1CMO

Growth strategy | Advisory | Force multiplier

Change

KISS: The Power of Simplicity in a Complex World

by

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction”

—Albert Einstein

There are many benefits to keeping things simple in an increasingly complex world.

Successful growth leaders know that it is a constant battle to fight the evil forces of complexity within their organizations. Complexity is the single greatest execution risk for any growth strategy.

Simple is good. Complexity is bad.

KISS

There is an old and often-quoted acronym, called KISS, which is most often interpreted as: Keep It Simple Stupid.

There are many variations of the KISS phrase, including: “keep it simple, sweetheart”, “keep it simple, silly”, “keep it short and simple”, “keep it simple and straightforward”, “keep it small and simple”, “keep it simple, soldier”, or “keep it simple, sailor”.

No matter which version of KISS you prefer, they all have the same core meaning: Simple is good. Complexity is bad.

The KISS acronym is credited to Kelly Johnson, lead engineer at the Lockheed Skunk Works (creators of the infamous Lockheed U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird spy planes, among many others).

The KISS principle states that most systems work best if they are made simple rather than more complicated. Therefore, simplicity should be a key goal in design, and unnecessary complexity is to be avoided.

A great example of the KISS principle in action is a story of Johnson providing a team of his design engineers a handful of simple mechanics tools, with the challenge that the jet aircraft they were designing must be repairable by an average mechanic, in the field under combat conditions, with only these tools. In this context, “stupid” refers to the relationship between the way things break and the level of sophistication available to repair them.

A great lesson that has application to any field.

Simple is good. Complexity is bad.

Norup’s Complexity Theory

During my career I have interacted with many other leaders – both as colleagues, competitors, partners, advisors, prospects, and clients.

With this first-hand experience, I have concluded that all leaders can be categorized into one of two broad buckets:

  • There are those who constantly seem to make things more difficult and complicated. This usually is not malicious – it is just how they think and operate. I like to call them “Complicators.”
  • And, then there are those who constantly try to simplify things and strive for effectiveness. The “Simplifiers.”

Unfortunately, I have also observed that they exist in a 4:1 ratio. In other words, 80% of leaders are Complicators and only 20% are Simplifiers.

The most effective growth leaders are Simplifiers. They strive to build efficient go-to-market processes, communicate clearly to the market, and build effective teams.

All things being equal, simplicity always wins. It is easier to build, maintain, and scale.

During times of massive uncertainty and crisis, even the strongest and most experienced professionals can get overwhelmed and freeze up. Taking complexity out of the equation enables teams to know what to do, where to start, and who to help.

Complexity makes the path forward much more challenging.

Complexity does not scale.

Simple is good. Complexity is bad.

Where to Start

Growth leaders should tackle complexity within their organization by evaluating the major go-to-market processes within their domain.

A useful model is to literally “follow a lead” all the way through a typical buyer’s journey for your organization. Starting with marketing and lead generation, and then moving to sales enablement, on to sales, and all the way through to your post-sale client success function.

At every step and through every stage, pay attention to extra steps that can cause friction or confusion in the process. Remove variables. Provide decision-making guidelines.

Before layering in any form of complexity. Make sure the simple case is optimized.

This approach of slow is smooth, and smooth is fast is a proven way to accelerate growth while reducing execution risk.

People often worry that making something simpler is, in fact, making it simplistic or dumbing it down. In fact, the opposite is true. As Leonardo Da Vinci so eloquently said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

Conclusion

Eliminating complexity is not a one-time event.

In the post-pandemic “new normal” business era, the pace of change is accelerating, not slowing down. This relentless level of innovation and pushing boundaries can easily breed complexity if not constantly monitored.

Successful growth leaders should focus on being simplifiers, dedicating continuous effort to refine, simplify, and optimize processes.

Leader that fit in the Complicators category will find it difficult to stay ahead of sudden changes that are often forced on them by unforeseen economic, environmental, buyer, or competitive forces. The complexity of their organizations becomes an anchor – slowing things down and limiting growth.

Simple is good. Complexity is bad.

-Onward

Goodbye 2020, I Will NOT Miss You!

by

“I never lose. I either win or learn.” – Nelson Mandela

For starters, wishing you and your family a very happy New Year.

For me personally this past year was extremely challenging. It was filled with professional and personal heartaches, along with some momentous positives. I will skip the details, but suffice it to say that in my lifetime I have never experienced the amount of stress, uncertainty, and angst that 2020 delivered.

Fortunately, every storm passes and the sun eventually emerges to shine again.

To say that I have gained a lot from 2020 is an understatement. This might sound horrible and insensitive, but in many respects, I am very thankful for the last 12 months. While I would not want to live through it again, I have learned and grown tremendously.

Here are some of the key lessons I learned.

Expect the Unexpected

So often in our personal and professional lives, we are surprised and caught off guard by an unexpected external force. Something we did not anticipate, or even imagine possible.

Whether it is an insensitive comment from a friend, a political move by a co-worker, losing a job, a direct assault on our business from a competitor, or, perhaps, even a global pandemic, the world of work is full of VUCA forces (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, uncertainty). These can cause a wide range of impacts from just “having a bad morning” to seriously jeopardizing your livelihood or the viability of your organization.

The best solution to any problem is always to prevent it from happening in the first place. While predicting unknowns is not always possible, developing a good situational awareness of your environment and marketplace is a great place to start.

You might be surprised, as I was, at how many “clues” you missed by rushing through your daily routine and not paying closer attention.

Developing a better understanding of your surroundings will help to better define possible threats. You can then begin to brainstorm their potential impacts, and your response, should they arise. This type of Scenario Planning is a key aspect of VUCA Strategic Planning, and doing it regularly will help to ensure you and your organization are more resilient against any threats.

External forces are very real. We cannot ignore them. However, we also cannot allow them to consume us.

When they hit us, we have to address them, learn from them, and then focus on moving forward.

Crisis Can Lead to Introspection

Another big lesson from all the VUCA forces that hit me this past year was this: The event does not define us. It is how we choose to respond that counts.

I have seen three common response patterns, and depending on the situation, each of them has merit:

  1. You can decide to hunker down and hide. Sometimes we get lucky and the storm will pass by leaving us unscathed. Unfortunately, for many issues in the world of work, hope is not a strategy, and the issue will still likely be there tomorrow.
  2. You can lash out. With the right strategy, fighting back can sometimes be effective. However, if you get it wrong, things can get messy in a hurry.
  3. Or, you can take it as a learning opportunity and figure out how to move on. Sometimes we have to accept the things we cannot change, and pivot.

There is a lot of value to be gained from detaching yourself (taking a neutral and objective view), reviewing what happened (being honest, not overstating it but also not sugarcoating it). This allows you the time and space to figure out what you could or should have done differently (if anything). Which hopefully will lead to internalizing the lesson (so you do not repeat the same mistake again), and then figuring out the plan to quickly move on.

Another lesson that 2020 taught me was I am often guilty of not taking enough time for introspection. I think it is a common executive ailment – everyone is so stretched for time, moving fast, and always focused on solving problems quickly. This merciless cycle does not afford the time we need to process and learn.

Like many professionals, the pandemic forced me to work from home and prevented any business travel since March. This has given me more time to think, to learn, and to strategize about the future than I have had in the past 20 years. As an added bonus, the time with family and a better work/life balance has been priceless.

Crisis can lead to healthy introspection, if you take the time to do it.

Introspection Leads to Reinvention

By allowing ourselves time for introspection, something magical happens. We not only gain clarity, but also a newfound confidence to revisit and challenge the status quo. I have found that the more profound the external force, the greater the potential opportunity for change.

As evidence, we do not need to look much further than what has happened in the world of work over the past 10 months. The global COVID-19 pandemic caused many organizations to make rapid and far-reaching changes to how they get work done. A few examples of this dynamic workforce and workplace reinvention:

  • As evidenced by the unprecedented spike in US unemployment, almost every organization cut headcount in 2020. While we can debate whether some organizations did not cut enough, and others perhaps cut too far, the reality is millions of jobs are likely not coming back in their prior form. Many of these roles will resurface as more flexible, contingent jobs.
  • Some industries (for example, travel) may never come back to the same pre-pandemic level, while others (for example, home delivery) will reach new highs.
  • In 2020 we proved that almost every white-collar role can effectively be accomplished working from home. Many studies I read actually showed an increase in productivity for these newly remote workers. As the pandemic recedes, it will be interesting to see what organizations decide to do with their remote workforces, and their need for traditional office space.
  • Many highly skilled professionals will take advantage of these radical changes in the workplace and reinvent their careers as experts for hire (like how I am helping some awesome growth minded organizations with my 1CMO Consulting services!), achieving new levels of career satisfaction and work/life balance.
  • The research firm Gartner, predicts that by 2024 only a quarter of workplace meetings will take place in person. The meteoric rise of virtual meetings will have far-reaching impacts. Not only eliminating the need for a lot of corporate real estate, but also changing the dynamic of field sales (and all the things that accompany it like business travel and entertainment!)
  • The Gartner Future of Sales 2025 report predicts that by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels. In other words, not in person.

These are just a few examples of how organizations, and the individuals who work in them, have been forced to challenge their historical assumptions when confronted by a crisis. The ability to test different approaches, see what sticks, and then quickly pivot, is the winning approach.

Reinvention Leads to New Opportunity

I am looking forward to seeing what the year 2021 has in store.

As we begin slowly emerging from our pandemic-forced hibernation, my prediction is that there will be many new opportunities (both personal and professional) in the upcoming year, visible to those who are paying attention to their surroundings and actively looking for them!

My practice of growth strategy consulting is certain to benefit from a rising optimism in the markets. And I suspect many readers of this article will be able to say the same.

With that, I say one last goodbye to the year 2020. I am very thankful and blessed to have survived intact, but I will NOT miss you.

-Onward

How to Navigate and Win Against VUCA Forces

by

“Change is the only constant in life. One’s ability to adapt to those changes will determine your success in life.” – Benjamin Franklin

We live in an increasingly VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world. The winds of change are blowing in every direction, in every region, and across every industry.

At this point, there is only one safe conclusion: Current levels of disruption and unpredictability are likely not going away. Change is the only constant. So how best to move forward? How do you navigate through a VUCA environment and win?

In this challenging business climate, traditional strategic planning frameworks have proven to be distressingly inadequate. The speed and ferocity of the health and economic impacts caused by the pandemic caught many organizations flat-footed, and ill prepared to react quickly.

Faced with this uncertain and disruptive environment, a growing number of business leaders and growth strategists have been inspired to develop VUCA Strategic Plans to guide their organizations forward and better plan for an unknown future.

While VUCA has proven to be a valuable framework to visualize the disruptive environment we now operate in, it is not always easy to apply. This article will present some tactical remedies that business leaders and growth strategists can use to counter each of the VUCA forces.

VUCA Overview

As a quick reminder, the definition of VUCA:

  • Volatility – The tendency for things to change quickly and unpredictably, typically for the worse. These challenges are unexpected or unstable, and may be of unknown duration. However, they are not necessarily hard to understand – knowledge about them is often available. The more volatile the world is, the more change there is and the faster that change occurs.
  • Uncertainty – Situations where there is imperfect or unknown information. It applies to predictions of future events, to physical measurements, or to the unknown. Despite a lack of other information, we know the disruptive event’s basic cause and effect. Change is possible, but not a given. Uncertainty refers to the extent to which we can confidently predict the future, therefore the more uncertain the world is, the harder it is to predict.
  • Complexity – Refers to the number of factors that we need to take into account, their variety and the relationships between them. The more factors, the greater their variety and the more they are interconnected, the more complex an environment is. Some information is available, or predictable, but the volume or nature of it can be overwhelming to process. The more complex the world is, the harder it is to analyze and come to rational conclusions.
  • Ambiguity – A lack of clarity about how to interpret something. Situations where information is incomplete, contradicting or too inaccurate to draw clear conclusions. More generally, it refers to fuzziness and vagueness in ideas and terminology. The more ambiguous the world is, the harder it is to interpret. The causal relationships are completely unclear. No precedents exist and you often face many “unknown unknowns.”

Tactical Remedies for Each of the VUCA Forces

The VUCA model has great value as a strategic planning tool. By using it as a framework to interpret the current operating environment, business leaders and growth strategists can think creatively about new strategies for the organization, and begin planning for alternative scenarios.

One common question that many leaders ask is how do you counteract each of the four VUCA forces?

Great question, here is how…

We can describe the best VUCA leaders by their vision, understanding, clarity, and adaptability. These four leadership abilities become the opposing force to each element of the VUCA model.

It looks like this:

  • Vision counteracts Volatility
  • Understanding counteracts Uncertainty
  • Clarity counteracts Complexity
  • Adaptability counteracts Ambiguity

The key to managing in a VUCA environment is to break it down into its component parts. Once we identify volatile, uncertain, complex, or ambiguous situations then we can tackle them. Since each type of situation has its own causes and resolutions, so it is best to deal with them one at a time.

In the next sections, we will look at each of these forces.

Counter Volatility with Vision

Vision – You can counteract the first VUCA force (Volatility) with Vision.

In this context, vision is not referring to sight, or the ability to see. It is an acknowledgement that in turbulent times it is very easy to get distracted. Leaders need to rise above volatility by having a clear vision of the future for their organization.

Leaders with a clear long-term vision of where they want their organizations to be can better weather volatile shorter-term environmental changes such as economic downturns or new competition in their markets. Vision helps them see past the immediate chaos.

Some helpful tips:

  • It almost goes without saying, but leaders much acknowledge that change is the only constant. By embracing change, we can find opportunity. Accept and embrace change, and encourage your teams to do the same. Resistance is futile!
  • Begin with the end in mind. The US Army calls this the “Backward Planning Sequence”, where they plan a mission from the end first (actions on the objective) then work backwards, step-by-step, to the beginning of the operation.
  • Build all strategies and plans on the strong foundation of the organization’s Core Ideology (mission, values, purpose). This “true North” approach to navigating an organization is similar to using a compass instead of the map! It provides clarity and helps prevent external chaotic events from pulling them off course, or abandoning their mission.
  • Leaders should always be thinking, and communicating to their teams, from the perspective of the organization’s Envisioned Future (vision, long-term objectives). By painting a compelling picture of the future, and illuminating the path to get there, they will align people and resources, and provide the motivational push to get it done.
  • While long-term objectives should be solid, it is important that leaders allow their teams some flexibility in how they get there. This latitude allows them to react, in real-time, to changing market conditions.

Beat Uncertainty with Understanding

Understanding – You can counteract the second VUCA force (Uncertainty) with Understanding.

To be effective in a chaotic VUCA environment, leaders have to look and listen beyond their functional areas of expertise and span of control. To make sense of the volatility and to lead with vision they need broad Situational Awareness of their operating environment.

By deliberating practicing a “stop, look, and listen” approach, leaders will gain important decision-making information. To do this effectively requires leaders to communicate with all levels of employees in their organization and to develop and demonstrate teamwork and collaboration skills.

Some useful tips:

  1. When building situational awareness, many leaders make the mistake of only paying attention to information sources and opinions that reinforce their own views. This creates a huge risk of missing alternate viewpoints. Instead, leaders need to cast a wide net. They should get different points of view from many sources by engaging directly with their customers and employees to ensure they learn about changes in their markets. The best leaders wander around the office talking to their teams and get out of the building to spend time with clients, prospects and partners in the marketplace.
  2. Once the encounter uncertainty in their operating environment, leaders can gain an overview by evaluating the PESTEL factors: political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and legislative.
  3. With broad situational awareness of their environment and their vision in mind, leaders also need to have an in-depth understanding of their organization’s strengths and weaknesses. The goal should always be to take advantage of rapidly changing circumstances by playing to strengths while minimizing weaknesses.
  4. Leaders should embrace Scenario Planning as a critical part of their strategic planning process. This useful tool helps leaders and their teams to anticipate future threats and begin preparing contingency plans to respond.

React to Complexity with Clarity

Clarity – You can counteract the third VUCA force (Complexity) with Clarity.

We all know that in a VUCA world, chaos comes quickly and hits you hard. Leaders who can react swiftly and tune out the noise will make better decisions.

To gain clarity effectively, leaders need to break problems down to the basics. By learning to simplify challenges down to their root causes, leaders and their teams can then begin to think creatively and make quick decisions on how to respond.

Some useful tips:

  • Make sure that everyone in the organization understands the vision and long-term objectives you are trying to reach. Leaders should communicate the organization’s vision, purpose, and values often. An emergency is not the ideal time to help your team understand the organization’s direction!
  • The best teams are creative and collaborate often. Leaders need to develop this capability across the organization. VUCA situations are usually too complicated for one person to handle on their own. It takes a team.

Overcome Ambiguity with Adaptability

Adaptability – You can counteract the fourth VUCA force (Ambiguity) with Adaptability.

This concept of adaptability applies perfectly to today’s chaotic VUCA environment. I believe those organizations (and leaders) who are best able to adapt to change will grow and thrive. Those who don’t, won’t!

By taking an agile approach, moving swiftly and adapting to circumstances, leaders and their teams can quickly make decisions and execute. This requires many of the skills and abilities discussed above plus a willingness to experiment, iterate, and figure out what works in the face of adversity. This is what I have

Some useful tips:

  • Effective leaders reinforce to their teams that the only way to make progress towards any objective is to take action. This deliberate effort in the face of hostile VUCA forces is not always easy, or pretty. When in doubt, move fast, and get stuff done!
  • Teams need to try hard, fail fast, and learn. Then rinse and repeat. This adaptation to changing market conditions is the key to competing and winning in any market. Leaders can promote agility and adaptability by encouraging their teams to plan, and consider alternative scenarios.
  • In many organizations, long-range plans are often obsolete by the time they are approved and funded. This does not mean the effort was wasted. Leaders should encourage continuous consideration of alternative strategies, that way there is always a plan B, in case the first strategy does not work out.
  • Leaders should encourage their teams to continuously be learning about themselves, the market, and their teammates. They also need the latitude and flexibility to experiment, without fear of making a mistake or failing.

Thriving in Turbulent Times

Many experts agree that VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) forces are only going to increase in frequency and intensity. However, that does not mean VUCA is a bad thing. It represents the changing environmental conditions most organizations must now operate within, and overcome if they want to be successful.

Since organizations are largely powerless to stop VUCA – leaders and their teams must learn how to live with, and effectively manage, these forces in their market environment. By learning how to counteract each VUCA force – with vision, understanding, clarity, and adaptability – we can thrive in these turbulent times.

-Onward

Is Your Organization Ready for Growth?

by

“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” – Socrates

It is a safe bet that almost any leader you ask will say they want to grow their business.

That makes sense, right? Of course it does. Everyone wants to have a role in a thriving and growing business.

However, once you get past the desire for growth, I have noticed things tend to get a lot more challenging.

Not every leader is prepared for the hard work of developing a growth strategy, and not every organization is ready or equipped to execute. While there are a number of detailed tactical questions one could ask to help diagnose an organization’s readiness for growth, I have found it useful to start with some big picture, strategic questions first.

Change is the Only Constant

We can summarize the underlying challenge in this discussion with one word: change. High-end management consultants would use two words to describe the process: business transformation!

No matter your word choice, accelerating business growth inevitably requires change. This is the crux of the problem for many organizations. Not every leader, or organization, is prepared to disrupt themselves. To drive new growth they will have to change their old approach to the market. They cannot continue doing only what they have always done. They have to change their activities. Sometimes they may even have to change people, process, structure, or systems. This kind of change can be painful.

Change is the only constant in our disrupted VUCA world. Despite that fact, embracing change is hard work. The natural state of most people is to resist difficult or uncertain things. Many will choose to dig in and resist change, or run from it instead of running towards it.

Yet, business history teaches us that the only way to survive and thrive is to adapt. In fact, adaptability is a key ingredient for effectively dealing with change. The willingness and ability to pivot as new circumstances present themselves and embrace something different is vital for creating business growth and success. We also know that great teams are the ones that will show up and do the hard work required to adapt.

Fundamental Growth Strategy Questions

Once leaders have embraced change, they can begin to ask fundamental questions to assess the readiness of their organization for growth. Here are a few that I have been using:

  • Is the value proposition of the organization’s product/service sound? In other words, is your product or service any good, or is it crap? If it needs work (and it is okay to admit that it does) then do that before you invest in growth. Your customers, and your team, will thank you!
  • Is the leadership team, the board, and ownership aligned around the desire and need to grow the business? If not, then clearly this needs to be a priority conversation.
  • Are you prepared to invest time and money in growth?
  • Is there a growth leader who is able to rally the team and prepared lead the charge?
  • Is there a cultural willingness and ability to confront reality? In strategic planning exercises, it is a requirement to put everything on the table: the good…the bad…and the ugly. This can sometimes get very personal for leaders and their teams who take great pride in the business they have built. Are you willing to call your baby ugly?
  • Related to the questions around confronting reality – is there a willingness to challenge all assumptions? Are you willing to admit the old ways of doing things may be outdated? Are you willing to consider new approaches? To challenge sacred cows?
  • Asking questions like these can often quickly lead to difficult discussions around making structural changes to the business. Are you prepared to revisit and possibly make changes to the people, process, and technology that will help drive business growth?

Where Do You Go From Here?

Business growth is great to have, but never easy to deliver. It requires leadership, change, investment, and a lot of hard work. The questions in this article should provide some insight to the readiness of your organization for growth.

Now the hard work begins…

Strategic leaders who decide to proceed with a growth initiative should first focus on getting situational awareness about their marketplace. They will gain valuable insights by getting out of the building and making sure their teams do this important learning exercise. Some of these insights might lead to developing alternative strategies or plans to address other scenarios.

Casting a wide net of inquiry, asking questions, listening, challenging, and learning provides great perspective and becomes a critical foundation for creating a VUCA Strategic Plan for growth.

With growth strategy and plan in hand, it is time to execute. The most successful leaders will inspire their teams with a bias to action. In the growth mode, leaders need to quickly triage issues, make aligned decisions, and push forward.

Being a leader in times of transformation is challenging and difficult, but driving growth for the organization is a great reward.

-Onward

Show Up and Do the Work

by

“The only easy day was yesterday” – US Navy SEALs motto

I recently had an interesting conversation with a prospective client. The topic was about updating the go-to-market strategy for their organization. While the concept of the new strategy I proposed was straightforward (the best ones usually are!), the execution was more complex and would require making some changes to their existing approach.

After some conversation, it became clear this CEO was fishing for a quick fix solution without any disruption. He wanted all the benefits of a new, transformative approach to the market. However, he was reluctant to invest the time, money, or resources to get there.

He wanted the benefits of growth, without making any changes to the status quo, and without doing the hard work.

This reminded me of a fundamental business lesson that applies to leaders of any organization.

As Woody Allen famously said, “eighty percent of success is showing up.”

The rest is just hard work.

No Shortcuts

The real secret to success in life is quite simple.

It does not matter if the topic is family, friends, your job, or executing a strategic plan.

There is no magic pill.

There are no shortcuts. (At least not lasting ones.)

The same fundamental rule of effort applies – you have to show up. And, even more importantly, you have to do the work.

You must be in the game, playing the game, in order to have any chance of winning the game. You cannot be on the sidelines and have any hope of success.

Connection to VUCA Strategic Planning

The harsh reality is that many strategic plans fail.

It is not because these strategic plans are necessarily bad, but rather because they are not executed.

Why? There are many reasons. Leaders and their teams get distracted. Competitors make noise in the market. Customers have problems. Employees need attention. Crises and distractions abound. Life interrupts…

As a result, the brilliant strategic plans that leaders and their teams invested a lot of time and money in developing are tossed aside. Hopefully to resurface when “we have more time.”

Sad but true.

A strategic plan is useless unless someone (or some team) shows up, and then does something. This bias to action is critical. By developing a robust VUCA Strategic Plan and following an effective Management Cycle cadence, leaders can stack the odds in their favor and ensure success.

A Dieting Analogy

Like many who have been mostly housebound during the global pandemic I have put on a couple of extra pounds (a good friend of mine, who has also put on some extra weight, calls it his COVID 19!).

After doing some research on popular diets, I discovered a dirty little secret.

Wait for it…

Nearly all diets work!

That’s right. The actual diet is not the problem. The real problem is the dieter. Most of us lack the discipline to buy and prepare the right food, to exercise appropriately, and, more importantly, the motivation to stick with the discipline of the diet.

Much like strategic planning. We have to show and do the hard work. There is no shortcut.

It really is that simple.

-Onward