Amplify Festival 2015, June 3rd - Transformation & Strategy

Amplify Festival 2015, June 3rd - Transformation & Strategy

Prof. Stephanie Preston of the Ecological Neuroscience Laboratory at University of Michigan, at the breakfast panel on Wednesday conferred Lorna Ross’ point about how people seek out their own optimal paths despite what we try to get them to do.

“When people figure out the quickest steps they need to do on a web page, that becomes all they do. They don’t look at the menus.” It is not simply about doing something quickly, but about what creates the least cognitive load. Therefore, when we see busy web pages full of content and actions, it creates cognitive noise that overwhelms people with their design.

“Our old beliefs about growth were to build internally, or go out and buy it. Our belief is a third notion of leveraged growth through ecosystems,” said John Hagel from the Deloitte Center for the Edge. Mr. Hagel made three points about how ecosystems describe value.

 

Ecosystems are the new avenue through leveraged growth, by interconnecting complementing resources, where you can grow together through performance. Li & Fung grew into a $20B apparel business in China by doing none of the production themselves, and instead use a network of 15,000 partners to produce everything.

Ecosystems help to scale evolving functionality. Rather than build all the functionality themselves in-house, Charles Schwab, the US brokerage, expanded the capabilities available to their customer through their network of databases and partners.

Ecosystems allow distributed innovation. “Crowdsourcing innovation is very transactional in nature. I’m talking about a much more sustained relational innovation,” said John Hagel.

The ecosystems of manufacturers centered in Chongqing, China, wanted to compete with the Japanese automobile and motorcycle manufacturers. But rather than develop their own tightly integrated design, they chose to focus on a motorcycle with distinct independent modules. They then created a network of third party technical expertise that could build innovative modules. By focusing on fixed intervals of release, they could put out a new model of motorcycle every six months, while also reducing the retail price by 75%.

Sanjay Purohit, SVP & Global Head of Consulting at Infosys, enlightened us with a detailed story of how a company of 170,000 employees across 88 nationalities is reinventing itself. His key premise was the focus on high fidelity experiences as a function of the human effort needed to provide it. As he sketched it out on a simple curve, you can have three strategies for progress of an organization.

 

Strategy one, provide the same customer experience but reduce the effort needed, often through the use of productivity levers. Strategy two, keep the effort needed the same, but modify or improve the experience, often through technological levers. And finally Strategy three: improve both the experience and reduce human effort at the same time. This really requires a fresh approach with design thinking to the fundamentals.

This approach of Effort to Experience ratios guided them to redesign their work environments and the talent they seek and develop to focus on a more flexible approach to working.

“When we designed our workspaces, we converted them into design labs. In most corporate settings, you can’t write on surfaces around you. We changed our entire work environment so that you could write on any surface. Anything and everything we were doing was on the walls.

Another thing we tried to give them is the confidence that if in meetings, they felt that they did not need to be there, they could just walk out saying so. It gave the employees the confidence that they can do things differently and challenge the paradigms.”

Simon Wardley, all-round scientist with the CSC Leading Edge Forum, introduced us to a novel approach on how to create a map that aids us on setting and choosing business strategies. Such maps provide visual reasoning and high situation awareness, a significant advantage over most strategy documents that are simply descriptions in text.

To create a Wardley map, first you start with describing your value chain, and the components needed to deliver it, breaking down into the subcomponents that support them and so on.

But you also need time as a domain of your business strategy. You need to determine where along a maturity path that each component and subcomponent sits. For example, is it a newly emerging idea; has it been implemented in some uses; has it become mass-produced and commoditized for many; or has it turned into a utility service as it becomes ubiquitous.

This kind of strategy map (charting value chain across product evolution) does act like a real visual map. User needs tend to appear near the top end of the map (end result of the value chain), and towards the top right (where it has evolved into higher levels of stability). But you can also look at it in terms of where subcomponents of the value chain sit along their evolution, and how to help progress them. Perhaps a key subcomponent needs to mature toward commoditization beyond just available to a few. This provides possible strategy options to move in some direction in your company or industry.

See all the days at Amplify Festival:

  • June 1st - Innovation management (Dr. Norman Lewis, PwC), Video surveys (Matthew Barnett, Verbate)
  • June 2nd - Futurism (Stuart Candy, U of Toronto), Healthcare Design (Lorna Ross, Mayo Clinic), Bitcoin (Jon Matonis) 
  • June 3rd -  Ecosystems (John Hagel, Deloitte), Company Transformation (Sanjay Purohit, Infosys), and Strategy Planning (Simon Wardley, LEF)
  • June 4th - Innovating Publishing (Paul Cameron, Booktrack), Education (Heather McGowan), Long-term Innovation (James Moody, Sendle)
  • June 5th - Aging (Michael Hodin, Ruth Finkelstein, Ken Smith, Mark Halverson)

 

Rawn Shah is a Director & Social Business Architect with Rising edge, an independent consultancy focused on work culture, collaboration, and the future of work. He is also Partner at Ethos VO, Ltd., the innovation networked organisation in the UK. He is based in Tucson, Arizona, USA, and can be reached on Twitter, or LinkedIn.


 

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