My dual corporate/ entrepreneur’s lifestyle has had some amazing lessons in understanding how to take a strategy use it to bring meaningful change to an organization.
I’m finding that there are three important steps to solving a problem:
- Step back and understand what a meaningful solution would look like– and be able to express that perspective from 360 degrees and see why it makes sense (if not is advantageous) to all parties.
- Understand from the perspective of any stakeholder what obstacles make this difficult
- Build processes and incentives that (after a brief period of transition) make the new course the path of least resistance.
My McKinsey training taught me the first 2. It is the third that I’m finding is actually the most meaningful– most people have a vague sense of whats wrong. A few people have a general sense of what direction solutions should head in. But very few people try to design a solution that is less painful to the end-user than the current known issues. Its often because they don’t have a strong sense of how to move forward in a meaningful way.
Two tools have helped me tremendously in building step 3 in the last few weeks:
A) Fundamental management theory: I’ve been reading a couple books that have laid out both fundamental management theory and a sense of how to accomplish true disruptive change. The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done (Harperbusiness Essentials)
and The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
B) The distributed project management tool Basecamp, put out by the makers of Ruby on Rails (programming language). Its simple and helps create transparency and accountability– helping to buy time to help me think through what is most important for the team to do (and help them see the big picture as they propose changes)– and then helps keep track of their priorities and timely execution. It doesn’t take bloated, rigid Microsoft Project to keep track of a multi-pronged project any more!
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