Getting started, exploring possibilities

Good morning!

At the Uncertainty Project, we explore models and techniques for managing uncertainty, decision making, and strategy. Every week we package up our learnings and share them with the 2,000+ leaders like you that read this newsletter!

This week, we will close out our series on the strategy facilitation canvas we call the Strategy 5x5. In the last two newsletters, we’ve shared examples that support good strategic dialog - some for business leaders, and then some for technology leaders. Here, we will offer examples that can be used by mid-level leaders, like department managers or even team leads. The intent is to show how easy it can be to use the Strategy 5x5 as an enabling constraint to drive better strategic thinking, especially for small working groups.

Let’s say you are a department manager, and want to become more strategic as you set goals and build a vision for your part of the organization. You work with your staff and peers to set direction for the year ahead. In this exercise, you feel like expectations are high. You’re supposed to anticipate the future, explore many options, and settle on the “best” way forward. You’ve seen others be rewarded for unwavering conviction in their choices, so you model after that.

But deep down, you know the truth is different. Uncertainty is high; the future is unknowable. The organization you work within is a complex adaptive system; change is more emergent than directed. And while strong conviction can motivate strong execution, you need a way to accelerate learning and be open to adapting your vision.

In the past, when you’ve done this, you tried to spark some good ideas, then developed the first promising one into “strategic plans”. You supported the plan with 50 slides to make it bulletproof when you communicated it across your teams and peers. You then sold it, with certainty.

What if… you could drive strategic dialog with a working group in a way that (1) makes focused choices while acknowledging the uncertainty, (2) drives execution while recognizing the complexity, and (3) acts as a living document to support adaptability?

Oh, and let’s keep it simple. You don’t really have time to learn heavy, new ideas about strategy… you just need better ways to organize the dialog. A starter kit, if you will.

So here we show offer three “local starters”, derived from three great thought leaders:

• V2MOM (Marc Bienoff) - places focus on alignment, communication

• Decision Stack (Martin Eriksson) - places focus on focus

• Estuarine Mapping (Dave Snowden) - places focus on change & complexity

Mid-level leaders should be able to jump into any of these with a low cost-of-entry. Each of them can help support communications up and down the existing lines of authority within your organization. And those conversations, in turn, yield alignment.

V2MOM - Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, Measures

Decision Framework:

• What do you want to achieve?

• What's important to you?

• How do you get it?

• What is preventing you from being successful?

• How do you know you have it?

This approach can be applied by department leaders, team leads, and even individuals. Salesforce created this in their early days, to support communication and alignment, as they scaled. As Marc Bienoff explains it, they really emphasized the communication benefits:

“I’ve always thought our biggest strength is how we’ve maintained alignment while growing quickly. Success depends on constant communication and complete alignment.“

He also pointed out how this kind of thinking differs from the normal “day job” and how alignment involves convincing others (i.e. your boss, your teams) that your choices are sound:

“We need to be in the present moment and pay attention to where we are and what’s going on to help us deal with those smaller, less monumental issues that dominate the bulk of our time. You have to convince others to align with your vision to plot a course forward. You need to prioritize. And at a big company, you need to scale the process of setting priorities for tens or hundreds of thousands of employees. The V2MOM enables me to clarify what I’m doing, and then communicate it clearly to the entire company.”

So at Salesforce, each leader, and each individual (as part of their employee performance management process, I’m guessing) will draft a V2MOM as a living document. 

If we move this exercise into a Strategy 5x5, we can make the full possibility space more visible, exploring several different ideas for vision, for values, for methods, key obstacles, and key measures. The possibility space will present the full V2MOM, but the distinct possibilities (i.e. combinations of options across the space), can help set a path, say, for the upcoming quarter.

Connect the V2MOM Strategy 5x5s from each level in your organization, to support transparency and alignment. Set expectations for revisiting the canvas (e.g. at a cadence) to support cross-functional communications and improve adaptability. 

If you are just getting your feet wet with strategy, the V2MOM might be a good place to start.

The Decision Stack

Decision Framework:

• Where are we going?

• How will we get there?

• What matters right now on that journey?

• What actions do we take to move forward?

• How do we do the work?

This approach, from Martin Eriksson, has some similarities to the V2MOM, but emphasizes the importance of communicating “what we are not pursuing”. In his “Decision Stack” visuals, he makes a point of showing the options that are not being pursued (in blue) alongside the choices that form the strategic direction (in yellow).

This is a powerful way to gain focus. By communicating that there are several good options, but only one will get our attention and resources, leaders can strengthen alignment across teams.

Eriksson says:

“In a world of ever-growing complexity, where startups struggle to keep everyone on the same page and scaleups struggle to move fast enough, empowering small cross-functional teams with the autonomy to make decisions themselves is the only way to succeed. Yet the thousands of decisions made at every level by our teams still need direction. They still need alignment. They still need context. Every decision is a trade-off, and deciding what not to do is just as important as deciding what to do.”

He recommends setting strategy from the top-down, and challenging strategy from the bottom-up. His decision framework starts with options for vision and current challenges, then takes an honest look at which areas need focus to achieve the vision, or address the challenge. These could be internal areas, or external areas for a business, like segments of a market. 

From there, he recommends exploring objectives (goals), opportunities (work), and principles (ways) that can be put into service in the areas of strategic focus. The possibilities that are identified across the possibility space can then be expressed as hypotheses:

We believe applying <these principles> while pursuing <this opportunity> can achieve <this objective >in <this strategic area> to realize <this vision>.

Once a set of hypotheses are formed, the preferred direction (yellow vs. blue) can be set and communicated.

He likes using Teresa Torres’ Opportunity Solution Trees to drive execution in a way that can easily connect back to the decisions that set the focus. This is an enabler of effectiveness that complements the speed advantage of autonomous teams. He explains:

“As an industry, we have been responsible for a lot of useless work. We have over-indexed on efficiency, delivery, and productivity, and not paid enough attention to what we should build in the first place. This mismatch compounds when we (rightly) start empowering our teams with more and more autonomy – they can all run faster, but are they running in the right direction for the business? Are they even running in the same direction?”

Estuarine Mapping

Decision Framework:

• For existing 'constraints', where is change possible?

• For existing 'constructors', where is change possible?

• For existing 'actors', where is change possible?

• What actions can/should we take on the 'actants'?

• What micro-projects could we initiate?

This approach, from Dave Snowden and the Cynefin Company, introduces some new vocabulary from complexity theory, but frames a simple, pragmatic approach to driving change in organizations.

Similar to the way that a Wardley Map served as a prerequisite to the Strategy 5x5 dialog, we build an Estuarine Map in advance of the strategic dialog in this approach, too.

Here’s an oversimplified summary:

1. Identify the “manageable items” in your system of work (e.g. rituals, policies, roles, etc.)

2. Evaluate the relative “energy cost to change” and “time to change” for each item (i.e. how entrenched or entwined is this item, in your complex adaptive organization?)

3. Find the items where change is possible (i.e. that offer lower costs/time to change…but not too low!) 

4. Initiate nudges (as micro-projects) to probe via small changes to the items.

Note how this is the polar opposite of defining a future state, and constructing a big project or transformation to get there, from the current state.

Let’s dig a little deeper into the unique vocabulary that Snowden uses (but if you’re still wondering about “estuarine”, then you’ll have to find your answers here).

• Actants - anyone or anything who is acting in the system (“manageable items”)

To build a list of actants (to plot in our map), we explore three kinds:

• Constraints -  anything that shapes and influences a system, affecting patterns and possibilities in it. Examples include an organization’s policies, structure, and norms. (Think: Conway’s Law.)

• Constructors - elements that produce consistent, replicable, reliable transformations through various mechanisms. Examples include: rituals, processes, habits, roles, artifacts, rules, etc. (Think: ways of working)

• Actors - anyone or anything who can act with intelligence and intention. Examples include: individuals, roles, teams. (Think: org structure and leadership structure)

These should zero in on the things that are “keeping you up at night,” as leaders. Since they are “manageable”, you know something can be done (something should be done!), but also know that the line from change-to-outcome is non-deterministic.

So with this set of items, rated by the energy required to induce a change, you can begin to plot a “direction of travel”, for a journey of change. Not a desired destination, but the first steps in the path. [Notice how different this is from a goal-setting process like OKRs.] 

The strategy that forms (from Estuarine Mapping) is a set of possibilities, in the form of micro-projects, that target lower-energy items where change might unlock desirable emergent outcomes. We don’t know (can’t know), so we run it as an experiment.

Setting this desired “direction of travel” can help unleash autonomous teams to run their own experiments, in their local context, in the same direction, yielding aligned experimentation.

The system will evolve and change with the first micro-project, so monitoring the results and updating the map is a continuous activity. The map is a living document, and should evolve with your evolving system of work.

So this wraps up our four-part series on the Strategy 5x5 facilitation canvas. Hopefully, today’s examples convince you that introducing them into your leadership team doesn’t require a dramatic change to your current practice. I bet you do something like a V2MOM (or Decision Stack) already today.

Also note that you can “roll your own” decision framework, and form a customized possibility space, better suited for your current context. Start small and simple, to match your current practice, and build from there.

Your journey to greater strategic capability can be framed with the Strategy 5x5. Just grow your capability by swapping in new decision frameworks when you’re ready for (or in need of) new approaches.