Maps for changing your strategic mindset

Courtesy of McKinsey Quarterly we have a superb article by Pankaj Ghemawat , Remapping Your Strategic Mindset, with awesome graphics on rooted maps and their use for strategic mindsets. Leaders of global teams, programs, and initiatives will find most useful most useful.

Senior executives need better mental maps to navigate our unevenly globalized world. Although a wide variety of metrics show that just 10 to 25 percent of economic activity is truly global, executives disproportionately embrace visions of unbounded opportunities in a borderless world, where distances and differences no longer matter.

Rooted maps correct a misperception reinforced by conventional ones: that the world looks the same regardless of the viewer’s vantage point or purpose. In the real world, though, geographic distance and differences in culture and policy matter. To better reflect this reality, rooted maps depict the world from a specific perspective and with a particular purpose in mind.
They do so by adjusting the sizes or positions of countries in relation to a specific home country, while otherwise maintaining familiar shapes and spatial relationships, which help us fit these maps into our existing mental models.

This is an example of a rooted map. Teams focused on new products and remaking global corporate processes will benefit from taking a strategic view of their work using this powerful tool.

Collaborative Leadership Matters

Leaders at any level of an organization benefit from reading Are You a Collaborative Leader? in July-August Harvard Business Review by Herminia Ibarra (INSEAD) and Morten Hansen (UC-Berkeley). Their research shows the power of collaborative leaders who:

• Make global connections that help them spot opportunities RATHER THAN focus on internal connections
• Engage diverse talent from everywhere to produce results RATHER THAN rely on homogeneous teams for new ideas
• Collaborate at the top to model expectations RATHER THAN serve corporate politics and parochial agendas
• Show a strong hand to speed decisions and ensure agility RATHER THAN let groups get mired in conflict or attempts at consensus

 The matrix below provides an excellent structure for comparing leadership styles.

Use Sponsors and Steering Commitees More Effectively

Thanks to Booz's S+B for this summary of recent research in the INSEAD paper, Supervising Projects You Don’t Understand — Do Your Major Projects Receive the Leadership They Need?. It provides a very useful framework for the challenges and how to address them that arise from serving as a sponsor of or providing guidance for large programs and projects.  Authors Christoph Loch, Magnus Mahring, Svenja Sommer provide insights from their research on what makes a sponsor or steering committee (SC) successful. We address these types of issues in our Stanford Advanced Project Management Program (SAPM) courses, such as, Executing Complex Programs and Leading Change from the Middle, and welcome research supporting what we find in practice.  Below is an example of findings from the paper provided by S+B.

1. Steering committee (SC) composition and self-management. SCs should include important stakeholders, create their own governance systems, and work as a team.

2. Goal agreement. Team members should clarify and agree on the project’s objectives, producing workable compromises. Although vague goals are easy to agree upon in the beginning, they often merely postpone unpleasant confrontations and create future pitfalls, the interviews showed. To avoid problems down the road, SCs should begin their work by producing a detailed scoping document, with the help of subject matter experts, stating the business goals and translating them into operational aims.

3. Relationship with the project team. SC members should decide how to evaluate and motivate those charged with executing the project. To keep project teams motivated, SCs should find a middle ground between micromanaging and dodging the tough calls.

4. Supervision and control. This area involves keeping the project team on track within the context of the company’s goals. SCs should question assumptions throughout the project, the authors write, and insist on translating technical jargon into business language whenever possible (in other words, can the marketing department sell what the technical department is inventing?).

5. Managing surprises and changes. Modify the project’s direction when objectives or opportunities shift — and they always will. When large modifications are needed, small-scale experimentation, paradoxically, often leads to breakthroughs. And when surprises occur, the best response is to get insight into why. Rather than focus on final results, SCs should make use of “intermediate insight milestones” to keep plans flexible and moving forward.

Standardize to Innovate...yes you read it right

Fast Company design has useful post on how standardization enables innovation by focusing on the similar, the shared and the common.

Standard Processes
Baptist Health System (BHS) in San Antonio, Texas, became part of an initiative designed by The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) to reduce costs and increase quality in acute care. A physician-led Clinical Improvement Council for Orthopedic Care at BHS transformed its approach to hip and knee replacement procedures.
Common Goals
Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, instilled a culture inside Apple that had nothing to do with the free-spirited and rebellious self-actualization that its TV and billboard ads proposed. From this surprising conformity, Apple achieves an extraordinary level of innovation and productivity that has transformed not one but several different industries, including computers, music, phone and home electronics.
Common Platforms
By 1970, Black & Decker’s consumer power tool portfolio was a hotchpotch of 122 different models, which between them had 30 different motors, 60 different motor housings and 104 different armatures. Black & Decker decided that it needed to rethink its entire approach to the design and development of its power tool portfolio. The next three years saw a massive reduction in variants, leading to just one motor, a huge reduction in space, facilities, resources and time needed to manage parts and equipment, faster production cycles and retooling times. Motor production labor costs were cut by 85%, armature costs by 80%, and failure rates fell from 6-10% to 1%.
Shared Values
Every potential new employee at the online retailer Zappos.com is screened not just for capabilities and experience but also for likely culture fit. As a new hire, they receive five weeks of training, are immersed in the company’s culture and taught the company’s 10 core values. Commitment to these values is so important to the company that it offers new recruits $4,000 to leave if they don’t share them.
Standard Interfaces
The Picatinny Rail allows soldiers to attach and detach weapon accessories like optics, lasers, bipods, and other hardware to the M-16A1 assault rifle. It has helped to more than double the longevity and functionality of the Armed Forces' standard issue weapons. The common interface provided by the rail has reduced the costs and simplified the logistics of equipping and supporting 1.5 million soldiers and 1.5 million reservists, and increased the rate of innovation and growth in the small arms and accessory industries. Most importantly, the rail has increased the functionality and efficacy of active-duty front line soldiers, providing them with a tool that can meet a variety of both specialized and general needs.

Fast Innovation...on one page

Bob Sutton, on the faculty at Stanford and teaches in our Stanford Advanced Project Management program , talked about "fast innovation" at IDEO, the Palo Alto design consultancy..  Graphic facilitator, Kevin Bain captured graphically the essence of Bob's talk on a single big piece of paper.  See the results below and more at Kevin's site.

World class mindmaps...

These sites provides a wealth of mindmap ideas and beautiful examples that can be used for your teams.  Thye cover a wide range of topics and concepts. Worth sharing and learning from.

• Mind Map Innovation
• Mind Map Art
  

The example below is Paul Foreman's mindmap on innovation.

Intuition Rocks...if you use it well

Intuition mindmap inspiration can be found at Mind Map Inspiration...a super web site of mindmaps for all types of insights and inspiration.

99% is Behance’s research arm and think tank and take its name from Thomas Edison’s famous quote that “genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration”. 99% includes a daily web magazine, an annual conference, and the best-selling book “Making Ideas Happen.” Their web site is worth a visit. The recent post based on William Duggan's work around the three types of intuition is spot on!

Ordinary intuition is just a feeling, a gut instinct.

Expert intuition is snap judgments, when you instantly recognize something familiar, the way a tennis pro knows where the ball will go from the arc and speed of the opponent’s racket…

Strategic intuition is not a vague feeling, like ordinary intuition. Strategic intuition is a clear thought… That flash of insight you had last night might solve a problem that’s been on your mind for a month.

...Expert intuition is always fast, and it only works in familiar situations. Strategic intuition is always slow, and it works for new situations, which is when you need your best ideas.



This difference is crucial, because expert intuition can be the enemy of strategic intuition. As you get better at your job, you recognize patterns that let you solve similar problems faster and faster. That’s expert intuition at work. In new situations your brain takes much longer to make enough new connections to find a good answer. A flash of insight happens in only a moment, but it may take weeks for that moment to come. You can’t rush it. But your expert intuition might see something familiar and make a snap judgment too soon. The discipline of strategic intuition requires you recognize when a situation is new and turn off your expert intuition. You must disconnect the old dots, to let new ones connect on their own.

99%'s Takeaway: We should trust our expert intuition (based on experience) when making choices about familiar problems. But when we need a break-through solution, we shouldn’t be too quick to jump to conclusions