The Overlap Blog

When I went home to Virginia over Easter, I drove to Charlottesville to visit my undergrad alma mater and have coffee with Jeanne Liedtka at UVA’s Darden Graduate School of Business. Those of you who keep up with academic writing on “business design” have most likely read some of her articles for the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. Jeanne really regretted not being able to attend Overlap and wanted me to share with you all her interest in being included in any future collaboration that comes out of the event.

Personally, I’m also pleased to say she is definitely “our people” and I really enjoyed the hour we spent chatting - here are some of the highlights from our conversation:

On Strategic Planning

“Design thinking” (more on that term later) can give traditional strategic plannning a much needed overhaul. Rather than analyzing on past results to guess at an abstract future, design methods can be used to facilitate a different kind of strategic planning that is grounded in the realities of today. Most important, the design process emphasizes experiential learning and collaboration over analyze-and-decide processes - the benefits are:

• strategy is made real, rather than esoteric
• strategy formation is experienced
• strategy becomes a creative process, rather than simply a cognitive process
• strategic conversations become more authentic … because there are no facts and figures to hide behind

On Authenticity

Reality and authenticity have become more prominent in today’s culture … novels like the Da Vinci Code (historical fiction), reality television (real people in real situations), blogs (citizen journalism), vlogging, etc. However, authenticity is difficult at the senior ranks of a company because it can go against the cultural norms. The strategic planning process is a good place to practice authenticity by creating an experiential process. To statisfy authenticity, the strategic planning experience must:

• live in the objective reality between desired states
• feel and be genuine
• deal with real issues … tangible and not abstract
• require participation

On Participation

Participation among stakeholders outside the executive suite is vital in the strategy formation process. However, current cultural norms do not allow a participatory process … and experiential design methods can help. Here are some obstacles to be overcome:

• Strategy needs to be seen as something that everyone does … not just executives … and this perception must be overcome not only at the top, but also at the bottom of the organizational hierarchy.
• To get more participation, leaders should view their role not as making decide-and-announce decisions, but rather as of defining boundaries of the strategic questions for larger teams to “design” strategies around.
• Boundaries focus creative effort and foster more emotional engagement because people understand the boundary and how they can influence what’s inside of it.

On DESIGN

We talked about the problem using the word design with non-designer executives - we both shared experience that the word is very limiting because their mental models for design have been so confined by the business press that it’s hard move them away from the IDEO/iPod mindset. Jeanne is moving away from ever mentioning “design” to senior executives. There is a similar issue with the word innovation - it’s too abstract and means too many things to too many people.

She has started to distill these concepts down to what executives are really asking for when the ask for innovation. What they want is organic growth. Especially mature companies require organic growth because they hit a point where integrating mergers is more and more difficult and costly. Organic growth/innovation requires an entirely different kind of leadership than M&A activity: such leadership requires a creative type, not a banker.

A note on Organic Growth from Scott - Revenue growth is organic if it comes about from increased market share, price premium, and/or output (top line revenues) that is NOT the result of mergers, acquisitions, or takeovers. Therefore, this growth comes about through internal product development and product improvements within the company itself (hence the link to innovation). Apple’s creation of the iPod was organic growth; Yahoo’s acquisition of Overture was NOT organic growth.

On the Needed Business Case

Because so much of her work has involved management theory, Jeanne is particularly interested in finding companies willing to co-create some business cases that frame “Strategy as Experience.” Here are some criteria for good candidates:

• should be a practical example in real-time at a real company, rather than an academic hypothetical or reconstruction of a past event
• she’d like it to involve the use of artifacts that are currently foreign to most strategic planning process advocates
• it would be great it if i could be linked to real financial results; if not, at least linked to process/culture change
• should be a the executive level if at all possible.
• should involve the elements of good design (constraints, possibilities, uncertainties)

For further reading:

• Jim Gilmour on Authenticity
• Robert Fiddel, University of Maryland, History of Innovation
• Benedict, UT-Austin, Towards an Architecture of Reality

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 25th, 2006 at 11:40 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.