During November, we explore four mental models related to transformation and change. By the end of this month, you will have strengthened your innovator’s toolkit with these new principles and ideas. Today we look at the map is not the territory.
Tag: strategy
Are your assumptions holding you back?
Too often, we take the status quo for granted and don’t challenge our assumptions about the world around us. This can lead to stagnation and a lack of innovation.
Look back and smile on perils past
The word spek– is a really old word root meaning “to observe”. If you prefer a little Greek: skopein means to “behold, look, consider”. Or perhaps some end of the week Latin: specere “to look at”.
You can see spek– is the root of the word perspective. This is something we are all seeking at the moment. Our isolation has meant that we are missing the normal connection and interactions that allow us to “consider” and to “observe” how others are. And so how we are.
The word perspective originates from Latin perspectus meaning “clearly perceived”. We want perspective because we seek clarity.
Let’s look at some other uses of the word and how they are important utilities for us right now.
Introspective
You know this one. Looking inside ourselves. Many of us have had to spend more time with ourselves than we might have liked (!)
It is not just about looking and observing. This is a time for increasing self-awareness of our response to change and the problems that have emerged.
Regular introspection and reflection give us the chance to capture what is happening with our disposition. The ups, downs and spirals.
Write it down, talk to a colleague or loved one. Using language to express how we see ourselves is a powerful way to process what we are going through.
Your Talking Point
What do you notice about how you have responded to the uncertainty of your current experience?
Retrospective
Looking back is a critical position to take in the coming months, as we transition to some sort of normality. Future innovations will build on the success of the past. They are not disconnected.
Our schools need to consider the powerful practices that were already having a high impact. In our enthusiasm for change and the “new normal” we have to look back at what worked for our community.
What were we doing before? What did we value and how is that different? What still works? Which first principles still exist?
In many ways, it is illogical to consider a snap back to the way things were. Learning, leadership and innovation are intricate and complex behaviours. The stories we carry now and the experiences we have gone through will mean it will be irrevocably changed because we have changed.
Your Talking Point
How has your value set shifted and changed?
Prospective
When we add pro- we look forward. We are scanning the horizon and looking ahead. Here in Australia (in early May) we are starting to see a shift in the restrictions and easing of the constraints.
Many of us are looking ahead and figuring out the path through the next few months. Prospective thinking will serve our communities well, as we navigate a return to the normal rhythms of school and consider what is ahead.
There are school events and rituals to be celebrated that will undoubtedly be on our minds. Will we run those as normal? Will they be different this year?
As we lead we need to be prospective. Crucially our students and families will not have had a homogenous experience. Regardless of the synchronous and asynchronous labels we might use. That diversity will mean we might be all looking ahead and prospecting for different things.
Exploring and surfacing that type of insight may help us design a better learning experience in the future.
Your Talking Point
How will you discover what your community members are looking forward to?
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As always let me know what resonates.
Look back, and smile on perils past meaning
The blog post “Look back and smile on perils past” is a quote from Sir Walter Scott’s poem, The Bridal of Triermain: Or the Vale of St. John:
That this same stalwart arm of mine,
Which could yon oak's prone trunk uprear,
Shall shrink beneath, the burden dear
Of form so slender, light, and fine;
So! now, the danger dared at last,
Look back, and smile at perils past!
**Photo by Emma Dau
Pre-Mortem Worksheets — How to Avoid Project Catastrophe
A Pre-Mortem is a strategic planning activity that imagines a project has failed. This type of thinking helps to identify and mitigate risks early on in the planning phase.
Exploring the worst-case scenario is traced to great Stoic philosophers, like Seneca, who called it the premeditation of evils, “premeditatio malorum”.
What is quite unlooked for is more crushing in its effect, and unexpectedness adds to the weight of a disaster. This is a reason for ensuring that nothing ever takes us by surprise. We should project our thoughts ahead of us at every turn and have in mind every possible eventuality instead of only the usual course of events.
~ Seneca
Adding the Pre-Mortem technique to your planning toolkit will help you project your thoughts ahead, comprehensively assess the challenges to a project and adapt your plans.
I have developed a set of Pre-Mortem worksheets for you to take away. It outlines all of the steps you need to follow and provides a clear structure. Before you finish make sure you subscribe and grab a copy.
👉 Jump to the download link for the worksheets.
Improve Your Planning
One of the biggest challenges to a successful project is the quality of planning. A plan is weaker when it overemphasises a positive outcome. A Pre-Mortem activity helps to balance this outlook by allowing time and space to explore failure scenarios.
If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!
Benjamin Franklin
However, it is not negativity for its own sake. We are not simply amplifying the negative voices in a group or the whinges.
The structured Pre-Mortem process steps through how to explore each scenario, identify the causes and outlines methods that respond to each potential risk.
Prospective Hindsight
Instead of being reactive to problems, in this activity, you will use the thought experiment: Prospective Hindsight. You might even be able actually to say you are going “back to the future”.
Prospective Hindsight is casting our mind forward into a future time and then imagining what we might have wished we had learned by looking back.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing
William Blake
Prospecting is a powerful imaginative disposition when working with any strategic planning and is something I use frequently.
- “I can imagine a time when we …”
- “It is clear that in the future we might be…”
- “When this is in place the benefits are likely to be…”
Strategic planning is all about prospecting, to imagine a future scenario – what Prospective Hindsight does is explore and recognise the risks and issues that might occur.
When and Who
To gain the most benefit, use the Pre-Mortem exercise with your core team at an early stage of the project planning. Potential risks and issues that you uncover may need time and resources to address.
The Pre-Mortem is a planning activity, and so unsurprisingly, it needs to occur during planning. The outcomes of the task feed into your project planning.
Instead of a post-mortem, when we look back on what went wrong, we establish this reflective practice even before the project has started.
Gather a core team who have a clear understanding of the proposed project plans so far. The outcome should be relatively straightforward and agreed upon; time should be spent exploring the risks, not what the project is about.
Disposition and Mindset
Establishing the right mindset is essential to the success of the Pre-Mortem: open to sharing risks and identifying responses to those risks.
Explicitly discussing the potential failure scenarios is a challenging type of talk. Our positive bias, especially for a project we have invested in, means we don’t like to be deliberately negative.
This deliberate and strategic negativity is a strategic muscle we are not often activating.
The Pre-Mortem also requires us to grapple with increasing uncertainty and ambiguity. This is a delicate balance and might need strong facilitation. Our tolerance for uncertainty is an indicator of our creativity.
Pre-Mortem Worksheets
Works Well With
Below I have outlined a range of other methodologies and mental models that the Pre-Mortem complements.
Playing the Devil’s Advocate
This activity works well with other mental models and planning exercises. Playing the Devil’s Advocate is something many of us have experienced.
It is a subjective version of the Pre-Mortem. An individual takes it upon themselves to imagine that something might go wrong.
The problem with that interjection is that the approach and disposition are often not mirrored by others in the group. A genuine insight might be discarded because others do not want to think negatively or are not ready for more uncertainty.
A Pre-Mortem brings the whole group into that thinking at the same time – that is its strength.
The Tenth Person Rule
The Tenth Person Rule is the deliberate opposition to a decision when everyone else agrees. If everyone else is saying “Yes”, the tenth person (or the last) is ethically bound to say “No”.
This opposition, regardless of personal belief, instigates further debate and challenge. The outcome is more coherent due to that conjecture, even if it remains the same.
The task of the Tenth Man is to explore alternative assumptions and worst-case scenarios…to challenge conventional and received wisdom. The aim is to look at things creatively, independently, and from a fresh perspective, to engage actively with and to reconsider the status quo.
How Israeli intelligence failures led to a ‘devil’s advocate’ role
The Tenth Person Rule was popularised by the film World War Z and had some real connections to approaches within Israeli Military Intelligence.
The Reversal Method
The Pre-Mortem activity works well with this creative thinking method as they both help create a new perspective.
The Reversal Method is a lateral thinking tool that encourages us to change how we think about a problem. In Lateral Thinking, Edward De Bono explains it might be used for the following reasons:
- To escape from the absolute necessity to look at the situation in the standard way.
- By disrupting the original way of looking at the situation one frees information that can come together in a new way.
- The main purpose is provocation. By making the reversal one moves to a new position. Then one sees what happens.
SWOT Analysis
A SWOT Analysis is a standard managerial and leadership model used during planning and review. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Obstacles and Threats.
The Pre-Mortem focuses its lens on Threats in a much more systematic way than the SWOT Analysis. These two methods would complement each other well.
Running a Pre-Mortem activity could be done to create the outcomes linked and included in a comprehensive SWOT for a project.
De Bono’s 6 Thinking Hats
These parallel thinking processes fit into six key areas. The Black Hat type of thinking is most relevant to the Pre-Mortem exercise. We want Pre-Mortem participants to do Black Hat thinking:
The Black Hat is judgment – the devil’s advocate or why something may not work. Spot the difficulties and dangers; things might go wrong — probably the most powerful and valuable of the Hats but a problem if overused.
What balances the planning process is the use of Green Hat thinking once potential risks are identified. A team would explore new ideas to address the problems identified during the Pre-Mortem.
The Green Hat focuses on creativity, possibilities, alternatives, and new ideas. It’s an opportunity to express new concepts and new perceptions.
Further Reading
- Gray, D. (2011). Pre-Mortem – Gamestorming.
- Atlassian. (2019). How to Run a Project Premortem Exercise with your Team.
- Harvard Business Review. (2007). Performing a Project Premortem.
- Wikipedia. (2019). Pre-mortem.
- Delisle, J. (2019). Pre-mortem: an effective tool to avoid failure.
- UserVoice Blog. (2016). 13 Questions to Ask in a Product Pre-Mortem
- Team, T. and Team, T. (2018). Pre-Mortem and Post-Mortem Analysis | The Redbooth Blog.
- Jager, C. and Grubesic, T. (2015). Plan More Effectively With The ‘Tenth Man Rule’.
- De Bono, E. (1992). The use of lateral thinking. 5th ed. London: Penguin.
5 Provocations to Improve Your Strategic Planning
Strategy has been a key area of my work over the last 12 months. Planning and developing it, reviewing and critiquing it. I know this year will be the same. I stumbled upon the work of Freek Vermeulen on strategy and I want to share a few key provocations with you that resonated with me.
Your organisation’s strategy might be called something different – in education, these are typically
- School Improvement Plans
- Annual Improvement Plans
- Strategic Improvement Plans
You get the idea. Anything that is laying out goals, actions and strategies for the future of your school or organisation is ripe for this critique.
If you are one of my school partners, watch out! We will be using these provocations and ideas to explore your plans for 2018 and beyond.
Freek Vermeulen has 5 provocations for critiquing strategy documents, or as he puts it:
Let me present you with five such common excuses for a strategy or, put differently, five examples of why the things on the PowerPoint are not strategy.
Are you really making choices?
Straight of the bat, this is my favourite of the five. It forces us to carefully consider what it is we are choosing as a result of the strategy. Or do your plans just include everything? “We are focusing on everything”, means you are focusing on nothing.
I enjoy the fact that strategy is seen by Vermeulen as a choice about what to do, and what not to do. Of course, this reminds me of the Pareto Principle and how we should know what has the highest impact. I am looking forward to having conversations with teams about what they have chosen not to do!
Or do you just stick to what you were doing anyway…?
An extension of not making choices is that you write a strategic plan that just describes what you are already doing. The mental model of Path Dependency is a good one to learn about here because it refers to a bias towards past events.
We have issues about letting go of past programmes and we tend to collect and compress new ideas. When previous commitments have been made we err on the side of historical preference. This means that strategy documents, like the ones you have where you work, just describe what is already happening.
more often than not, strategies adapted to what you were doing anyway results in some vague, amorphous statement that would have been better off in a beginners’ class on esoteric poetry, because it is meaningless and does not imply any real choice.
Your choices have no relationship with value creation (you’re in “The Matrix”)
Again the emphasis here on high value or high impact strategies. Everything you are choosing to implement needs to be closely related to the change you desire.
In schools this is all about improving the learning experience for students, ultimately improving learning. If an idea or programme does not relate to creating value why are we doing it?
Without a proper rationalisation of why your choices are going to help you create value, I cannot call it a strategy.
You mistake objectives for strategy
This is a really common issue that makes reading organisation-wide plans and documentation quite a challenge. Put simply an objective or goal describes a future state you are aiming for. A strategy is how you will get there.
Objectives typically have something that you can measure. You might use SMART goals to help craft them effectively. Objectives should be
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Realistic
- Time-bound
An example objective from my business this year is:
3 new long term partnerships in Melbourne / VIC by the end of 2018.
You can see it is quite specific and time-bound, despite it being a long period of time it is realistic and achievable (I hope!)
One of my strategies for how I might achieve this is to:
Speak at local events
Pretty straight forward. But surprisingly we often get all these things muddled.
You need an idea and a rationale – a strategy – of how you are going to achieve all this. Without it, they [objectives] are an aspiration, but certainly not a strategy.
Nobody knows about it
Who normally writes your strategic improvement plan? Who checks and critiques it? Normally this group can be quite small – typically the leadership team, plus outside consultants, might craft the plan.
But what good is a great strategic plan if nobody in the organisation knows about it!? What goes hand in hand with the imperative to make a strategic plan accessible is the language used. Too verbose or nuanced and it becomes a barrier for others to access.
This is a nice example from Oakleigh State School who have created an infographic for their plan – and I can imagine that this makes it much more accessible to a wider audience.
I always remember strategic plans just being a box to tick when I first started experiencing them as a subject coordinator. If they are accessible and written in an open jargon free way they should be actively used throughout your work. They shouldn’t just be a box to tick or to fill a folder.
Ultimately this is about changing something and how your strategy impacts on the day to day behaviour of those in your organisation. I will leave you with this final provocation from Freek Vermeulen about this:
A strategy is only really a strategy if people in the organisation alter their behaviour as a result of it.
There you go five great provocations to help you improve your strategic planning
#28daysofwriting
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