In this ProductTank SF talk, Github’s Chris Butler shares his experimental framework, 360 strategies, and looks at how to build resilience into a strategy by considering uncertainty and importance.
Chris starts his talk by outlining a common starter strategy - a company’s leaders simply outline their strategic themes for the coming year through a list of projects or plan. It’s a starter strategy, he says, it doesn’t define how people should make decisions or help to make hard decisions easier, and it usually ends up with the team saying they don’t have a strategy. “A strategy as a plan is a flawed premise,” he says.
Our organisations exist in complex and uncertain environments, Chris says, so a successful strategy needs to be more intentional. His experimental framework, 360 strategies, tries to focus on the relationship between uncertainty and importance. “Some uncertainties are vital to the way we do our jobs, the way our organisations exist… others aren’t that meaningful,” he says. He presents a 2x2 matrix, with the y axis showing uncertainty and the x axis showing importance, and runs through each quadrant in turn.
This is the top left quadrant, important and certain. This is the starter strategy, or a list of things that we know we need to do now, says Chris. They are tracked by means of KPIs, OKRs and so on and we can judge whether these strategies continue to work.
This is the top right quadrant, important and uncertain. These are hypotheses that could work, says Chris, things that the leadership team think we should go after. It might include “We want to create signals that could show that this is working,” he says.
This is the bottom left quadrant, where not to go, or strategies that haven't worked. Chris references a talk here by Sonja Blignaut, Becoming modern day way(s)finders, which looks at strategy as an outward view and journey towards a distant shore. Chris says that leaders end up giving a lot of guidance about where to go, but we don’t see as much about functional limits, whether extrinsic or intrinsic. “We can learn from others in the market,” he says. “Where have people failed doing things that we think could have worked.”
This is the bottom right quadrant. This is Chris’ favourite and comes from what Good strategy, bad strategy author Richard Rumelt calls ‘fluff’. Chris cites best in class as one of these pieces of fluff, because there has to be another strategy that we would not choose. For everything that in the aspirational strategy there should be a corresponding bizarro strategy, he says. “We need to think about the opposite of our own strategy as a way to make our strategy better,” he says.
Your strategy is not meant to be a point in time, it’s supposed to be the way you make decisions now and going into the future, Chris says. “Everything we do today has to in some way allow for adaptability to the current now at all times. If it is no longer valuable we should evolve it in some way,” he says. He recommends Wardley Mapping by Simon Wardley which looks at how to map the components of a business and how they evolve over time. “We start to do a better job of embodying our strategies if we can understand how they evolve,” he says.
Chris then runs through some examples from his own experience of when strategies become no longer valid, how many “things” make a full strategy, monitoring the assumptions that underpin a strategy, the right specificity.
Chris closes by saying that it’s an experimental framework and not one that will solve everything. He directs us to some tools for practice, including some found on The Uncertainty Project. He says: “Think about the working strategies you have and push yourself to build out the designation between working and aspirational, start to create the opposite, bizarro-type strategies… and be very aware of what happens to the strategies you’ve now abandoned.”
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