It is the time of year when a line is drawn and what has been done can no longer be remedied. It is the time for the reality check. Are you happy or disappointed with your results?
Looking back on the 12 months that have just passed, I must admit that I am happy with the decisions I made, some were drastic, some were softer. I feel that either way they were necessary.
I decided to run less and read more.
In 2019 I ran only 660 km, against the target I set for myself and consistently achieved in previous years, the 2,000 km in 2018 and 2017.
In 2019 I read more than 30 books, in 2018 and 2017 less than 10 in all.
I needed to train the mind after spending so much time training the body. I needed to find answers to problems that I could not solve on my own or in my network.
I do not mean to say that it is only possible to run or read, alternatively, binary. It’s just an observation, it’s the effect told by the numbers of a decision, and every decision always moves a number. It is one of the most important things I have learned this year. I will come back to that later.
It is very likely that you and your team have not yet planned what and how to work in the next 12 months.
If you did, congratulations!
If you didn’t, however, don’t worry, it’s not your fault, it’s always your boss’s fault!
But if you want my advice-don’t, yes you heard me right, don’t plan.
Prototyping vs. Budgettizing
The budget, as a management tool, was invented by McKinsey in the early 1900s. Since then most companies in the world invest at least six months a year and millions of € (or $) in designing a future that does not exist.
If last year we sold x, this year we will have to sell x+y%. Everyone knows it doesn’t work that way. Yet bureaucracy forces us to fill out Excel sheets and attend hours of meetings to justify our role, secure our space of influence, our bonuses, the bonuses of the higher level.
Each excel line becomes a trench. We literally put sandbags in place to protect what we might lose in the event that we don’t reach that number. This is called sendbagging. You negotiate the lowest possible number, you play below your capabilities, not to deceive the enemy and launch a surprise attack but to rig the system. Each company thus decides to cap its growth at the lower limit of its potential. The reality is that no budget survives meeting the market, and on that October phone call we always hear back that “the budget has been cut.” And history repeats itself.
When I look back at my 2019 the best things that happened, in LIFT-D and in my life, have one thing in common: they were not in any budget. No one could predict them in advance. As a result, no one could set the number too low, or too high, that the results could be compromised. The confirmations, or denials, are not in the budget, but in the final report.
The best, most innovative initiatives worked because they were prototypes. Low-cost, low-risk versions of a new way of working, of tapping into a need of people, of making the system more efficient.
Assuming that any organization can have the operational capability to be able to implement a minimal, no-frills but fully functional version of a new solution, there is no such thing as a prototype if these 3 basic ingredients are not present.
- A hypothesis. What if… The benefit of the doubt. The freedom to be able to explore without prejudice that there may be something better. That it is counterproductive to do things the way we have always done them.
- A number. Everything we do moves a number in a database. What is the signal that my assumption is correct?
- Deadline. How soon do I need to make the next decision?
NASA does it as well.
Did you know that in 2024 man will return to the moon? The code name for the project is Artemis. But we are not going to the Moon to colonize it. It will be the prototype for the next big mission, the one that will take us to Mars.
From the microsite home page (link in resources): “…we will work with our partners to define a sustainable mode of exploration by 2028. We will use everything we have learned to design the next great leap forward for humanity: sending the first astronauts to Mars.”
To reach Mars from Earth, with the modern technology at hand, considering the change in their respective positions, it could take between 120 and 600 days round trip.
We could make a budget and calculate how much fuel, oxygen, and food are needed to make the trip but, looking at the excel sheets, we would only get a spaceship so heavy that it would not get off the ground.
Most companies I know would have built it this way. Doubling sales takes twice as many sales, twice as many people, twice as many resources….
But history and experience teach us that we have another, more efficient option. Achieving new goals requires abandoning the anchor of prejudice and embracing the benefit of the doubt. Launch an experiment. Use data to design a radically different rather than incrementally more complex way of working.
New hypotheses
This year is different, it is not just the end of a year, it is the end of a decade.
How did it go?
Have you achieved your goals?
What do you need to focus on for the next 10 years?
I read in a 2001 survey that because of the new economy, managers feel they do not have time to equip themselves with new strategic tools. 19 years later the new economy has become the new-normal economy and the situation has not changed, in fact it has gotten worse.
Designing new prototypes and evolving current ones requires access to information, and the end of the year is also the densest in this respect.
Big brands show off their ability to analyze the data they collect and their ability to spot trends because of the scale at which they operate, and they package useful reports that provide insight into the near future.
I invested some time to collect in this list the most interesting ones for those in our profession.
Every year, like a kid in a candy store, I download them all, flip through them and take notes then store them in a folder inside Reports/Trends/20xx and regularly access them to measure the distance between what I am doing and the future. Although I am aware that what you will find written down is already happening, the speed with which these trends will impact our businesses will depend solely on the ambitions we want to have.
Happy prototyping!
