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Why you don’t want to future-proof your business

“What can a business leader do to future-proof their business?”

This is a question I’m seeing and hearing everywhere. It pops up in the questions that I get from clients, interviewers and audiences. Authors and thought leaders are posing it in their content and in publications.

This has made me start to think more deeply about the question and, importantly, the pre-conceived ideas that sit behind it. And as a result, I’ve reached the belief that…

You should NOT try to ‘future-proof’ your business.

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Exploring PROJECTIFY with Mykel Dixon – Projectifying Your Business

It’s Monday morning and you want to start projectifying your strategy, but then the questions start to come…

Where do I begin? What’s the first thing that I do? What do I want to avoid? What does it mean for my business’s culture?

In final episode of the PROJECTIFY interview series with Mykel Dixon, these are the questions that we explore.

I discuss how starting has to begin with ‘purpose’. You need to know where you want to take your business or you have no direction for the strategy journey. It can be ethereal and aspirational or as straightforward as continuing to do what has been successful for you. However, you need a strategic model from which to build.

From there it’s as simple as identifying the 3 projects that will allow you to realise the improvement opportunities that will unlock that strategic purpose. Not just any 3 projects but the most important 3.

Then you appoint 3 teams of 5 people with the skills, knowledge and experience necessary to create valuable strategic outcomes from those projects…and get started! By doing it, you will gain clarity around what you need to do next. You’ll also learn what will make you better at your strategy-making activities – you build ‘project muscle’.

 

Myke and I also talk about the ‘C-word’ – is what we’re trying to shape a Projectified Culture?! I share my perspective that what you’re actually doing when you projectify your strategy is ‘cultural gardening’. As a business leader, you’re creating an environment where a certain type of culture will thrive. You’re creating fertile ground for your people’s culture to flourish and bear fruit that nourishes opportunity for both the business and the people in the business.

We wrap up our discussion by talking about the sort of thinking that needs to be avoided if you want to move your strategic activity from the static, ineffective world of traditional business strategy to a dynamic, adaptive world where strategy-making is driving the business forward. Where you’re nimble enough to not only respond to emerging and disruptive forces but become the disruptive force that your competitors are responding to. Where you become remarkable in your customers eyes and those ‘remarks’ draw new customers to your door. Where you shape a workplace that not only attracts and retains the best and brightest but makes all of your people their very best.

Whether you’ve watched every episode in this series, caught the majority or only managed to see one or two, it’s my profound hope that you found some tidbits of value among our ramblings. Above all else, I truly appreciate the gift of your time and attention – I know that it doesn’t come cheaply in today’s world.

Of course, if the idea of projectifying your strategic endeavours intrigues you and you’d like dig a bit deeper – want to learn more – then you can get in touch here. We’ll work together to see what approach might be right for you and your business or team.

As always, I also hope you’ll share the thoughts and experiences that come from your strategy-making activities – your challenges, your successes and what you’ve learned in shaping your business for the future.

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Exploring PROJECTIFY with Mykel Dixon – The Power of People

As we near the end of my discussions with Mykel Dixon, this episode explores what I’ve learned in developing the concepts contained in PROJECTIFY and in applying those ideas in the real world. How the power of this approach isn’t in the projects – projects are the just the key that unlocks the power of people.

In episode eight of this interview series, Mykel and I discuss how the most surprising thing that came out of the research that I did for the book was the ‘Progress Principle‘. The often misunderstood quality of meaningful progress as a driver for human endeavour. It is all the more intriguing as I’ve started to see the intrinsic motivation that progress brings, manifest itself in the people and organisations I’ve worked with.

 

We also talk about how the most rewarding thing I’ve experienced in applying these approaches in the business environment are the truly amazing business outcomes people deliver when we trust them to make a difference. When we give them the freedom to shape the future of the business. We discuss how these outcomes are not just confined to their strategic project activities but also filters into other aspects of their working life.

A subtle part of what I’ve uncovered in developing and applying this strategy-making approach is that becoming a nimble and adaptive business requires something more profound than a structured framework for pursuing your strategic objectives. Sure, projectifying the execution of strategy allows you to consistently and persistently pursue your strategic aspirations and adapt to emerging changes in the business landscape. But the most important aspect of strategic projects – when used effectively – is they allow the organisation to tap into your people’s skills, experiences and innate human desire to be part of something bigger.  They create workforce motivation by giving people a purpose to be motivated by – motivation that manifests itself as ownership not just compliance. It creates engagement by giving people meaningful work to be engaged in and a sense of progress that makes them want to engage more deeply.

When you unlock the power of people they drive your strategy forward because they experience the difference that future-focused work makes. The business not only progresses the strategic agenda, but business leaders can base that agenda on better insights into what will make the business stronger – for your shareholders and in the eyes of your customers.

In next week’s final episode of this interview series, we touch on some final thoughts around how to lead a projectified strategy-making approach.

As always, I also hope you’ll share the thoughts and experiences that come from your strategy-making activities – your challenges, your successes and what you’ve learned in shaping your business for the future.

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Exploring PROJECTIFY with Mykel Dixon – Empower Your Team

What does a projectified approach to business strategy look like in practice? How does it look for your people? How does it impact you as a manager?

The seventh episode of my interview with Mykel Dixon explores these questions…and a few more. We discuss how the effective use of projects to execute your business strategy manifests itself in the business – how it empowers your team and leverages leadership across the enterprise. We talk about how projectifying your strategy-making starts by creating consistent and persistent strategic activity. But, in its highest form, it makes your people the strategic engine that drives the business forward and allows its leaders to be the navigation system that directs that strategic momentum.

Myke and I chat about the liberating nature of a strategic environment where your people are empowered to move the business toward the future it aspires to. How it creates leadership bandwidth that spreads the heavy-lifting of leadership across the organisation. It frees up the business’s senior managers to blaze the future direction of the strategic journey. It gives your people the platform and ‘permission’ to lead…with their skills, their commitment, their experience or by enabling others to be their very best.

Finally, we talk about the power of circles over triangles when tapping into the capabilities and knowledge of your staff. This ‘tribal perspective’ on the relationship between the business and its people allows you shift from a Pareto world where 20 percent of the effort yields 80 percent of the strategic value toward one where 90 percent of your strategic activity satisfies 100 percent of the needs of your business and its customers. Where your people are the greatest source of strategic opportunity as well as the driving force behind translating that opportunity into business practice.

In the final episodes of this interview series, we continue discussing how to lead a projectified strategy-making approach. How, once on the strategic journey, you extract ever-greater mileage from your strategic activities.

As always, I also hope you’ll share the thoughts and experiences that come from your strategy-making activities – your challenges, your successes and what you’ve learned in shaping your business for the future.

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Exploring PROJECTIFY with Mykel Dixon – Sustaining the Strategic Journey

So, your business has carefully created a strategic roadmap and now you’ve embarked on the strategic journey…

How do you sustain that journey? How do you ensure that it remains relevant with a laser focus on your strategic goals? How do you pivot when the strategic landscape changes and you need to respond to emerging issues or opportunities?

The sixth episode of my interview with Mykel Dixon is a discussion about how you maintain the strategic journey. We discuss how the best way to make your strategic endeavours perpetual is to ensure that your strategic projects are not. We talk about how using short-duration projects as stepping stones toward your strategic goals allows you to break those objectives down into manageable, achievable steps. We riff on how it creates an immediacy to your strategic execution that allows it to compete with the daily urgent and important – the business of busyness.

Myke and I chat about the fact that the strategic journey shouldn’t just be meandering in the business wilderness. It should be something that business leaders create forward momentum around. To do that you need to be intentional about not only initiating strategic projects but also bringing them to a powerful conclusion. You need to constantly re-connect your strategic activity to the business value that a nimble, adaptive strategy can deliver.

For individual projects this means declaring clearly defined endpoints from the outset – what strategic outcome you’re looking to deliver and in what timeframe. Importantly, you want the project team to shape this endpoint so they feel a sense of commitment to its realisation. When that endpoint is reached you want to look at it from 3 perspectives:

  1. Look back. Determine if the intended outcome was delivered and what the team learned from its delivery that can be applied in the future.
  2. Celebrate and communicate. Celebrate any accomplishments and communicate the project outcomes more broadly across the organisation.
  3. Move forward. Determine what you do with what the project has told you – do you continue to develop the project idea, do you operationalise it or do you shelve/kill the project because it doesn’t create the business value you’d hoped.

For your overall strategic portfolio – the strategic projects that you’re undertaking at any given time – you want to create a routine where you regularly assess that project mix. You want to ensure that:

  • Your projects have forward momentum and aren’t foundering,
  • The portfolio is made of the projects that represent your highest strategic priorities, and
  • You capture any new project ideas that are emerging out of your strategic activities.

This not only connects the projects your business is undertaking to the strategic outcomes that you want to deliver, it also connects your people to your business’s strategic purpose.

In the remaining episodes of this interview series, we discuss how to lead a projectified strategy-making approach. How to effectively use the strategic journey to shape your organisation and your workplace into the business you aspire to become.

As always, I also hope you’ll share the thoughts and experiences that come from your strategy-making activities – your challenges, your successes and what you’ve learned in shaping your business for the future.

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Exploring PROJECTIFY with Mykel Dixon – Creating A Strategic Roadmap

So how do you effectively initiate your business’s strategic journey? How do you transverse the uncertain terrain of the future business environment? Most importantly, how do you ensure that your people join you on that journey and contribute in a meaningful way?

In the fifth installment of my interview series with Mykel Dixon, we get into the nitty-gritty of undertaking the strategic journey. We talk about the initial steps you need to take to begin projectifying your strategic journey and how to motivate your people to be a part of it. Like any journey it starts with a clear idea of where you’re going and how to get there – it starts with a strategic roadmap.

But strategy-making is not a journey that’s undertaken on well-charted roads and clearly defined paths. As discussed previously, it is a constantly changing journey over uncertain terrain. So this ‘roadmap’ looks more like a topographical map than a Melways directory. Navigating it is more route-finding and exploration than reading street signs and following directions Siri’s directions.

In this episode, Myke and I discuss how an effective roadmap connects the project framework to your strategic intent via the improvement opportunities that will lead you to your long-term strategic objectives. We talk about how creating a strategic roadmap that links the initial strategic steps to your long-term strategic objectives generates intrinsic motivation within your workforce. Motivation that will not only sustain your strategic activities. It will make them more creative, more productive and more collaborative the further you journey into your business’s future.

Putting in place a strategic roadmap that commits your organisation to the strategic journey, yet acknowledges the uncertainty of that journey, ensures that your strategic activities provide valuable insights into the next leg of that journey. It ensures that your strategic resources are invested in the most important activities for progressing your strategic aims. It also allows your people to clearly see how the strategic work they are being asked to do, shapes the future direction of the business and their workplace.

In the upcoming episodes of this interview series, we discuss what you need to do once the strategic journey is underway. How to effectively use that journey to shape your organisation into the business you hope to become.

As always, I also hope you’ll share the thoughts and experiences that come from your strategy-making activities – your challenges, your successes and what you’ve learned in shaping your business for the future.

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The Project Framework
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Exploring PROJECTIFY with Mykel Dixon – The Project Framework

What is an effective strategic project – one that will maximise the business’s opportunity to create the future that it aspires to? How to do you create and execute projects so that strategic activity is driving the business forward? How do you, as a business leader, use a project framework to move from managing your people’s resistance to change to enabling your people to adapt the organisation to the change that is all around them?

In the fourth episode of my interview with Mykel Dixon, we dive into these questions and get more specific about how to effectively projectify your strategy-making. We discuss how to create projects that move the organisation from the ineffective world of major transformational change to an environment where your strategic activities drive opportunity – market opportunities for the business and opportunity for the people in the business.

Myke and I talk about how the right types of projects create shared purpose where your people are not just cogs in the machine – asked to contribute to the business’s strategic activities in indiscriminate, uncertain ways – but are given clear line of sight to how their work contributes to the business’s strategic goals. By creating a sense of individual purpose and connecting it to the organisation’s strategic priorities you give these projects meaning. By supporting and enabling your project teams in an intentional way, you maximise the opportunity to deliver those projects successfully – to make strategic progress. As a result, your people are given a chance to see how their work contributes meaningfully to the strategic direction of the business and are motivated to continue making strategic progress.

So, by putting in place the right sort of project framework, you ensure that strategy isn’t just something you have. It’s something that you do as a part of your operational fabric and manifests itself as part of your organisational identity.

I hope you’ve had an enjoyable holiday break and find that the final few episodes of this interview series will provide you with some ‘food for thought’ as you shape your business or team for success in 2019.

As always, I also hope you’ll share the thoughts and experiences that come from your strategy-making activities – your challenges, your successes and what you’ve learned in shaping your business for the future.

 

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PROJECTIFY Interview - A Two-Way Bridge
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Exploring PROJECTIFY with Mykel Dixon – A Two-Way Bridge

In this third episode of my interview with cultural architect, Mykel Dixon, we start to explore the crux of projectifying your strategy-making. We discuss how the exceptional businesses of the future will be the product of exceptional workplaces. I talk about how strategic projects are the two-way bridge that can connect a business’s strategic intent and the workplace that will allow that intent to be realised.

Myke and I play with this idea that strategic projects create the opportunity to meaningfully engage a business’s people in shaping its future. Once people see how their endeavours are contributing to that future – progressing the organisation’s strategic aspirations – they become motivated to contribute more and make greater progress. This creates an environment where not only are the business’s strategic goals being progressed in an intentional way, but you’re shaping the sort of workplace where that progress has broad-based engagement and is intrinsically motivated.

In upcoming episodes of this interview series, we’ll dig deeper into some of the fundamental steps you need to take if you want to make your strategic activities part of your operational fabric. Most importantly, we’ll explore some of the opportunities to engage your people in strategy-making that allows your business to constantly evolve and thrive in the shifting business landscape.

I hope you’re enjoying these discussions and you’ll continue to follow along as we explore how projectifying your strategy builds a bridge between the business and your people. A bridge that allows you to adapt at the pace of change and seize the opportunities that change creates.

I also hope you’ll share the thoughts and experiences that come from your strategy-making activities – your challenges, your successes and what you’ve learned in shaping your business for the future.

 

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Exploring PROJECTIFY with Mykel Dixon – An Illusion of Certainty

In this second episode of my interview with cultural architect, Mykel Dixon, we discuss how strategy-making must exist in ‘layers’ if a business is to effectively adapt and evolve in today’s highly uncertain business environment. We talk about how your strategic perspective can’t be a singular focus on high-level strategic objectives. It needs to include the detailed strategic activity that is required to turn those objectives into reality. Importantly, the high-level, medium-term and detailed strategic perspectives should be connected in an intentional way.

Myke and I explore some of the reasons why we get business strategy wrong and how the need to create the illusion of certainty has turned strategy into a static, analytical affair. As a result, most strategic plans become a manifesto for doing what you’ve always done. Their execution then lacks the dynamic qualities that are required to make strategy the force that drives your business forward.

We begin to touch on how meaningful collaboration – rather than purely effective communication – is the power we’re looking to unlock when we projectify our strategic endeavours. This allows you to leverage the strategic foresight of the business’s management team as well as your people’s detailed understanding of the frontlines of business operations.

In upcoming episodes of this interview series, we’ll start to explore some of the key concepts and cutting-edge research that the book is founded on. We’ll discuss some of the fundamental steps you need to take if you want to make your strategic activities part of your operational fabric. Most importantly, we dig into some of the opportunities to engage your people in strategy-making that allows your business to constantly evolve and adapt to the shifting business landscape.

I hope you’ll follow along as we roll out this discussion and see how projectifying your strategy builds a bridge between the business and your people. A bridge that allows you to adapt at the pace of change and seize the opportunities that change creates.

I also hope you’ll share the thoughts and experiences that come from your strategy-making activities – your challenges, your successes and what you’ve learned in shaping your business for the future.

 

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Exploring PROJECTIFY with Mykel Dixon – The Case for Change

Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with my friend and colleague Mykel Dixon and explore some of the ideas that sit behind my book PROJECTIFY. In this first episode, we riff about why the pace of change isn’t what makes today’s highly dynamic business environment unique – it’s the pervasiveness of that change. We discuss the perils that exist for business leaders that aren’t intentional about responding to this dynamic and how businesses that are in traditionally-entrenched industries might be at the greatest risk.

Over the course of this interview series, we’ll explore some of the key concepts and cutting-edge research that the book is founded on. We discuss some of the fundamental steps you need to take if you want to make your strategic activities part of your operational fabric. Most importantly, we dig into some of the opportunities to engage your people is strategy-making that allows your business to constantly evolve and adapt to the shifting business landscape.

I hope you’ll follow along as we roll out this discussion and see how projectifying your strategy builds a bridge between the business and your people. A bridge that allows you to adapt at the pace of change and seize the opportunities that change creates.

I also hope you’ll share your thoughts and experiences about undertaking strategy in today’s ever-busier, distracted business world.

 

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