - think of them as the different (important) lenses on the challenge.

The questions we ask have been developed and organised into ‘sets’ over the years. They are applied (through certain perspectives) and the questions arise in multiple lenses.

The answers to these questions give us real indication into the health, the maturity, the capability and the appetite of the business. These ‘indications’ give us a direct link to the imperatives the business needs to understand to develop its future strategy. 

Consumerism

Consumerism is an interesting word.

It's synonymous with retail but it impacts everything and every industry sector in some way. It’s been taken by society, business and politicians to be something either to defend or to be cautious of.

Everyone is a consumer.

We all consume. The degree we are cajoled (into it) or delighted to be part of it is in itself a complex set of dynamics. Consumerism has also come to define an unhealthy addiction to (need to) own more stuff - in a time of abundance and that has obvious pitfalls and traps.

More centrally though, the idea is that all societies are built on trade. All businesses need to be aware of their customers and many of them rely on consumerism of some sort.

This dynamic ensures that communities survive.

The ‘profit’ within that trade has led to more civilised and meaningful societies. Without consumerism, we would not have the benefit of the products and services that fulfil the needs of modern society.

Consumerism is all around us.

Consumerism has come to mean the science associated with how to buy and sell and create attraction and then some sense of loyalty or addiction to certain brands.

And for brands, this is a wholesale/wide-scale and very generic reference to everything that can be bought or sold.

Technologies

Technologies are many and varied.

Most people’s perception of the word refers to our handheld mobiles and our computers that live on our desktops and in our homes. But in reality, technologies are all around us - from biotechnology to agricultural technology to space technology to automotive technology and so on.

Virtually everything (and everybody) is being disrupted and transformed at this time. Scientists and engineers developing these technologies are doing so to automate, improve, make progress and reduce the manual nature of many tasks that have historically been done by human beings.

Technology in itself is not that interesting to the vast majority of people. This is not true in business where it is a massive cost. Business is therefore wary of investment in such a time of dramatic change.

However, this is now the situation as normal.

The rate of change and the ability of technology to disrupt everything is now a constant.

In the majority of our assignments, the technology backdrops will represent a powerful tidal wave of almost uncontrollable power crashing through every industry and every business on earth.

It will be those who can embrace and leverage technologies, in general, he will survive.

Work

Most of us work.

Most people have a trade or a job or a role to fulfil.

We all know about work. Businesses are under significant pressure to improve the capability of the people at a time when they are also considering how to automate large parts of their business in the name of effectiveness and efficiency.

We do not have a crystal ball that it is highly likely that large numbers of people will need to quickly learn new skills as technology enables them to be freer to do higher-value work that the machines simply cannot do at least for the foreseeable future.\

The ability of the workforce to influence how fast or how slow an organisation can transform (and take advantage of the new world) is significant.

Work isn’t always rewarding for everybody and these paradigms are significant as leadership teams consider how to educate migrate and replace skills in order to stay competitive and be relevant in the future.

Society

Society is very local.

Societies are very different and complex wherever you are in the world. They are made up of everything. Business politics cultures religions heritage education Systems laws and 1000 other things.

We have come to think of society has a tangible thing but it is really the sum of myriad systems and a merry and dynamics.

Society is not a thing it is a collection of subtle nuances of and historical perceptions and perspectives of individuals who are more or less enfranchised by each system. This causes many tensions and many great opportunities and countless cycles and pendulum swings that make the society what it is.

Fundamentally society is built on trade politics, media, history and the wishes and appreciations of the individuals that inhabit it. Societies are heavily impacted by neighbouring societies and global trends. In the current world. Society either bends or reacts to the threats and challenges of which there are many.

Surrounding it all are the global threats and opportunities that society has and human beings seemingly impossible challenge of becoming a collective force to combat the sometimes sinister/self-serving threats and abuse of the few in power against the interests of the many.

Marketplace

In many ways, the marketplace is where everything comes together. It is the one vignette where it would be possible to see the effects of a thriving or otherwise society, the impacts of a marauding technology or two, the work being done by the citizens and workers of the many businesses and The trade that is going on between everybody and every entity to release the currencies that enable the human beings to operate and survive.

Unsurprisingly given the phenomena of the digital marketplace is now not only a physical concept but also a digital and virtual reality. This has given rise to countless examples of major disruption to traditional. Amazon eBay Airbnb Uber and many more purely digital businesses have been able to make global multi-billion dollar businesses that have effectively replaced our high streets.

The Marketplace is a vital concept for humans.

The puck is headed to a place most existing ‘brands’ are not geared up to exploit.

Marketing is wrongly associated with advertising and agencies. For us it means the business made visible to its audience.

Effective business will only come from those that are fluent enough in the new skills/tools to exploit that idea. They will have to be skilled and forensic enough to know what to do with them. So to us that suggests three things - a recruitment strategy that understands the meaning of effective marketing (below), a culture that drives and thrives on diversity and leadership that inspires and then gets out of the way of creativity.

Another (simpler) answer would be to have everyone far more skilled in what ‘marketing’ is and what efficiency means. But that’s a little simplistic. What that will take is leadership, focus and determination to spend quality time working at it. And there’s the challenge.

Few people are well practised in the kind of marketing that consumers expect from their loved brands. Especially when conquesting for new consumers. This means most marketing organisations are struggling to educate their own teams fast enough to exploit the power of the new technologies and tools available to today’s marketer.

Efficient and Effective Marketing nowadays is built on going beyond the platitudes and language and engineering the marketing function as if it meant life and death - because it does. From choosing which resources/capabilities are required to having a creative mindset and from knowing the business/brand strategy to having the correct leadership and skills in place.

These days we consumers want to understand what a brand stands for before we are prepared to be associated with it. We need to deeply understand the role we play in people’s lives and why. And if we don’t play a role why not - and what clues exist to alter that state. These would be highly valuable insights.

• Insight - Insight is an overused term (sadly) because it’s the right word. What is that tiny crumb of information that changes the decision and the future forever. Insights in marketing can only come from information about customers. Their behaviours, attitudes, habits, propensities and willingness to be persuaded.

• Persuasion - Persuasion tends to come from a belief that something will be better or will benefit them. And that’s learning - learning is something that comes with experience. And while the idea isn’t in any sense new - creating experiences has long been heralded as the future of marketing. It’s also probably the hardest thing to get right at scale because one person’s good experience is another’s nightmare.

• Experiences - We hear fancy phrases such as ‘experience-led’ as an approach to more integrated marketing. Creating experiences at scale because habits are individual things and they are becoming increasingly fragmented, both online and offline. Great competition and more access to information generally has created a new and savvier generation of consumers.

• Test & Learn - Creating a place where consumers can experience a brand allows the brand to study and experiment far more with what does and doesn’t work. Off the back of that comes far more data - and data can then be used to scale the result - but always in local contexts. This is a major element of maturity in companies - the ability to share core data but make that locally useful. First share and then localise.

Two things most businesses are pretty poor at.

• Marketing Frameworks - This ties back to the new frameworks for marketing - having a single minded and big core idea (point of view/purpose) that can scale globally, knowing who and how to get that out across all the connections we need, know how to stay engaged over the longer term - and when we have the attention be able to create relevant content, know what actions to take and deliver meaningful storytelling. Underpin all of that with the tools and techniques, skills and capabilities at the enterprise level.

• The Ability To Tell Stories - Storytelling is essential. And as deep into the funnel as possible. Increasingly new consumers need to see evidence of the reason why they have bought into the brand - that means quickly moving beyond the fancy headline and marketing narrative and into proof. It really has to come to life.

• Trust & Belief - This new world has proven that trust can be superficial and it’s easy to tell/spin a great story but if it doesn’t get backed up the fallout can be disastrous all over the world in seconds.

• Brands With Integrity - More and more businesses have started to evolve from pure marketing and awareness to meaningful relationships and actual engagement. This means developing real world occasions that can alter individuals opinion through real time experiences. Enabling consumers to actually associate with the ideas inside the brand.

• Creativity - This all takes a whole new form of creativity. New ideas and mindsets can be formed and shifts in attitude start to happen. This will in turn create new waves of referral and recognition amongst their networks and so it goes on.

• Innovation In Markets - By understanding the habits and behaviours of real people new connections and adjacencies can be seen that lead to new ways to think about partnerships, products and services that relate far more to the consumers.

• Creative Mentality - To a large degree this becomes about how the business thinks and operates in the new world - it means creating a platform that weaves all the different parts together and integrate around experience. It redefines how we speak about the Omnichannel. So it’s no longer about simply which TV commercials we have running but how what that evokes plays out in the complete experience of our brand.

• Benchmarking Data - Key to understanding anything in marketing is benchmarking by building an index of measurability. One best practice for globalising a brand is to use an agency holding group (per region/marketplace) and making them responsible for bringing together all of the resources in an integrated way. This enables meaningful sharing the data and getting at the insight of what works.

• Reorganisation For Marketing Efficiency - It also means the business changes accordingly to support the new way - roles and job descriptions need to be realigned. The client marketing folk need to understand and align alongside the more complex platform in place.

We keep thinking!

 All Things Considered

Making things happen is simple compared to making things happen and then stick.

“Or scale, or grow, or inspire audiences, or lead, or change, or transform or shelve legacy investments. Or get the leadership aligned or prepared to think differently - or agree to solve the real challenge…”

You’ve Guessed It. In Business Nothing Comes Easy

That’s because we’re not good at making all the parts of the problem make sense - all at the same time.

By that I mean we tend to find something fairly obvious - something clear enough to handle and then fix that.

It’s usually wrong and doesn’t work.

That’s because if everyone thinks it’s obvious and clear enough to handle then you will get a lot of help.

We are very attracted to the effects of things and deterred by the causes.

It’s also the case that when you find the thing that’s behind the thing - then you are going to be on your own for a while.

You are the in the minority. You can see it doesn’t work.

You may even think it’s pretty obvious but despair that others can’t see the bigger picture.

We think about all these things better as visuals.

1. Every Business Challenge Starts With A Clear Picture Of What Good Should Look Like:

Pressing on with any challenge without everyone agreeing with what it is is simply insane.

We’ve proven that working collaboratively to build a ‘picture’ of what that is and what it means to all the different constituents makes all the difference.

Having the clear picture allows teams to defines the shared meaning.

Having the shared meaning ensures that everyone is working toward the same end.

That sounds smart but it’s still shocking how few programs of work start out that way.

2. Once There’s A Clear Intention/Purpose Those Headed There Need A Shared Blueprint:

That picture of the future makes it possible to understand the requirements for solving it or heading there.

It makes no difference what the challenge is.

We always describe that as the ‘exam question.

From that we can wrap the business or situational analysis around it.

3. In Addition To This We Need To Know Who Else Is Involved:

Very few businesses ‘do it’ on their own.

These days partners, experts, stakeholders of all kinds are leveraged to great effect

They make the result more effective and efficient in every dimension.

5. You Can’t Go There On Your Own - It Has To be Collaborative & Cocreative:

It’s not that often that someone, especially someone leading one department can make anything meaningful happen overall on their own.

In fact that tends to guarantee that the wrong problems get solved really well.

Being co-creative and collaborative through impartial and objective facilitation and visualisation helps enormously.

6. Making It Stick Requires Different Tools & Techniques:

Sustaining interventions is hard.

If you have collaboration and ownership the chances of making things stick rise.

If you can get ownership and the behaviour and motivation to use some of the new technologies and tools then so much the better.

Sustainability is never one thing.

Not once have we heard a client say they needed another ‘agency’ or ‘consulting’ firm. But we always hear they want a different one.

And in search of the different one we’ve yet to be shown a perfect model, method or network. Let’s face it that’s unlikely for many reasons. Clients always wish the external firms would do more quality work. They wish they understood them better, were more proactive or generally more ‘this’ or ‘that’.

Many clients are toying with doing more with in-house capability. It’s easy to say that the model is wrong but what replaces it?

In an ideal world - a perfect relationship would have the following:

• World class creativity and innovation

• Infinite access to the best skills and talent - as needed

• High quality outcome in every business dimension

• Guaranteed results

• Fully flexible (sometimes subscription) cost models

• Proactive guidance and insight

• Seamless and confidential communications

• Globally scalable

• Always secure and zero risk

But we live in the real world.

External firms are in business themselves. They can’t guarantee anything, they are competing for talent. They can’t invest enough to know enough about all the dimensions and skills required to do it all. Clients aren’t ready to work with the firms in order for them to stay with them through how it needs to change.

“Leaders in business deserve to move with the times. But external firms need clients who understand that there are things are mutual…”

• Clients need to get value for their investments - and firms deserve clarity on the value expected. Not a vague wish list or unattainable metric.

• Clients need proactive guidance on how to avoid risk - and firms need the right support, commitment and investment to build meaningful ways into this crystal ball.

• Clients need firms that understand the bigger picture and dynamics at play to ensure they are given the correct advice - firms need to invest in the skills and talent required to do so and that doesn’t play well with subscription models.

• Clients need forms that can scale local excellence to global delivery - firms need clients that realise what that would actually take and work openly to transform accordingly.

Investment

Clients need to appreciate several things when it comes to investment. You need the same investment outside as you to build the resource inside. The firms need to understand that they are hopeless at explaining the reality of what they need.

Scale

Scale is a given in a world where shareholder value drives every conversation. And while that destroys pretty much every business in the long run it’s a current reality. It doesn’t need the same sized sized/shaped external firm.

Leverage

Leverage is now a recognised art form. Firms, in the future might apply an acquisition model with success - and then fail by smothering it to death. Talent leaves shortly followed by the clients.

Common/Uncommon Models

Different firms that deploy common frameworks and great leadership can deliver global results. Separate/different parts of the mechanism work and grow according to their own speed. They work in the local contexts by completely different sets of rules to each other.

It makes no difference who owns them. The basis is that discipline and rigour gets applied to governance and choreography.

Diversity

Diversity is starting to break through as a value. Although bruised by false starts, it’s the powerhouse of creativity and ingenuity. Next into this fray will come the value of experience and age.

“It’s ridiculous that society has shunned the experience of older people. It’s the old of mind that need to retire and they can be 25 or 30 years old…”

Longevity

Ageism hurts business. It hurts the quality of work. It hurts the clients who could value the insight and it affects the culture of businesses in general. Experience should inform strategy. Strategy informs marketing and that is the lifeblood of the brands. Brands have tremendous influence. They shape the minds of customers and markets and that shapes society.

“Age, diversity, creativity is what makes our lives rich. When these qualities are absent our world is the poorer for it. In the future brands who ignore this will be far less relevant…”

Creativity

It’s obvious that insight and creativity gets tapped wherever it's found. Many businesses in the creative industries, think that ideas emerge from young people. Not only wrong but dumb. They are losing crucial competency and long term capabilities.

Experience that informs breakthrough ideas and great strategy comes from experience. It's the difference and spontaneity that comes from different perspectives.

“I’ve heard more ideas emerge from a diverse and widespread aged folk than any number of 20 somethings.”

Health Warning - The Inappropriate Pursuit Of Efficiencies

 ‘Efficiency cuts the grass of the mind to its roots.’ - Virginia Woolf 

Placing efficiency over other values can be a mistake . It can create  a lapse in ethical, political, personal, or professional judgment. Some human or civic interactions thrive when they’re deliberate and erode when they’re sped up. Efficiency isn’t always value neutral.

Efficient & Effective Business

Business is now indistinguishable from digitalisation, marketing, culture, operation and leadership. And being good at these things is essential to remain in business. Mastery of them is vital if sustainable success is the metric.

Success requires mastery of all the dimensions listed in the toolkit below.

Efficient & Effective Marketing

Nowadays the professional business knows marketing and brand is central to its success. Brands get built by going way beyond platitudes and language. They get built by engineering the marketing function as if it meant life and death - because it does.

“To win. You need a framework. Knowing which creative resource you need and why. A creative mindset and a clear brand strategy. The correct leadership and the right skills in place. An aligned operational model...”

Marketing In A World Of Reducing Attention Spans

There's a deafening noise within popular content.

It’s driven by increasing production of information of all sorts. There's ridiculous competition for attention and the consumption of content. It's resulting in a more rapid exhaustion of our limited attention spans.

The competition is for novelty. The turnover rates increase. Individual topics receiving shorter intervals of our collective attention.

Consumers want to understand what a brand stands for before associating with it. Brands need to understand the role it plays in people’s lives and why. And if it doesn’t play a role why not - and what clues exist to alter that state. These would all be valuable insights.

Some Of The Tools In The Survival Toolkit:

• Having The Insight - Insight is an overused term, That’s sad because it’s the right word. What is that tiny crumb of information that changes the decision and the future forever. Insights in marketing can only come from information about customers. Their behaviours, attitudes, habits, propensities and willingness to be persuaded.

• Mastery Of Persuasion - Persuasion comes from a belief that something will be better or will benefit us. For a brand that requires learning - learning is something that can only come with experience. This idea isn’t in any sense new - creating experiences has long been suggested as the future of marketing. It’s also the hardest thing to get right - especially at scale. One person’s good experience is another’s nightmare.

• Create Real Experiences - We hear fancy phrases these days. Phrases such as ‘experience-led’ - meaning an approach to more integrated marketing. Creating experiences at scale is hard. Habits are individual things and they're fragmented both on and offline. Increased competition with more access to information has created a savvier generation of consumers.

• Test & Learn - Creating a place where consumers can experience a brand allows the brand to experiment with what does and doesn’t work. Off the back of that comes more data - and data gets used to scale the result - but always in local contexts. The ability to share data is a major element of maturity in companies. Especially when they make that useful locally. First share and then localise. Two things most businesses are often pretty poor at.

• Innovation In Markets - By understanding the habits of real people we see new connections and adjacencies. They lead us to identify new ways to think about partnerships, products and services. And these then allow us to relate far more to our consumers.

• Having A Creative Mentality - To a large degree this is about how the business thinks and operates in the new world. It means creating a platform that weaves all the different parts together. Everything integrates around experience. It redefines how we speak about the Omnichannel. It is no longer about which TV commercials we have running. It's how (what that evokes) plays out in the complete ‘experiencing’ of our brand.

• Benchmarking Data - Key to understanding anything in marketing is building an index of measurability. Creating a benchmark. A best practice for globalising a brand is to use an agency holding group (per region/marketplace). This makes it easier to govern and execute. It makes them responsible for bringing together the resources in an integrated way. This enables meaningful sharing the data and getting at the insight of what works.

• Reorganisation For Marketing Efficiency - Reorganising this way means the business changes in line to support the new model. Roles and job descriptions get realigned. The client marketing folk have to follow. They must understand and align in synch with the more complex platform in place.

We’ve spent the last two decades helping clients turn challenges into opportunities. And after that getting these opportunities to become realities.

“In business we have many different ways to work but far fewer ways to think. As a result a lot of work gets done that isn’t creating the value it should. Businesses are most likely solving the wrong problems really well…”

For 20 years we’ve been perfecting a solution to this. We’ve been passionate about what works and what doesn’t. We’ve created quite a lot of magic along the way. And we are still learning.

“A consistent approach has emerged. It doesn’t matter what the challenge, goal or outcome is…”

This is our simple mantra:

1. Ask better and better questions.

2. Make sure there’s clarity and accuracy over the challenge.

3. Dig deep early so as to understand the real situation.

4. Make sure the best available and diverse brains are available to work on the thinking.

5. Always work visually and for as long as is needed so that everyone sees the truth

6. Always work collaboratively and throughout so that everyone is properly engaged.

7. Arm and equip those most closely involved so they can fully execute.

8. Stay as engaged as necessary to make sure the work reaches its conclusion.

We Work Visually.

Visually - it’s important to explain what that means.

• What it’s not - it’s not note taking or recording. It’s not sketch notes or mind-mapping. Click to see the difference!

• We call it Structured Visual Thinking™

• What it is - Visualisation is the bringing of valuable information to life in a graphical form.

• Meaningful Storytelling - Our visualisations are central to wider awareness and engagement. Business relies on our ability to tell stories about the realties, the opportunities and the future.

• More Engaging Communication - We live in a video and immersive world. We all communicate all the time. Sharing ideas between stakeholders and with customers requires grabbing attention, creating interest and causing action.

• Informing And Education The Enterprise - Not everyone can be present during the creation of plans. Visual deliverables immediately enable the sharing and appreciation of these vital conversations and strategies.

"When data and stories are used together, they resonate with audiences on both an intellectual and emotional level." - Jennifer L. Aaker Stanford University Professor of Marketing

Why Is Visualisation So Valuable?

Business leaders have limited bandwidth and complex challenges which makes visualisation powerful.

And for many reasons:

• Visualising makes discussion points in conversations or inferred through written materials very real.

• Visualising the complex parts of business in logical and structured ways ‘realises’ hitherto hidden, unforeseeable/unknown realities, challenges, gaps or ideas.

“Excellence in visualisation consists of ‘complex ideas communicated with clarity, precision, and efficiency.’” - Professor Edward Tufte (Yale) Statistician

How We Think About Being Visual

• To achieve excellence in business strategy we are in constant pursuit of the best information (data) we can get.

• Our approach is based on designing frameworks based on logic - the more ‘complete’ the information the better.

• There’s a big difference between being present during the creation of something and simply being part of the audience.

• Creating simplicity is always a theme but by the same token so is meaning.

• There is a direct relationship between the time spent being engaged and seeing the meaning.

Meaning emerges through an increased degree of appreciation - this requires understanding the materials. This is as true of purely verbal artefacts as it is of any comprehensive visualisation.

Engaging In Visualisation

A journey is involved. It has to start with plain language. We build narratives that are engaging and use plain words. Or visuals of course!

“Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed.

Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography.

If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” - Steve Jobs

Pressure. That’s What Stands Out

Whatever size, type or age of your business right now the pressures are the same — increase performance at the lowest cost and without risk. Do that while ensuring investment (or revenue) and avoid being disrupted, outspent or dismissed.

“If you are a business leader you will be answering a bunch of irritating questions on top of having to figure that out. And when you have figured it out it will all change again…”

• Where are we headed?

• What is the result we want?

• What are the challenges we will need to solve?

• What are the opportunities we should exploit?

• How do we get there? — And when?

• How did we get here?

• What needs to change? — And why?

• What don’t I know?

• How do I take my people with me?

• Do I have the capability to get it done?

• Do we have the capacity to get it done?

• How will we know it was the right decision(s)?

“In reality strategy is actually very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell.” — Jack Welch

Results = Execution

As Sir Winston Churchill said, and he knew, that results are pretty important too. We can’t get results without doing work. Implementation. Delivery. Execution. Action.

That’s the IDEA

The challenge for business, especially in more connected and digitalised businesses is to execute as one. It demands a lot more than luck. It calls for weapons-grade orchestration. Dependencies exist everywhere — and the more complex the business — the more dependencies there are.

But First Strategy & Ideally - Strategy On Purpose

We are approaching the third decade of the 21st Century. In the western world right now it can feel like we are going backwards. We feel like we are headed towards a less civilised society.

“The greatest punishment for being unwilling to rule is being ruled by someone worse than oneself.” — Socrates

There’s a weird tension in the world today because, at the same time as the bonkers, business leaders are starting to promote more ethical standards and sustainable ambitions. They even have a name for it — the purpose driven business.

“Creating value for humanity should not be an afterthought but a core business strategy.” — Anonymous

This concept raises more questions for the business leader when it comes to strategy. How do we become more ethical, sustainable and environmentally conscious — and stay in business?

• We, the consumers can vote not to buy products that display arrogance, disrespect and waste. We are.

• We can march and protest publically about flagrant abuse of land and people’s resources. We are.

• And we can put pressure on businesses to rethink their supply chains to remove inequity, slavery and unethical practice. We are.

But there’s no doubt we could be doing a whole lot more. And we must.

And In The Future?

The ‘future’ is always going to focus the attention and preoccupy people’s minds. It will always be an important construct. It’s powerful because it forces the business to think. It has the ability to inspire or strike fear.

Of course, we never reach the future — we can’t ever determine or guarantee it. But nonetheless imagining what it looks like and how we get there is an important tool for the business.

“I believe that people make their own luck by great preparation and good strategy.” — Jack Canfield

Being prepared for the future is the new strategy. It’s deeply useful. It means being ready for what may come because you cannot predict what that might be. Being prepared sits right up there with having some idea what you want it to look like.

The Preparedness Mindset

Being prepared begins with having the right mentality — the mindset to think that way. A state of mind. A mindset of preparedness is a rarity. And gaining one isn’t as simple as it sounds.

The Mind. It Matters

It may sound obvious but being strategic is a critical mindset. Mindsets take years to develop. Mindsets come from experience (failure) objectivity (noticing) contextual awareness (consciousness) and patience (determination).

“Strategy is style of thinking, a conscious and deliberate process, an intensive implementation system, the science of insuring future success.” — Pete Johnson

They will have witnessed countless situations where a lack of preparedness has caused consequences. That’s how our experience shapes us in general — and how minds become set. How we have experienced, and as a result learned anything, is never the same journey for everyone. What happens is that after a while a series of random situations causes us to have an epiphany of some sort.

Be Prepared - Strategic Or Tactical? That Is Not The Question.

A strategy is what emerges once all the questions above (and more) have been answered. And annoyingly, there’s never a right or wrong answer to them. Some decisions are plain stupid but mostly it comes down to whether there’s a better or worse outcome. And it’s hard to forecast.

The answers to every question can be tactical or strategic. If tactical they will be short term but important. If strategic then longer term and likely more significant in terms of investment.

“Without strategy, execution is aimless. Without execution, strategy is useless.” — Morris Chang

Being strategic can be life or death for leaders. Sometimes even more important than that. Longer term thinking usually (but not always) drives more sustainable and successful outcomes. But because the pressure is always on — the ‘quick wins’ are always a feature.

We have to do stuff.

“Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.” — Peter Drucker

Hey Language. We Have A Problem

Recognising that the business needs to change course is good. But it’s often the start of fresh problems.

Many things lead to the need for change.

• The business realises it’s at risk.

• Innovation gets hailed as a requirement.

• New leadership demands it.

• A transformation program gets launched.

• The strategy dictates it — all of the above.

Whatever it gets called the definition of the challenge is often the villain.

“Sound strategy starts with having the right goal.” — Michael Porter

Because business is so interconnected (and interdependent) any change at all can be disproportionately significant. Transformation means reinventing/redesigning the business. If not well defined and understood then beware all who enter here.

“When your headlights aren’t on, the best rearview mirror available isn’t likely to improve your driving.” — Marth Rogers

It’s Not Hard To Comprehend

We are all consumers.

We buy stuff. Especially from brands that get us. If they get us then it’s clear. Everything they do shows up in our space (face) in the right way, with the right message and at the right time.

If they don’t then they need to fix that.

“You have to be fast on your feet and adaptive or else a strategy is useless.” — Charles de Gaulle

It’s Not Easy To Fix

It means the business must innovate (change). Whatever it takes. Quite likely a total redesign of how they show up.

It will likely take an overhaul of their product or service. It will probably take a big shift in how they make me feel about my purchase — long after my purchase. This is a big deal.

“Always start at the end before you begin.” — Robert Kiyosaki

Business needs to do this consistently. Especially if they intend to stay ahead of all the others that are also vying for my attention.

The Devils. The Details

A vision without a strategy is an illusion. Aiming to achieve it without a plan is a delusion.

Making Plans

The plan is what you get when you’ve made all the decisions you can. You know you have one because you are able to draw it on a board with sufficient belief that your audience looks excited. Or scared to death that they no longer have an excuse to go deliver on it.

“A vision and strategy aren’t enough. The long-term key to success is execution each day. Every day.” — Richard M. Kovacevich

The challenge with making plans from strategic thinking is deciding what not to do. This fact will probably disappoint many people on the team. But that’s why Leadership is a lonely place.

“You cannot be everything to everyone. If you decide to go north, you cannot go south at the same time.” — Jeroen De Flander

To execute the plan (strategy) there needs to be a plan. And people to execute. You wouldn’t believe how often neither of them exists.

We appreciate that people find plans tough. That’s because they tend to be poorly formed. Most are opaque and impenetrable. Why can’t they be inspiring and written by humans? Getting a strategy in place demands simplicity and that demands inspiring leaders. You wouldn’t believe how often neither of them exists.

Differentiation Through Strategy

A successful strategy is always easy to spot. The business is being successful. You can see it in the people, in the culture and in the numbers. Successful strategies involve being different from the crowd. To gain attention from our consumers and that’s not easy.

“It’s not the customer’s job to know what they want” — Steve Jobs.

Different doesn’t come with instructions. You have to make it happen yourself. It requires creativity (in all its forms and leadership. Woven throughout this is sheer hard work and investment — time and money.

“Strategy is about setting yourself apart from the competition. It’s not a matter of being better at what you do — it’s a matter of being different at what you do.” — Michael Porter

Being completely different in marketing terms means being unique. As we’ve become more creative and innovative that’s increasingly rare. It’s where huge returns live. It’s the gold standard of success.

Decision Quality

Strategy can often be made up of a set of tactics. These are the decisions we made earlier. If they weren’t decisions then the strategy will fail. Intentions are not decisions. Tactics have to add up to the aim of the strategy or we have to make different decisions.

“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” Sun Tzu

Decisions are those things that are irrevocable. Otherwise, you will confuse the hell out of everyone. A decision is final. If it wasn’t a decision you just declared an intention. Make up your mind.

“Strategy is a fancy word for coming up with a long-term plan and putting it into action.” — Ellie Pidot

The Disruption Thing

Disruption. It’s that situation where a smaller (typically) company (with fewer resources) successfully challenges an established business or idea.

“A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.” — Michael LeBoeuf

Incumbent businesses tend to sit back and watch. They tend to focus more on improving their products and services. They are stuck in a way — focussing on their demanding and profitable customers.

Disrupters exceed the needs of some segments and ignore the needs of others. Entrants that prove disruptive begin by successfully targeting those overlooked segments.

“Failure is nothing more than a chance to revise your strategy.” — Anonymous

Strategy Defined

The word strategy gets flung about with abandon. It may be better to abandon the word itself but I don’t have an alternative that works. Plan? Direction?

What’s A Strategy For?

1. ​To set direction and priorities:​ A strategy is needed because it sets the direction and establishes priorities for the organization. It defines the organisation’s view of success and prioritizes the activities that will make this view a reality. The strategy will help everyone know what they should be working on, and what they should be working on first. Without a clearly defined and articulated strategy, all kinds of decisions will be made that undermines our priority initiatives — the ones that will drive the highest success will be given secondary treatment.

2. ​To get everyone on the same page​: If people are working to achieve different aims, or going in different directions, then we have failed on our strategy. With a clearly defined strategic direction, all parts of the operation can work towards a common outcome. Everyone moves together to achieve the organization’s goals.

3. ​To simplify decision-making​: The absence of strategy often signals trouble. It makes it very hard to say no to new ideas or potential initiatives. Our strategy must prioritise all the activities necessary for success. Priorities make it easier to say no to distracting initiatives.

4. ​To drive alignment​: Most organisations have hard-working people putting their best efforts into areas that have little to no effect on strategic success. This is because their activities aren’t aligned with the priorities.

5. ​To communicate the message​: Strategy can often be confused with Vision or Mission — our strategy is clear — it is the plan that means we will achieve our aims and intentions. We must make this explicit so that there’s no doubt or risk around our intentions. If the strategy isn’t down on paper and hasn’t been communicated thoroughly then it’s likely that few people are acting on it.

Leaders Have Choices To Make

A big one is whether to act in advance to challenges going on around them - or wait until forced.

Put another way. They could address the challenge or watch as the competition and opportunity flashes past.

For serious leaders this is the day job.

We Were Leaders Ourselves

We knew from direct experience that the job was seriously tough.

We tried the expensive ‘outsourced’ methods and consulting firms. Our people didn’t own the results. It didn’t work.

We needed ways that engaged and inspired us. We wanted the great thinking but we also needed to own the result.

We wanted to know what and how to execute.

The tools and techniques we needed to make better choices didn’t exist - we had to build them ourselves.

And they had to be rigorous, they had to deliver.

We saw the power of visual, collaborative and more engaging methods.

We needed the techniques to make genuine impact and get rapid results.

Making good strategic decisions had to be smarter and more inclusive than the traditional methods.

We needed them to inspire and generate creativity as well as be strategically smart.

We created Structured Visual Thinking™ - It’s our underlying philosophy.

ONE: We Deconstruct The Situation

Because it’s really critical to get inside the challenge and know what’s happening.

We apply tests and ‘scans’ of the current organisation.

In this way we can get an early sense of the situation through the eyes and perspectives of those most closely associated with the reality.

Only by doing that is it possible to understand the whole picture as a ‘system’ and therefore do the right things.

TWO: We Understand The ‘Real’ Opportunity

We visualise the conversations that allow us to build this picture.

We ensure that we are creating together because that helps everyone make sense of it in the same way.

This approach has the power to align, identify misunderstandings and spot the gaps.

It generates fresh new thinking and enables everyone to properly see the work that’s needed to be done in the future.

THREE: We Reconstruct For The Future

Working collaboratively means that everyone sees their role and ‘place’ in the system. They own it.

Together the team can reassemble the future far more meaningfully and we enable them to share the future workload much more intelligently.

FOUR: We Arm The Team To Execute Until It’s Done

The result of all the work above is visual and tangible. Frameworks and tools.

These emerge in artefacts, blueprints and a new narrative and language.

Because they built it all themselves that have significant confidence and fluency in them. That makes an enormous difference.

The team can now drive the work that's needed to get it done.

The New Human Race

Wake TFU

Let’s get straight to it.

We used to define the future in units of 5, 10 – maybe even 50 years. Science fiction painted us the pictures.

Now it’s possible to achieve almost anything we like in weeks or months if we put our minds to it. If you are awake then you are already putting your mind to it. If you are awake you are only limited by imagination.

The Race

The business world is racing to create new/better services at less cost and increased utility. Currently this involves returning sufficient value (margins) to the shareholders. Increasingly we hope it means reducing environmental impact and being sustainable in every sense.

The overwhelming majority of us are not awake to the degree of change that’s coming. For many of us it’s possible the near future will deal us a crushing blow. Work, lifestyle, opportunity, motivation is likely to change beyond recognition.

Will we be capable? Will we be awake?

How Do You Score?

The WAKE TFU Playbook

• Think – The awake listen, (really consider the discussions they are in) and think. They do this to avoid the familiar blurting of horse shit and cliché.

• Open – The awake are thoughtful, respectful, open to fresh/different thinking and they actually give a damn about what they hear.

• Confident – They aren’t always approachable. They will defend their positions and their evidence. But they will shift if the case stands up.

• Purposeful – They have a purpose in their lives. This can make them isolated at times. They are also. obsessive, passionate and responsible for their purpose.

• Real – They eschew the claptrap and. bollocks of celebrity for its own sake.

• Urbane – They don’t pour scorn on literally everything which is the vogue for so many people today. They don’t have to always need to be right.

• Generous – They tend to give (to others) a lot more than they take.

• Prepared – They are as ready for an uncertain future as possible.

• Dexterous – They can handle more than one thought, idea, perspective or concept at once.

• Dispassionate – They look honestly and objectively at their world. And they are perpetually revisiting that perspective.

• Honest – They don’t lie to themselves. They face facts. They know that knowledge can be (dangerously) wrong.

• Curious – They are curious and aware at the same time. Looking forward to what’s to come with only a pragmatic romanticism for what’s past.

• Mature – They are comfortable sharing their emotions – their thoughts and their feelings.

• Progressive – They don’t subscribe to the outdated norms and attitudes of society.

Here’s The Thing

We know there’s two things required in getting any job done. The capability and the tools. In the future these two change unrecognisably.

If you aren’t scoring high on the playbook it will be a tough journey. Three things:

1. Technology continues to engineer miracles – at pace.

2. Technology will replace a lot of human tasks. The rate of this change is exponential.

3. Human capability has to completely transform to keep up.

The capability required to take advantage of this fact is not readily within us. We are mostly ill-prepared.

The Future – It’s A Choice

Nobody can predict the future but we can interpret the trends. Autonomous everything, digital processes that remove entire workforces, the diamonds that exist in the data, the endless acronyms and labels that come and go – 4IR, IoT, bioengineering, artificial intelligence, virtualized service and experience.

There’s opportunity there.

Whatever happens, everything is guaranteed to be uncertain. And humans have an important choice to make – and we have to make it right now.

1. Don’t Wake TFU – Sit back, accept what befalls us – watch what happens.

2. Wake TFU – Be awake, involved, engaged and prepared to take advantage – come what may.

This choice either scares you to death, leaves you cold or inspires you enormously. For the average person keeping up will be the challenge. The above average will demand to be involved and win.

Exploiting Technology Before It Exploits Us

It’s no picnic being in business.

Leading your firm is tough already. Without the means of mastering the new dynamics we have to imagine it will only get tougher. However, in theory, and as these technologies improve, so do the tools we have to manage them.

The Race For The New Humans

This represents a new set of challenges for us humans to overcome.

We’ve become entitled. We’ve never liked change. We blindly expect things to carry on pretty much as they were. We will tinker with things because we’ve seen that wholesale change is bloody painful. We probably add to the problems.

We have small attention spans and large piles of information. This does not bode well for the future.

The future will demand a big step up. But not by making improvements to how we operate things today. It’s easy to see that a large part of what we do today is going to be handled by machines and digital systems.

Imagine the next 10 years. We had better get damned good at what we will do then.

The Future Bio/CV:

Master Of Uncertainty – What you will need to be when all decisions are uncertain. Your capability will be to wrestle the subtle, nuanced and brand new rather than clear cut and somewhat familiar. Oh, and it’s all data.

Master Of Leverage – How you will apply yourself hourly/daily and possibly globally to leveraging new technologies and skills because they are increasingly doing everything you need doing.

Director Of Creativity – Because you will have trained yourself to be more creative with powerful tools or can find and leverage the resources.

Business Model Supremo – You have had to think critically about the models and more hybrid integrations available. You have determined which models will be most valuable in the near future? You will be ready and able to deal with entirely original combinations of opportunity. You know they will only last for short periods. You will know when to go again.

Business Systems Leadership – You know why and which systems to trust. You accept that the systems and machinery know you and your business better than you ‘know’ yourself/your business. But you know how to turn that to your advantage.

The Intelligent Connector – You are the consummate collaborator, connector and communicator. That’s the biggest set of weapons you have alongside all of the above.

In Summary – Words Have Failed Me

I discuss this topic with people all the time. Most will agree that right now feels a momentous time. The best strategy for business is one of preparedness. Most will agree – but are unsure what that means.

It doesn’t take much to convince people that we need systemic and behavioural change. And, whilst they agree the idea that they can do anything about it fizzles out quickly as the reality settles.

Most of all I’ve noticed that the language we’re using isn’t working. Yes, the ideas are reasonable (we need strategies, plans, new models and frameworks) but these ideas just sugar the pill.

I have been guilty of calling ‘being awake’ consciousness – sometimes even enlightenment. What was I thinking? Why on earth did I think that would resonate with anyone? Why did I assume everyone is?

The reason there isn’t more consciousness or enlightenment around is because these words have the power to send people to sleep.

We just need to wake the fuck up.

20 Years Ago I Spotted A Gap

Leaders lacked ways to think about their future - without being sold to.

I knew this because that’s what happened to me.

Whatever challenge I set, their advice seemed compromised.

Management consultants, Marketing agencies - anyone who was offering the leadership a service seemed intent on remaining a dependency over time.

It’s their business model.

I Had An Opposing View

I like helping clients solve problems and exploit their opportunities. Collectively.

I want to help them create the best path to the future. Visually.

But, I believe they need to execute themselves. Sustainably.

So I Created Group Partners:

We have a sort of mantra.

‘We help clients avoid solving the wrong problem really well.’

It relies on weapons grade rationale. Logic.

It’s about creating safe spaces for people to be challenged and think. Visually.

At high level it’s a sequence of critical interventions. It works.

But crucially it’s about arming the business with the tools to get the job done. It’s sustainable.

There’s A Big Difference Working This Way

• The teams are guided to create and then own their own future.

• Clients learn to be capable because it’s a rapid, enjoyable and rewarding process.

• They are encouraged to figure out the real business challenges and build confidence in the future through meaningful visual experiences.

• Visualisation makes it far easier to see the solutions that they imagine - right there in front of them.

• Everyone quickly realises the systemic interconnected nature of new technologies, more relevant processes and practical plans.

The Prologue

Before all this I worked at a successful start up.

We created the most successful and famous microcomputer of its time - The BBC Micro.

We were listed. We made and lost millions.

In the process we spawned the most successful multi-billion dollar technology company in the United Kingdom - ARM Technologies.

I left as Olivetti bought the company.

I started a creative and strategic marketing and media company in London that many years later I sold to WPP Group PLC.

I’ve been clean ever since.

We’ve worked with great clients over the years:

Welcome To The 10 Killer Questions

These questions are a useful way to think about yourself and your future. These questions are a precursor to many other questions.

The answers to the questions shouldn’t be considered as being right or wrong. Think of them as simply representative of your current state of thinking and appetite. Answer them in as few or as many words as you like. It doesn’t matter.

Before you begin first have an understand of all the questions instead of just answering them in the order below.

Hopefully, however you set about them you will find some questions makes you want to change the answers to previous ones and that’s perfectly OK.

At The Bottom - There’s a series of definitions of those terrifying words associated with strategies, visions and planning. They may be helpful before you start too.

Vision (From The Latin Visio, To See.)

“A picture of the future made with imagination…” - A complete and vivid snapshot of an imagined future that you see, and into which you can zoom from the broadest context into the finest detail.

Purpose (From The Old French ‘Porpos’ — A Reason For Which Something Is Done.)

“What you decided you’re for. Your aim in life or reason to be…” - It’s what gets you up every day with a push in your back which inspires you to do what you do.

Values, Culture & Self Expression

“What you believe in, the kind of place and team you work in, and the style with which you communicate through all you say, or produce or do…”

Strategies

“The means you choose to achieve your vision…”

Missions

“The individual projects or ‘journeys’ within the scope of a strategy that people set out to accomplish, and their sense of commitment to them…”

Objectives

“Targets that you describe in such a way that you know when you’ve met them, or by how much you’ve fallen short…”

Plans

“These set out how you will achieve the objectives…”

Decision

“An Irrevocable allocation of resources…”

The Occasional Tactical Application Of Structured Visual Thinking™

There are many ways that meetings, events and conversations get visualised on walls. The main term for this is graphic facilitation.

This is NOT what we do at Group Partners.

This document explains the key differences.

Why What We Do Is Different

• We are in the business of decision-making, strategy development transformation and change.

• Our work involves leaders and the critical thinking needed to develop sustainable/high performing goals and objectives. This work embraces highly complex systemic aspects of the business and is therefore detailed and critical to business goals.

• Our approach isn’t designed to verbatim capture or make the conversation simply visual. It’s not a slightly more engaging way to take coloured notes on the wall as the conversation is occurring.

• We use the act of visualisation to summarise stimulate and create additional value as multiple conversations occur.

• Our visuals are created within a logical construct that forces tension to help make those assembled make better decisions.

Structured Visual Thinking™

Our approach is called Structured Visual Thinking™ because it combines rigorous logical models and live visualisation specifically designed for each client need/assignment and application.

Visualisation is a very powerful means of bringing to life the discussions around each topic. Topics are defined in modules within the framework. Better thinking, more critical and more systemic thinking happens as a result.

Applying SVT™ Tactically

It is possible that our technique of structured visualisation can be used tactically where it can be deemed to be of a long-term value.

• The most critical part of being able to work with impact amongst a group of people in business is preparation.

• In our experience the degree of preparation is directly proportional to the sustainability of the result and the experience of the audience.

Efficient Implementation

Avoidance Of Risk & Wasted Time

• By preparation mean the pre-structuring of the the framework that best organises the meeting or use to which it’s put.

• Proper preparation allows for pre-building the work and effectively allows us to carry forward work in progress - pre-existing material and information.

• Structured visual frameworks create powerful stimulus. This creates powerful context for the actual conversations that need to be carried out.

• This rapidly speeds up the familiarisation needed in typically short periods of time.

• These specific and limited time opportunities are what the tactical applications are designed for.

• Preparation can also be done remotely as the practical and logistical nature of the work requires large walls of an equivalent size to that which the framework will ultimately be applied in the specific event.

Creating The Canvas - The Space

• The large white canvas is created using electrostatic rolls of paper of a specific length and that requires the space where the event will be to be suitable and known

• Armed with the correct information the framework can be designed and built remotely rolled up and then re-applied at the destination with minimal difficulty.

• It is then possible for the stimulus material (content) to be built into the visual.

• This visual acts as an inspiring agenda and ‘formula’ for a more focused and more impactful session.

And Going Beyond

• A graphic that illustrates just some of the ongoing development of Structured Visual Thinking™.

• The evolution into tools and systems as a result of the structured nature of the approach.

We react to every challenge in the same way.

• We do what’s needed to understand the problem or opportunity we’re applying ourself to?

• From then on we work to understand the landscape - gathering every piece of information we can.

• We aren’t just interested in the immediate area but anything adjacent that will have an impact.

• We collect information and ask questions - lots of them.

• Alongside this we develop a rigorous framework

• The framework, as it evolves, will allow everyone to see the whole picture.

Keeping the team connected

• Everyone working on the program will be subject to change and shifting priorities.

• In this day and age there are many ways for people to stay connected - but this brings its own challenges.

• We assume that we can create the right teams and some appropriate principles for working together.

• With agreed protocols for staying in touch we can be sure to keep the momentum around the pre-agreed actions.

• We will use extensive communication strategies where possible to make sure everyone is kept in touch and the stories get out there.

NOW Enter Disruptive Technology

Digitalisation shortened the time and distance between ‘marketing’ and ‘manufacturing’ and the odds of success for anyone misunderstanding that.

The promise to the audience is right there, fully exposed on display to all of us.

The audience sees what’s made and what’s being made right there.

The promise is palpable, viewable, experienceable and comparable in every dimension. In every sense.

What manufacturing involves is what marketing is.

A Definition Of Digitalisation: The act of automating the core business processes and systems to increase efficiency and effectiveness. The act uses techniques and technology, often third party skills and resources to transform existing business processes or install complete platforms and solutions for increased customer experience, business performance and all the transactions and actions within.

A Definition Of Promise: Everything that we hear, see and sense from a given ‘brand’ enterprise or utility. This promise gets called a wide range of things - brand, awareness, experience, reputation and all the new and evolving components that add up to causing a favourable choice of one solution over another. Omnichannel

The Singularity Of Business

The Definition Of Singularity: In our case the term singularity describes the moment when a system changes so much that its rules and technologies are incomprehensible to previous generations. Think of it as a point-of-no-return in history. Advances in expectations, processes and underlying technology mean that the way we’ve thought and worked are no longer valid.

First 

Contemplate food, cars, consumer goods, retailing, fashion, sports goods, movies, computing, holidays - travel, legal services - anything.

Think Amazon, Google, Apple, Deliveroo and Uber and every one of their competitors as well as the online presence of every business on the planet.

Think about how we are influenced by countless channels and a plethora of evolving forms of media.

Social media, websites, activations, experiences, retail shopping excursions, out of home advertising, friendly referrals, consumer comment trails, peer opinion, traditional media channels, apps on our smartphones, product placements, Google searches, comparison website exercises. Everything.

We choose

Everything

The making and manufacture of each part of what we choose is open and on display through modern day marketing techniques and technologies.

Everything is increasingly configurable by us - the ingredients in our food, the details on our cars, the services we experience in our taxis/transport and the holidays, hotels and lifestyles we inhabit.

Everything available in any way, at an any time and for anyone with access to a screen and the credit.

All the components (the processes and systems of manufacture) have become more and more transparent as organisations seek to differentiate and create uniquenesses.

Second

Contemplate how close ‘we’ (the audiences) now are to the promises made by every one of these organisations.

Think how close the manufacturing/organisation has to be as they deliver and back up that promise of delivery and experience.

Think of every decision we make along the journey as we choose their ‘promise’.

That’s the work every organisation is doing as they digitalise their businesses.

Summary

We are reaching ‘singularity’ in business.

The place where the meaning, the making and the managing collide.

Through ‘digitalisation’ there is no longer any distance between what we choose through the marketing and the making of it.

We are directly involved with the people designing, building, packaging, distributing, transacting and servicing it.

We are fully implicated in the whole experience at every step because (increasingly) what we do has an immediate impact on what’s being made.

Therefore (however we define the organisation) it’s indivisible from the ‘marketing’ or the ‘making’.

In fact for the failing businesses it’s only the words used to denote them (marketing, manufacturing and organisation) that’s keeping them apart.

For Us To Be Prepared For The Future We Need To Understand The Possibilities It Holds.

We know how hard it is to think through the future sometimes. But the prize for thinking about it can be very high. Through our Business Dynamics ‘app’ we are understanding how well we are prepared for the future.

Looking Beyond The Typical Three To Five-Year Planning Horizon The World Starts To Look Very Different.

And some questions arising in bold:

• In 10 years, 7 billion people will be seamlessly connected to each other and the entire knowledge of humanity. Q. What do we need to do now to take advantage of that?

• Amazon is working on a version of its Alexa assistant that can understand emotions. Q. Armed with this technology (that can already call up our website) how should we design things differently?

• A machine is predicted to join a corporate board of directors within 10 years. Q. How likely are we to embrace that idea and does the idea encourage or alarm us?

• Gymnasts in the next Olympics could be judged not by people but by robots that instantaneously scan, plot and analyze the arc of the athlete. Q. It’s therefore totally likely that we can exploit that technology inside our business - how could/would we?

• Children born today will very probably not learn to drive, nor visit a physician for a checkup when they are 20. Q. As they may we’ll be our consumers in the future are we prepared or capable of exploiting that notion? If so when should we start planning?

• The concept of ‘going online’ will cease to exist, as we’ll be permanently and invisibly connected to an internet. This concept is an ever enveloping and ever-present fabric in our lives already. Q. Can we exploit this reality for the betterment of our customers and the wider society?

• Our bodies will become our passwords, with biometric recognition ‘announcing’ our entrance to many environments. Q. Can we imagine new ways to develop our solutions that take advantage of these more seamless opportunities?

• We’ll be surrounded by a cloud of data that can know our every preference, habit and behavior, and that tracks and scores aspects of our daily lives. Q. Can we imagine the future this proposes and develop solutions that are ethically and morally authentic and not exploitative or dystopian?

• Distributed ledger software, or blockchain, will enable trusted transactions or contracts without any intermediary. Q. What are we doing to build these concepts into our future? Do we have the skills and capabilities or even interest in these ideas? Are we prepared to invest in these ideas? For how long?

• Virtual and augmented reality will enable digital experiences that the brain can’t distinguish from real ones, for the price of an iPhone. Q. Do we have the appetite to engage in the creativity it will take to build applications of this nature in our own business?

• Genomics, biosensing and bioinformatics will yield near-perfect information about our health. Q. Are there opportunities in our business that we can start thinking about that will position is to be involved constructively in this new world?

Business Dynamics Will Embrace The Major Trends Over 5-10 Years

• Automation is expected to rapidly erode job security for entire categories of workers.

• I’ve seen reports that expect automation to take nearly 50 percent of jobs and wreak havoc on value chains.

• Retail businesses expect to see their physical business models disrupted by seismic shifts through digital and virtual technologies.

• These technologies completely change what it means to shop - full stop.

• Increasing transparency totally removes the opacity that exists in (siloed) vertically integrated businesses.

• Scale-driven manufacturers will see 3D printing create decentralized and fragmented production, making many traditional factories obsolete.

• Virtually no traditional business will be spared by exponentially accelerating change.

• There’s never been such a high degree of possibility for innovation.

• There’s significant opportunities for those who can envisage new solutions. For example blockchain applications will allow the goods we own to manage themselves to our budgets and preferences, ordering their own upgrades and repairs in advance.

• Technologies are continuously improving our ability to predict future well-being, monitoring and intervening to improve it by the minute.

The Big Questions Emerging From This Partial View

• What will it take to win customers in the new world of extreme connectivity and automation?

• What are the biggest unmet needs that we can create and how can we become confident enough to make these investments?

• Are we capable of developing a deep enough understanding of digital business design and develop these strategies?

• How fast can we develop the new mentality we need of relentless curiosity and courage to seize the opportunities?

• Are we prepared to embrace the more expansive, ambitious sense of purpose that will distinguish us with our audiences?

• Are we prepared to commit/invest with a deep passion and with (what will need to be) profound optimism to solving the next big (as yet unrecognized) and unmet need.

• Are we prepared to dismantle the traditional management constructs and rebuild the new kind of operation to meet the future?

• Can we transform all those around us who promote the usual themes of capitalism, profit at all costs, shareholder return? (And the usual calls for value creation based on core competencies - yawn).

• How ready are we as a leadership team to defusing entirely different organizational approaches, skills and cultures built on inspiration and human imagination?

• How persistent and resilient are we able to become? Can we become that new mechanism that isn’t just producing products to fill shelves or showrooms but a continuous and vital machine that’s always solving the challenge or opportunity for its customers?

We can readily deduce things from this. There cannot be a specific or best option because what’s best today may not be best tomorrow. The business dynamics require the leadership to balance the speed of technological change with the speed of behavioural change.

Prepared?

A first base for preparedness is how important a businesses understanding/appreciation of the current AND new business dynamics are to running a successful and sustainable future business.

However:

• Knowing what’s coming is impossible.

• Knowing where we are is (often) a mixture of bias and convenient subjectivity.

• Knowing how to prepare is therefore probably impossible to calculate accurately.

Challenging assumptions and conventional thinking starts with an honest appraisal of some sort. Our best chance is to test and challenge these ‘positions’ from every perspective we can.

So:

• Is it possible for a client to objectively assess the attitudes and actions already in play? How?

• Does the organisation consider itself to be a system of sorts? Where is the evidence?

• Does the organisation fully (enough) understand the key dynamic of digitalisation that is transforming everything? By what measure does it establish this? (((Collapsing the distance between marketing, making and managing...)))

• How can the leadership/decision makers get to a valid baseline of the whole system? (If the questions are posed to individuals who represent bits)

• Can the leadership become a sufficiently aligned cohort in order to work together to bring about change and embrace the future? How would they prove/know they were?

Our contention directly recognises how difficult it is for capabilities, systems, processes, mindsets and behaviours to change in an ‘orchestrated’ manner as an existing business struggles to keep up.

• How do we know the information we are receiving from the various parts of the business/system upon which we are making decisions is real?

• Is this testable?

• Is it meaningful anyway because it is probably a set of data taken from an isolated part of a more connected system? (Subjective)

• If the rate at which change is occurring then what value is historical information? It will falsify our calculations.

• How much investment is there in getting up to date information (feedback/assessment)?

• How do we test that information upon which we are making critical decisions is valid?

But we know we need to start somewhere. We know that it’s often more convenient to deny the inability to change than to accept the lack of knowledge or appreciation of what to do.

• How open are the leaders/decision makers to being proved inaccurate/wrong in the spirit of a better future?

• What tools and techniques are in place to create ways to improve this learning and by doing so grab fresh opportunity?

In many cases prior/earlier knowledge is potentially the enemy anyway. The past is definitely no prologue to our uncertain futures.

The Following Dynamics Vary Only Slightly By Market Sector. And As Dynamics They Are Not That Much Of A Secret.

• Keeping up with new technologies - How? Whose job is it? How curious are people about the insights? Are we able to identify an insight from all the information? Have we implemented discovery strategies to identify practical solutions and future plans? Are we comparison testing? Are we able to test for the suitability of the future plan against the current state - appetite and cultural implications? How robust or convenient is our risk assessment? Are we prepared to sacrifice a new/better technology or platform based on ethical grounds? (Sustainability/Morality/Politics) Facebook - Soul Cycle.

• The challenges of replacing legacy infrastructure quickly enough - How? Investment strategies? Stakeholder/shareholder understanding and acceptance? Business case development? Financial calculations against appetite for risk - how/can we? Do we care if people are losing their jobs? Are there some in the organisation who will do anything to hide the truth? Are we in partnerships that have been around forever and we are scared to change? Is their corruption in these relationships?

• Overall quality of leadership? - Have we got leaders who understand and acknowledge the pace and enormity of such change? Can we even tell them if not? Who can challenge the status quo? Is there a strategy for calling out leaders and helping them think? How strong is the board? Is there an impartial advisory board? Does the enterprise meet the board? How close is the CEO to the Finance Director? Are we outdated when it comes to the drivers of capitalism over everything? Is it possible to change these foundations? Are we hostages to ‘groupthink’, ‘best practice’ or ‘optimum solutions’? What are the leaders curious about? How prepared are they to listening to input beyond their peer group? How can we measure or evidence that? Are they suggesting radical change but not doing anything meaningful about it? Are there constant comparisons about other brands but no meaningful strategies to develop a new future for the business? (All talk - no walk)

• Data protection/Security - What/how? Are we paying lip service to the new regulations? Does everyone in the operation understand their obligations? How well are our processes and technologies doing when it comes to privacy, breaches and sharing of customer data? How do we share these responsibilities with partners in our ecosystem? Are we skilled at strategies for consumer data and development of secure protocols and strategies? 1st/3rd Party? With the disruption of robo-services and solutions can we survive the competition (currently known/unknown) delivering ahead of us? Is investment forthcoming? Is the risk recognised by the employees?

• The Purpose Driven ‘fashion’ - What/How? Does the organisation pay lip service or does it mean it? How far is the purpose practically realised inside the business and how far is it deployed (for example retail stores) in a meaningful and heartfelt manner - with any authenticity? Do our partners help with this? Are we checking? Are we investing in the purpose or is it simply a convenient message? Do the leaders talk about the purpose much? Do we feel it with sincerity in the business? Have we proven we are delivering it? Is there growing cynicism inside the organisation or are we good? Is the investment supported readily or is it a fight?

• The ability/inability to get the correct skills into the business - Why? Does the brand really inspire and motivate new recruits? Do the managers that do the hiring know how to explain and inspire the future employees? Does the culture immediately come across from the way the story is told and the experience in the recruitment process? Is that outsourced? Do the partners even know?

• The generational ‘tectonic plates’ that can swiftly kill the once strong brand - What? Who is the youngest person on the board? Do we speak to the coming generations and if we do what are we doing with the reactions and insight? Do we have the skill and insight to reposition the brand? Have we got the right skills to craft the story? Can we be fluent in explaining our unique story to ourselves? Can we tell it externally? Do we know how stories shift according to the media channels we are using? Do we understand how close our processes and systems are (through digitalisation) to our customers? Is everyone in the business aware that the consumer can see our business directly through our Apps and websites? Do we know that the promise we make to consumers can immediately impact the quality of service the consumer sees in real time? Are we or our agencies competent with the coming techniques - chatbots, VR/AR and the new storytelling skills required for immersive video technologies? Are we over emotionally attached to the existing brand? Do we appreciate what’s happened in the competitive landscape and realised we are possibly on the path to dying? Do we know what to do and/or find the partnerships to help us? What’s the leadership position on investing in this new way - combined investment in new positions, products and processes? Is it serious? Is the challenge always trying to convince the financial people? How good are we at creating the business cases? Do we actively seek the data that would make the case? (Cases?)

• The challenge of getting the attention of audiences - How? How creative and innovative are we in this area? Do we study the competitive environment at a creative and media positioning level? Are we aware of the degree/quality/content of the competitive noise in each space we ‘go to market’? Have we mapped the competing messages in order for us to drive towards distinction? Have we selected the right external partners to help us with these skills and challenges? Do we have the skills in house? Do we test and do we learn? Really? What do we do with the learning? The data? How do we assess the market opportunity and build the differentiated messages that will distinguish us from our competition? What’s the process that can drive true distinction? Can we create value propositions that are backed up across the enterprise? Do we engage the whole enterprise in the distinctions and stories so that we ensure a coherent experience for consumers? (((Do we spend time on the shop floor and with dealers/distributor workforce to ensure coherent messages and experiences?))) Do we learn from the ecosystem (dealers/distributors) about what’s working and what isn’t? As our customers come through the journey is the experience one we are proud of? Do we know that it’s not as seamless as we might like? What are we able to do about it? Do we do any user testing and feedback on our products and services? What is the standard of our website and collateral?

• Managing the plethora of channels through which to market - How? Are we conscious of all the media channels and applications through which we can go to market? Are these channels made aware to employees across the organisation? Are we fully exploiting the opportunity for scale and growth through these channels? Are we managing the data that comes through these channels? In the case of apps and online are we aware of the opportunity in UI design to increase performance? How would we know? Are we exploiting the data through our own capabilities or are we outsourcing? Are we sharing the

• Managing operational and future complexity at the same time - How? Businesses that have been around a while find it hard to create any kind of succession plan quickly enough to be ahead of the puck. This means having the nous to build a new platform for the business while dismantling barriers and infrastructure/behaviours and attitudes in the old one. Few people have the skill to do this because this is new territory and it may not be feasible to imagine the skill in any one individual. How are we thinking about this? Does the leadership even understand the idea? Is it saying it does but doing nothing about? Are we on the path to becoming more agile (test and learn) rather than more perfect? Do we know when to pivot rather than to blindly persevere? Do we know how to rid the system of old knowledge and old skills) do we constantly review ‘input/information’ or is it reactionary and ad hoc? (Keeping a research/tracking study going just because we’ve got x years of back data is highly damaging.)

Emerging Themes That Need Tackling

1. People & Caring - Whether it’s leaders caring about the people or their businesses futures and the people caring about their work. How do we feel?

2. Understanding & The Marketplace - The business of the future is only about the meaning, the making and the managing. But first it’s the meaning and that’s marketing. Ignore excellence in that and die. Competitors are coming thick and fast and far more automated. So do we know where from - what’s our response and are we prepared to make significant investment in new knowledge and capability? Do we study the trends and markets in ways that inform our future product development and positioning? (((What is the businesses reaction to these trends in competition))) Can we predict the impact on the business of potential market disruption and innovation?

3. Partnerships & The Overall System - The future demands connection and meaningful engagement with others to deliver. Connecting with others to deliver overall capabilities is a strategy - what is our strategy?

4. Intelligent (enlightened) Investment - A major drawback for future strategy is the inability to shift investment quickly. And the investment is often far too narrow. The conversation quickly turns to risk and business cases and then there’s the mentality to overcome even when the case is made. The subtlety of this mindset problem shows up in tiny and often indiscernible ways. And then bang - the Business is out of the game!

5. More…