In April of 2015, the McKinsey Global Institute published a report titled: ‘The four global forces breaking all the trends.’ I would argue that what McKinsey defined were not forces or disruptions, but new trends — which simultaneously, with related causation or not, the other “long-established patterns” ceased to remain as important or relevant has they had in the past. In other words, as these four items trended, other things stopped trending.
How to Make Strategy Stick
How to Make Strategy Stick For my Pinchot class on Sustainability and Strategy, my students nominated the topic of making strategy stick as their discussion topic. Please join them in offering questions, comments and contributions to this list of approaches for how to make strategy stick. Have a good strategy. While some consultants and advisors start …
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How to Derive Strategies from Scenarios
The future is complex and the paths forward a messy one. That has to be agreed to first. Any organization that thinks it controls its own destiny and can create the future in whole cloth does not need to read this article. For those who do agree that the future is messy, they must also acquiesce that navigating uncertainty requires sophistication.
Will Chocolate Save the World?
Keep an eye on chocolate. It may save the world. In the scenario planning discipline we call side conversations about potentially big things a weak signal. It is an early cry of “wolf” in a world filled with potential catastrophes. Sometimes, that cry is heard, and in the case of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, DDT was eradicated, albeit not until a decade after the book. But through action, Carson, the Environmental Defense Fund and thousands of individuals moved the federal government to a banning of DDT.
How to Think About Voting For Uncertainties in a Scenario Planning Project
Voting for uncertainties in a scenario planning project is counterintuitive and sometimes overwhelming. The list of items arrives for consideration from interviews and research in which the people voting didn’t likely participate. That means that people voting need to familiarize themselves with the items on the list.
Let Taylor Swift Help You Breakup with Your Strategic Plan
Strategy is messy, chaotic, and transformative, just like a youthful romance. You know you need to break up with your strategic plan. So who better than the Bard of Breakups herself to offer searing guidance on how to break with your strategic plan? Several years ago at a Microsoft analyst meeting, Steve Ballmer broke his promise not to go […]
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In an Uncertain World Scenario Planning Teaches Agility
Too often, managers and leaders focus on how to control the near-term without taking the time to consider if what they, and the organization they work for, are doing today, will be useful, valuable or applicable to some future state…
The Tens—IT Change Management
IT often drives change within organizations. This list of tens focuses on how IT can successfully implement new customer facing systems and infrastructure. Executive engagement Buy-in doesn’t cut it. If executives and organizational leaders don’t actively engage, drive and lead the new applications or infrastructure, change won’t happen. Executives need to understand that adoption arrives…
It’s Time to STOP Talking About Company Culture
Over the last month I keynoted the Chief Learning Officer Symposium and KMWorld. At both conferences, many speakers talked about the need to evolve, shift or otherwise change company culture. In some cases the shift was to support collaboration, in others knowledge sharing, and in still others, the need for…
