Category: strategy

Why New Strategies Come Up Short

~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

Someone had the idea to install a high-end Dyson hand drier in this bathroom. It’s more efficient, cleaner, and will decrease paper waste. It is, quite simply, a better mousetrap.

Except.

Except that the paper towels dispenser wasn’t removed. Maybe there was a good reason to do this, and maybe there wasn’t, but either way, it’s before noon and the  paper towel waste bin is overflowing. The new device, the new approach, is being undermined because no one had the guts to say “and we’re going to stop doing the old thing too.”

Strategy is about making choices.

Most of the time, our new strategies come up short not because we don’t have enough good new ideas, but because we’re scared to let go of the old ones. We are unwilling to stop doing the things that are comfortable that got us here–they feel like they form our identity, there are people who are accustomed to doing those old jobs, so let’s have our strategy be “in addition to” everything else rather than “instead of.”

That all sounds plausible enough, but the truth is we’ll never get to the other side of the pool if we keep clinging to the edge over here.

Driving at Night

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

I remember a conversation I had last year with one of Acumen’s East Africa Fellows.  We were talking about the faith it takes to walk an unknown path.  He shared that his father used to tell him, “You can only see a little ways in front of you when you’re driving in a car on a road in the dark of night, but that allows you to see far enough to eventually find your way to town.”

Much of what the world needs us to do is to walk untrodden paths. This requires more than just courage in the darkness.  While we only need to see a bit in front of us to travel far, it’s also true that we could have the brightest lights in the world and, if we have no idea where “town” is, we’ll never get there.

How do we balance knowing and not knowing? How do we avoid getting paralyzed – by trying to plan out every unknowable step along the way – while making sure we have a sense of our destination?

Part of the answer is imagining success.

Meaning, while we can only plan our next set of actions (as far as our lights can see), we can force ourselves to imagine what we will do when that step works out. And the next step. And the one after that.

Imagining this path of success helps me avoid becoming overwhelmed by a really nasty, thorny task that’s standing right in front of me.  It’s easy to say “let’s just get this part right, and we’ll figure out the rest if this bit works,” but that’s a big mistake.

Instead, walk all the way down that path of things going the way you hope they will, so that you can have the important and difficult conversation that starts with, “Then what?”  As in:

  • “We will succeed in getting key players in the organization to make the tough choices that they’ve been resisting.” “Then what?”
  • “Response rates on our new mobile phone survey will be high, and we’ll get new data that will be relevant to our driving repeat sales.” “Then what?”
  • “The big article that we’ve just submitted will get approved by the editor.” “Then what?”

Force yourself to figure out what happens when things go right, so that when they do you’ve got the next three steps lined up and you can step on the gas.  Otherwise, tomorrow’s victory will be a brief one.

Solving big thorny problems

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

I like to divide big thorny problems (aka “the fun ones”) into three parts:

  1. The easy bits
  2. Parts that will be hard to get done, that will take a lot of work, but where directionally I have a pretty good hunch about what the answer is
  3. Parts where I truly do not know the answer

I often find that the trick to making progress on these sorts of problems is to think about them as if everything in the first two buckets is solved.

For example, imagine you (as I am) are trying to transform your organization into one that systematically produces insights worth sharing, in order to transform your own work and the work of your peers.  Clearly, this is a big, thorny problem.  And there are limitless things you can do to work on this problem.  That’s your first challenge: where to start, and how to spend your time.

This is an idea we’re working on at Acumen – in order to “change the way the world tackles poverty” we need to push on our own ability, globally, to synthesize what we’re seeing on the front lines; turn what we are seeing into insights that drive how we make and manage investments, the types of funds we raise and deploy, how we invest in leaders, etc.; and share what we are learning with the world.

The core, hard parts of this problem that are staring us in the face are: how we go about creating the process and the ongoing culture change required to make everyone a more integral part of producing insights?  How do we take the amazing experiences and observations that are living in people’s heads, globally, and help get these ideas out more regularly in a more synthesized, formed way that can drive our own strategy and influence how we share what we are learning with the world?

When I was talking to my colleague Venu about taking this all on, we agreed, counter-intuitively, that all of that important work feels like a “bucket 2” problem.  Meaning, we don’t know exactly how to do it, it’s a lot to do and a long road ahead, but on some basic level we know how it will be solved, what the solution will feel like, and what the result will be if successful.

The part where we really didn’t know the answer was: imagine if we had, at our fingertips, a deep reservoir of our best insights – on everything from how cold chains could be improved in rural, developing markets to how to build business models with cross-subsidies that drive inclusiveness and reach to the poor – what would we do with those insights to drive large-scale improvements both in how we do our own work at Acumen and how the world at large addresses issues of poverty?  Yes, we know that we would share more of what we are learning, in blogs and articles and op eds, at conferences and the like, but that really doesn’t mean much.

If what we’re talking about is driving real change through insights, then the big questions are far beyond whether it will be valuable to have stronger, more codified insights on what we are learning on the front lines of the fight on poverty – of course it will.  But, before we start, we must be clear on how we will drive change once we have this deeper well of insights.  Will we drive big new initiatives like creating an Acumen publishing imprint akin to the McKinsey quarterly; will we start a large-scale global consulting practice to share insights with peers and those interested in getting into the space; will we create a filtering and voting process whereby the best ideas that bubble up are shared with a group of potential funders who will be given the opportunity to put capital behind the opportunities that have been surfaced?

None of those ideas is real, yet, not even a little bit.  But I’m sure we’d never get to thinking about them if we didn’t give ourselves and our team the piece of mind of knowing that we will pull off the hard bits, and it’s the unknown bits that we have to wrestle with from the outset.

If we put off the work on figuring out these sorts of truly big, truly hard questions in deference to the big but sort-of-known questions, that on some level we are putting off the hardest, most important work for later.