🌿🧭🌳 OD103: Decision Architectures
Curated resources on Strategy ∙ Org Design ∙ Org Development ∙ Adjacent fields
Starters
1 of 4 / John Hagel: Strategy As a Catalyst for Change - ”strategy needs to be viewed as a powerful and necessary catalyst for transformation – both within and outside the organization.”
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2 of 4 / Andre Arruda: Prospective & Backcasting - 7 futures tools applied to imagine the Future of Brazilian artistic languages. Useful showcase of how these tools can be used for foresight work.
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3 of 4 / Learn Biomimicry: A Field Guide to Biomimicry - excellent free guide for making the first steps into the field of biomimicry, dedicated to learning from nature and coming up with solutions that mimic those found in nature.
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4 of 4 / DoughnutEconomics.org: Doughnut Design for Business tool - Aimed at practitioners of doughnut economics, to help them run workshops with businesses. This comprehensive slide deck might also be useful for people who want to understand how to help businesses become regenerative and distributive in their core operations.
Main
Designing a Decision Architecture
Source: Blueprint newsletter
Leadership navigates the evolution of information, and punctuates it with decisions.
Leaders make a lot of decisions, each week, every month, every quarter. And most of the time, they’re good at it too! But collectively, these leaders wish for something better - something that can help them improve their effectiveness when making difficult choices, especially when facing uncertainty.
This challenge of choosing is most visible when leaders set strategy. And it affects leaders up and down the organization, and across different domains:
Enterprise strategy - satisfying stakeholders, ranging from employees to shareholders
Business strategy - winning in markets, across the business lifecycle
Product strategy - delighting users and getting customers, across the product lifecycle
Program strategy - delivering outcomes, at cost, on a date
Portfolio strategy - balancing investments, to rationalize, consolidate, and improve
When “deciding how to decide”, a leader forges a decision architecture: a set of practices that support decision makers as they encounter difficult choices.
Good decision architectures ask us to distinguish between situations with high and low uncertainty. At one end, they steer low-uncertainty situations into decision making practices governed by decision models and rules. On the other end, they steer high-uncertainty situations toward human intervention with an emphasis on collaborative techniques.
(…) a simplified model for strategic planning - one that allows us to discuss uncertainty and decision making across four layers of refinement, at different altitudes:
Each layer seeks to explore a range of options, then converge upon a choice:
Explore Futures - which scenario emerges as the “official future”, to form the vision?
Explore Directions - which levers emerge with the strongest case to achieve the goals?
Explore Opportunities - which change ideas emerge as the most promising to fund?
Explore Work - which work items emerge in the teams’ plans, to reduce risk?
What is interesting here is that each layer gives us a chance to explore various elements of good decision architecture.
Dessert
1 of 2 / Strategy+Business: The art of the turnaround—circa 27 BC - Unexpected article from PwC’s Strategy+Business publication about company turnaround lessons inspired by Virgil’s Aeneid.
2 of 2 / Economics Explained: Skills Wars Are The New Trade Wars (video) - Good summary about the poorly covered topic of ”skill migration” and ”brain drain” / ”brain gain” and the emergent dynamics of inter-national competition for talent.
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Bon appétit!
Curated by knowledge chefs ✨ Raluca and Bülent Duagi 🌿
As the Sense & Change team, we’re working with Directors in 🇷🇴 Tech companies to help them make more impact with better strategic thinking - which usually translates to:
🧭 having a clear strategy that enables better and faster decision making;
🤝 organizing better to both run operations and implement strategy with the available bandwidth and budgets;
🚀 implementing strategic initiatives and programs in an efficient and effective manner, paying attention to the people side of change;
⚡️ intentionally developing proper internal capabilities that are sustainable in the long run.
We've been recently advising, mentoring and training leaders from:
· Adobe, DB Global Technology, Deloitte Digital, HP, IT Smart Systems, Orange, Orange Services, Stockday and TotalSoft.
