All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

The first task of leadership is setting direction.

It’s also the most confusing, largely because, if you peruse the available leadership and management literature and leaven your findings with the maunderings of management consultants, you’ll find at least six different categories of direction-setting planning to choose from: (1) Vision, (2) strategy, (3) strategic planning, (4) mission, (5) values, and (6) key messages.

There are probably more, but let’s stick with these so we don’t overwhelm the already overburdened.

Vision is an explanation, in primary colors, of how a leader would like tomorrow to be different from yesterday. Vision can be about the leader’s organization, its work products, or a constituency’s perceptions.

Vision is at risk of being the most self-important of the directions. If that point isn’t clear, imagine you hear someone in a leadership role say, “My vision for our products is …”

“My” vision? “MY” vision? Vision had better be the result of multiple conversations within the leadership team at least, and even better if it’s the result of a wide variety of conversations, so that “Our” vision is a meaningful designation.

Strategy is a succinct explanation of what an organization plans to win on (if it’s for an entire company). For IT and other segments of an organization, it’s the centerpiece of the value it’s going to create. So, a company’s strategy might be to win on price. IT’s strategy might be to enable and support opportunities for operational efficiencies throughout the enterprise.

Strategic planning might apply to the vision, or to strategy. Either way the strategic plan lists the steps an organization will take to make the vision, strategy, or both real.

Mission explains why an organization exists. Also known as a charter, it’s a prosaic understanding of the reasons the organization’s leaders have decided to add this box to the organizational chart.

“Mission” is often confused with mission statements. It’s an easy conflation to make. Just think of it this way: Everyone in or near an organization needs to understand its mission – what it’s supposed to do and deliver. “Mission statements,” in contrast, rarely have any actual meaning and may be safely ignored by everyone involved.

Values (and their associated “values statement”) are a safe alternative to leaders having the courage to create and lead a business that exhibits behavior we would consider moral were an individual human being to exhibit it.

Somewhere and sometime in my untraceable past I suggested that “It isn’t ethics unless it hurts,” the point being that if a decision does no harm and doesn’t hurt then it’s nothing more than “moral luck.”

Also in my distant past was the admirable “gray zone” training I participated in during my tenure at Perot Systems. Its purpose: to help its employees recognize that ethical decision-making isn’t just hard the way digging a ditch is hard. It’s also hard the way differential calculus is hard. Which is to say, there’s little point in admonishing employees to “do the right thing” because often, figuring out the right choice is complicated and ambiguous.

Values, that is, have the same relationship to values statements that missions have to mission statements.

Key messages are a tool leaders use to communicate. Out of everything the leader might want their audience to understand about the direction they’ve decided on, their key messages about that direction are seven or so simple declarative or imperative sentences that summarize it. So key messages aren’t directions leaders set. They’re a vital means by which leaders set whatever the direction is they need to set.

Bob’s last word: Setting a well-chosen direction is satisfying. It’s important, and, done well, is a key ingredient in an organization’s success.

But when setting direction, effective leaders don’t lose sight of the Edison Ratio, Thomas Edison’s observation that genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

Which means that when an organization’s leaders choose its direction they’ve expended a whopping one percent of the total effort needed for success to happen.

Bob’s sales pitch: As I wind down Keep the Joint Running, I’d like to make sure I cover topics of interest. That is, topics of interest to KJR’s subscribers, not just of interest to me.

So please let me know of any topics that fit these three criteria: (1) their appeal shouldn’t be too narrow; (2) I should know enough about them to have formed an opinion worth paying attention to; and (3) I haven’t already beat them to death in previous posts.

To let me know, either use the Contact form, or post a Comment.

This week in CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide: “6 ways CIOs sabotage their IT consultant’s success.” The point? It’s up to IT’s leaders to make it possible for the consultants they engage to succeed. If they weren’t serious about the project, why did they sign the contract?

Comments

|In: Cognitive Enterprise|Last Updated:

What’s the difference between a “Digital Twin” and a simulation? Or a model?

Not much, except maybe Digital Twins have a more robust connection between production data and the simulation’s behavior.

Or, as explained in a worth-your-while-if-you’re-interested-in-the-subject article titled “How to tell the difference between a model and a Digital Twin,” (Louise Wright & Stuart Davidson, SpringerOpen.com¸ 3/11,2020), “… a Digital Twin without a physical twin is a model.”

Which leaves open the question of what to call a modeled or simulated physical thingie.

Anyway, like models, simulations, and, for that matter, data mining, “Digital Twins” can become little more than a more expensive and cumbersome alternative to the Excel-Based Gaslighting (EBG) already practiced in many businesses.

If you aren’t familiar with the term EBG that isn’t surprising as I just made it up. What it is:

Gaslighting is someone trying to persuade you that up is the same as down, black is the same as white, and in is the same as out only smaller. EBG is what politically-oriented managers do when they tweak and twiddle an Excel model’s parameters to “prove” their plan’s business case.

Count on less-than-fully-scrupulous managers fiddling with the data cleansing and filtering built into their Digital Twin’s inputs so it yields the guidance the manager in question’s gut insists is right. Unless you also program digital twins of these managers so you can control their behavior, Digital Twin Gaslighting is just about inevitable.

Not that simulations, models, and/or Digital Twins are bad things. Quite the opposite. As Scott Lee and I point out in The Cognitive Enterprise, “If you can’t model you can’t manage.” Our point: managers can only make rational decisions to the extent they can predict the results of a change to a given business input or parameter. Models and simulations are how to do this. And, I guess, Digital Twins.

But then there’s another, complementary point we made. We called it the “Stay the Same / Change Ratio.” It’s the gap between the time and effort needed to implement a business change to the time the business change will remain relevant.

Digital Twinning is vulnerable to this ratio. If the time needed to program, test (never ignore testing!) and deploy a Digital Twin is longer than the period of time through which its results remain accurate, Digital Twinning will be a net liability.

Building a “Digital Twin,” simulation, or model of any kind is far from instantaneous. The business changes Digital Twinning aspires to help businesses cope with will arrive in a steady stream, starting on the day twin development begins. And the time needed to develop these twins isn’t trivial. As a result, the twin in question will always be a moving target.

How fast it moves, compared to how fast the Digital Twin programming team can dynamically adjust the twin’s specifications, determines whether investing in the Digital Twin is a good idea.

So simulating a wind tunnel makes sense. The physics of wind doesn’t change.

But the behavior of mortgage loan applicants, is, to choose a contrasting example, less stable, not to mention the mortgage product development team’s ongoing goal of creating new types of mortgage, each of which will have to be twinned as well.

Bob’s last word: You might think the strong connection to business data intrinsic to Digital Twinning would protect a twin from becoming obsolete.

But that’s an incomplete view. As Digital Twins are, essentially, software models of physical something-or-others, their data coupling can keep the parameters that drive them accurate.

That’s good so far as it goes. But if what needs updating in the Digital Twin is its logic, all the tight data coupling will give you is a red flag that someone needs to update it.

Which means the budget for building Digital Twins had better include the funds needed to maintain them, not just the funds needed to build them.

Bob’s sales pitch: All good things must come to an end. Whether you think KJR is a good thing or not, it’s coming to an end, too – the final episode will appear December 18th of this year. That’s should give you plenty of time to peruse the Archives to download copies of whatever material you like and might find useful.

On CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide: “6 ways CIOs sabotage their IT consultant’s success.” The point? It’s up to IT’s leaders to make it possible for the consultants they engage to succeed. If they weren’t serious about the project, why did they sign the contract?

Comments