All Posts in Strategy and Tactics

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Once upon a time, when the world was younger, PCs and Windows were fun, and hair covered more of my scalp, I was going to make my fortune with a decision-support system far superior and more cost-effective than any available from that era’s industry leaders.

Sadly, my plans to market a digital coin tosser, Magic 8 Ball, and dart board fell victim to my deep-seated personal laziness and lack of initiative, so it’s only now that, thanks to others willing to leap across the digital chasm, you can find smartphone apps with some of the capabilities my younger self had imagined.

Which adds another dimension to the issue last week’s KJR raised: In addition to choosing whether to trust your gut or to depend on evidence and logic, you have a third alternative. You can rely on randomness to get you through the day.

This isn’t as preposterous as it sounds.

Start where evidence and logic work best. It’s when you can articulate the decision criteria that matter, identify reliable sources of information regarding the criteria, and … and this matters a lot … you’re confident your circumstances are stable enough that the criteria and evidence you use making the decision will continue to be valid when the present has fled and the future arrives.

Also, for evidence and logic to be useful, the time available for making the decision in question has to be long enough that the decision, once finally made, hasn’t been superseded by events.

Often, evidence and logic only take you so far — to narrowing down the alternatives to two or three that are close enough to a tie as makes no difference.

Evidence and logic often reach a point of diminishing returns. Once they do, you might as well toss a coin or throw a dart as invest in any further information-gathering and analysis.

Or, you might trust your instincts — your ever-popular-but-over-rated gut, which is more accurately labeled the voice of your experience.

How’s that work? It comes down to pattern-matching. You accumulate you experience into a sort of personal database. It contains situations you’ve faced, divided into categories. For each category it records how you or someone nearby handled the situation and how it came out.

When a new situation comes up, you find the situation category that matches best, and apply its context and lessons to what you’re facing now.

I am, of course, oversimplifying, but you get the idea. Instinct works well when new situations closely resemble past ones. It misfires, and misfires badly, when the new situations superficially appear to resemble past ones but are actually quite different beasts entirely.

Blindly trusting your gut will often cause you to hit the bulls-eye, but it will be a bulls-eye drawn on the wrong target.

If your experience isn’t truly relevant to what you’re deciding about right now, trusting a Magic 8 Ball is probably wiser than trusting your gut.

Then there are time-bound decisions — situations where being right enough now is superior to being spot-on too late. Imagine, for example, you’re playing tennis and need to decide whether to hit a lob, a ground stroke, or a drop shot. Figuring out the perfect tactic might call for as much as 30 seconds of analysis. Sadly, while you were scratching your head the ball went right on by.

In business you rarely have as much time as you’d like to make a decision, but usually have enough to avoid being reckless. So to leave you with something more than a platitude but less than a recipe, here are the steps you should take when making any important decision:

> Know your deadline. If you don’t, you’ll miss it.

> Define your decision-process. How do you plan to you apply evidence and logic to the decision? If you don’t define your decision process you’ll drown in disorganized factoids.

> Listen to the voice of your experience. Listen to it, don’t obey it. Especially, figure out how to articulate it so you understand why it’s telling you what it’s telling you.

> Narrow your alternatives. As mentioned earlier, more often than not all the evidence and logic in the world won’t get you to the answer. It will, however, get you to a short list of good answers.

> Throw the dice. You have to get from your short list to a choice, and you’ve already exhausted the other possibilities.

Depressing? Nah. You’ll never be certain anyway, because in the end, all your evidence and all your experience are about the past.

But your decisions are all about the future.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

We need some help.

“We” is Dave Kaiser, my co-author, and myself. The help we need: Figuring out the best title for our upcoming book.

The book starts with a premise more familiar to members of the KJR community than to the management world at large. The premise: There’s no such thing as an IT project — it’s always about business change or what’s the point?

We use this premise to launch what we think covers the ground of what it takes to achieve intentional business change. We don’t dive to great depths. We’ve tried to write a handbook, not a tome, for three reasons: (1) a tome would be inestimably dreary to read; (2) a tome would be even more inestimably dreary to write; (3) in any event, neither of us, separately or in combination, is remotely qualified to write about this at the tome level.

Nor, we suspect, is anyone else.

Until now, when titling a book, the challenges haven’t been conceptual. My book about IT leadership is Leading IT. When I wrote about the principles to follow in order to run a modern IT organization, Keep the Joint Running — a tie-back to this, my weekly column, seemed reasonable, as it was where I introduced most of the ideas incorporated into the book.

Naming my 54-page project management book was even easier. It presents the bare bones and only the bare bones of the discipline, so Bare Bones Project Management jumped directly from the Introduction to the folder name without any conscious effort at all.

Even The Moral Hazard of Lime Daiquiris, the worst-selling novel Dave and I co-authored (it is, by the way, an outstanding Chanukwansamas gift for everyone on your list who’s (1) a reader; (2) has questionable taste; and (3) wants to read something nobody else they know has read) made some sort of sense, as the trouble all started with two guys ordering lime daiquiris with the hope of achieving a morally questionable outcome, although not as morally grave as it turned out to be.

But now we find ourselves in a quandary. We like There’s no such thing as an IT project: Achieving intentional business change, but especially when separated from its subtitle, the main message is negative.

On the other hand, we find Achieving intentional business change to be, while accurate, a phrase that promises dullness.

It also leaves out the handbook part, which we think is important — we’re trying to identify what matters, all with enough substance to point readers in the right direction but not so much substance that they get stuck in one section for so long they forget what they read in the three preceding sections.

So, we thought, maybe it should be There’s no such thing as an IT project: A business change handbook. Or, if we do lead on a positive note, A business change handbook: Why there’s no such thing as an IT project.

Don’t really like that one? Neither do we.

And so, as we’ve read that crowdsourcing is supposed to achieve brilliant results without our having to work all that hard … how about it?

What’s that you say? You need to know what the book actually covers? Alright — it covers the management culture change needed for intentional business change to happen; redefining the business/IT relationship so everyone focuses on the change instead of who’s to blame for nothing important happening; how to fix Agile so it delivers business change instead of software; how IT and business operations fits into the whole picture; replacing IT governance with business change governance; IT regaining its place of leadership in defining business strategy; and a very brief look at the seven disciplines organizations must master in making intentional change happen.

Please leave your suggestions as Comments, to facilitate the whole crowdsourcing thing — presumably it’s only crowdsourcing if everyone who looks sees all the other ideas already posted.

We do reserve the right to ignore all of you, especially if our publisher disagrees — we do need to acknowledge their expertise in such matters, not to mention recognizing the critical role the fine art of sucking-up plays in our working relationship with our editor.

But if you do submit the winning entry, what you’ll get in return is us telling everyone we know what a wonderful and creative person you are.

Who else would make you a promise like that?

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