X : We need to adapt to our new reality.
Me : A question?
X : Should we start with organisation or operating model first?
Me : Neither. Start with doctrine i.e. basic principles of your company. This will lead you to landcape which will lead you to structure + operating model.
X : Don't we need to get the structure right though?
Me : Structure against what? If you don't understand the landscape that you operate in then how do you structure around it? How do you decide what your operating model is? Awareness comes first and that needs those principles.
X : Explain?
Me : Pretend you're running a tea shop (I'm a Brit, I like tea shops). First thing you need to do is to know who your users are - the public, the business for example (there are more like regulators etc).
... but just knowing the users is not enough, you need to know what they need i.e. a cup of tea, maybe something more like entertainment or a nice piece of fruitcake
... but just knowing what they need is not enough, you need to know what goes into making a cup of tea, the chain of chains that it is built upon. You need to know the details ...
... but knowing the details is not enough, there is a world of difference between a custom built kettle and one you buy from argos. so you need to understand what is being considered ... this is what we call a map ...
... now that we have a map, we have a common language where others can add components we are missing or discuss how we should think about those components ...
... because we have a common language, we can now challenge the assumptions because we are expressing our assumptions in the map. The key is to challenge the map (not the person) ... it's the map that's wrong ...
... as we build more maps, we discover we have duplication and bias between maps. We can literally see it by comparing maps and because we've now become good at challenging then we can remove it ...
... with our understand of the landscape, we can start to apply appropriate methods. All methods have a context where they work, there is no one size fits all ...
... we can embed challenge, communication (maps) and learning (i.e. which method goes where) through the use of pre and post mortems. We call this "spend control" and it's all about learning from those maps (i.e. data) rather than using data to justify a story we like.
... you have now completed all phase I of the doctrine. You have some awareness! Congratulations!
You have earned the right to talk about concepts like organisation, operating model and strategy ... just don't try and do them yet. You've got more principles to fix first.
X : What about phase II?
Me : Have you done phase I?
X : Not quite.
Me : Ok. Was the tea shop example useful.
X : It's pretty good.
Me : Ok. Well, in which case I better put some maps together to explain phase II. Note to self ... #to_be_continued#phases
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
dX: How do you deal with strategy?
Me: First, we need to answer the Where question, which depends a lot on the what and why.
dX: And?
Me: Ok, some very simple steps ...
Step 1: Visualise your environment. That means getting people to discuss, collaborate & challenge in order to create a "good enough" map of your environment. Should be a couple of hours.
Step 2: Look at what's changing which is competitor moves, your moves & economic patterns.
Step 3: Using the map, determine where you could invest/focus on. You're not making a decision yet, you just want the options. By now, you could have spent four hours on the exercise.
Step 4: Decide where you should invest i.e. look at the options using why & what
Those born in the 1890s experienced electrification, telephone, radio, television, nuclear age, penicillin, two world wars, commercial flight, computer age and a moon landing. By the 60s we had AI, VR and 3D printing.
Today, we have the internet / www and have improved stuff.
Is it me, or is human progress slowing down? Great breakthroughs, moments of change, and radical transformations seem like a thing of the past. What we call "revolutions" in industry today seems mostly a marketing slogan.
If you think back to 1957 and the Mark I Perceptron machine that was built at Cornell, then consider the changes in the previous 60 years ... you can't help but think they would be bitterly disappointed with how slow we have progressed in the following 60 years.
We will be entering a phase in which the US high-tech industry (including the military complex) is highly dependent upon China, whilst China is not dependent upon the US.
For those who doubt how clear the intentions were ... go read Made in China, 2025.
China's government made its intentions evident in 2015. The US sabre rattling of sanctions reinforced that purpose whilst the US essentially continued with a misguided "market knows best" policy.
A couple of prompts with Claude 3 creates a Wardley Map for economic sovereignty in the defence space.
Not bad at all -
On par with political, military and defence folk I've spoken to. I'm also finding I can have a reasonable discussion about mapping with Claude 3.onlinewardleymaps.com/#clone:XvHskIi…
It's not perfect but it's not bad. There's more I want to interrogate Claude over ... i.e. the link to secure sourcing, the positioning of some components etc. But it's almost good enough that I can start a discussion over strategy and investment.
Anyway, upshot is that Claude 3, from my perspective, has left ChatGPT4 in the dust. Of course, I'll use Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini to cross-compare for now but if I do start building anything more complex then the obvious path is AWS Bedrock which gives me Mistral etc.
dX: What is the single most significant problem facing AI today? Safety? Lack of skills? Inertia?
Me: Overinflated expectations by the business.
dX: You don't think AI will become widespread?
Me: Of course, it will; industrialised components are rapidly becoming cost of doing business. Don't confuse that with expectations. There will be an awful lot of disappointed businesses hoping it would create some advantage.
dX: I don't understand.
Me: Imagine you're just finishing off your plan for how AI will revolutionise your business. Six months for budget approval, one year to build team, 18 months to deliver something ... that's 3 years from now. Any advantage you thought of is long gone.
For those who don't know, I'm working increasingly on and with Glamorous Toolkit - ... I have become fascinated by our willingness to blame humans for problems that are created by our toolsets ...gtoolkit.com
... I saw this last night at Cloud Camp. Apparently, the issues with understanding, explainability and observability in AI are down to humans' inability to deal with complex environments... no, they're not. The problem is with the tools and the type of tools we are creating ...
... we've imported concepts from a physical world where tools are constrained by physics - hence a hammer is a hammer, a drill is a drill - into a world without such constraints. Rather than building contextual tools, we've built constrained tools.