AppsJack TECH DRIVERS Debate Highlights - November 2017

We had a motley crew of 16 awesome people at the kickoff of AppsJack Season 2, where our topic is causality and business dependency networks (BDNs). 



We were led on Tuesday evening by management consultant David Slight who is basically awesome. David came very well prepared with handouts for the guests and a meetup host sign-up sheet.  David led us in topic 1 of 12: TECH DRIVERS. 

The dialog went far and wide and was fascinating.   The discussion touched on:

• The 3rd Industrial Revolution wiki
• 5G mobile networks wiki
• Humans are Under Rated video
• GM says it is leaving the automotive industry - Richard Webb statement, needs source
• Bonini's Paradox - contribution by newcomer Lucas Parker - "explains the difficulty in constructing models or simulations that fully capture the workings of complex systems (such as the human brain)."  wiki
• "Things don't just happen, they happen for a reason."  ~ David Slight quote.
• Drivers are things we can't change.
• Richard spoke about the technology having been ready and done for five years but regulation and its impacts are the things holding its implementation back.

The main lessons that I took away as a facilitator and leader of this group were A) we need to tell people to create a small team of at least one other person so they are engaged and can break out if needed (and not just be quiet or disengaged in the discussion).  Having small groups is one thing that makes us identify as part of the big group.

Join us for our next gathering in a couple of weeks when we'll take the HUMAN side of the DRIVERS debate.  Details and RSVP here.

The Plan for 2017 and 2018

By David Slight

We'll Talk About Causality and Business Dependency Networks. For a YEAR!

Given our mission to talk about business and technology and learn from diverse perspectives of the group members, we are suggesting and going forth with this self-organizing charter for the coming year. For each of the six BDN perspectives, we will look first at the technology followed by the human perspective. So our calendar for the year looks like the following:

The WHY

November: 

Drivers Tech: what is coming for robotics, automation and futurism

December: 

Drivers Humans: how to evangelize the humanist and people perspectives

Drivers explain why an investment is being made. These are the reasons that senior managers believe will have an impact on the business in a given time frame, yet they are outside the direct control of the organization. A driver requires responses from the business. Drivers can be external (listed first), something in the larger market environment, or internal, an improvement initiative or mandate generated within the organization by senior management.

January: 

Outcomes Tech: What technology and automation do we want to adopt? How far are we willing to let the robots go?

February: 

Outcomes Humans: Define the outcomes we as humans want to achieve.

The outcomes define the end point, or the state at which an investment is aimed.  They are the agreed-upon achievement targets  that help address the drivers. Outcomes are derived from the envisioned changes indicated by the drivers, and help define the benefits that are to be expected.

March: 

Benefits Tech: What benefits can automation and technology provide? How do we measure the benefits?

April:

Humans: Benefits: Who should get the benefits? Large tech corporations or everyone? The developer or sales?

Benefits describe what will happen in the business to help achieve the outcomes. These are advantages to an organization’s stakeholders that can be realized by business changes. Every benefit stream must have an owner who is part of the analysis process. The expected benefits types must be determined, along with how they will be measured. The organization’s key performance indicators (KPIs) are a good source of measures. Inclusion of quantitative measures is preferred, if a reliable number can be obtained from the customer.

The WHAT

May: 

Changes Tech: Where is the tipping point when AI starts to think for itself?

June: 

Changes Humans: Can people change, can culture change?

Business changes are new and permanent ways of working within the organization to realize benefits.  The changes come in three forms: 1) Doing new things, 2) doing things better, and 3) stopping counterproductive things.  These can be shown at a high level in several ways, depending on the organization’s preference: as a business process to be changed, a description of the changes to be made, or as organizational capabilities or functional units.

The HOW

July: 

Capabilities Tech:  What capabilities can we rely on from technology?

September: 

Capabilities Humans: What are the essential human capabilities that should be retained and nurtured?

Capabilities are that must be at the required level of maturity in order to support the desired business changes. Multiple capabilities may be required to change an individual process, and some changes may affect more than one process. Training, implementations of new standards, policies, and procedures, or acquisitions and reorganizations are included in this category.

October: 

Enablers Tech: Which technologies are ready for prime time?

November: 

Enablers Humans: What can technology still not enable?  

Enabling technologies  provide the lowest level answers to the question of how  business changes will be achieved.  The items in this column are the IT systems, projects, or product features that will support needed changes. They can support changes in a business process, as well as the introduction of new technology or the work required in a project .

WRAP UP

December: Discuss our charter for 2019

About Vision & Strategy - How to develop it, other challenges and considerations

We had a motley crew of awesome people show up to the AppsJack Share gathering last in Kirkland to talk about Vision & Strategy. I got a lot of great input (see everything below) that will help me better direct the January version of the podcast.

Key Takeaways:

1. Strategy and approach (what to do) depends on the stage and situation of the business
2. Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) a good way to break down complex projects
3. Internal and external lenses/views/perspectives key to understanding and thinking about strategy
4. Personal and corporate authenticity key to successful implementation
5. Aligning an essential skill
6. Nuance and readiness for seeing, understanding, integrating and working with outliers and anomalies is another key
7. Timeframe matters for strategic thinking
8. Context matters (and therefore controlling/limiting scope and having focus)
9. There is a general prerence toward rapid tests of assumptions (failing fast) rather than long and protracted 'strategic' actions but there are times when the latter tactics (strategic actions) matter
10. We couldn't determine whether or not models mattered. Models are meant to be broken, so why manage to them or even think about them?
11. The mitigation and reduction of risk is key to successful strategy
12. Design thinking is a key and related skill
13. Strategy isn't and shouldn't be thought of as linear

We wondered at the very beginning if we should start by discussing vision or strategy and the answer, perhaps not surprisingly, was 'it depends'.  Chris brought up a good point that it very much depends on the stage, phase or status of the organization.  Assessment and triage (qualification) is first needed.  Steve raised challenges he has about breaking down a compelling vision into the component parts.  To me, these are the skills of project managers and other leaders who make complex and challenging things easier, that can be communicated to the necessary suppliers.  Work breakdown structure is a common method.  Mike Pritchard shared that he thinks there is an internal and external vision.  Joe Okonek refers to the vision, values and valued behaviors as things that can / should be externally communicated and publicly shared.  Missions, for example, can be internal documents and communications that help internal relationships focus on comm and strategic goal.  Public/open and private/closed is another dimension on which to explore strategy.

Good parts / what attendees liked: mentions of sex, swearing, arguments, passionate discussion, British accents, food, beer.  Authenticity was brought up as a key factor in this area.  Without true authenticity (and value, quality) your audience will see you as a fake and disengage (won't authorize).  Berry talked about the importance of alignment.  For example, aligning yourself and your company with the market and environment and their vision, values, purposes, needs, interests, ideas, etc.  Dominic talked about the difference between power (which can be personal and thought of as influence) and force, which can be applied from the tops down if someone has a lot of money or ability to coerce.  10 types of power are discussed in this article.  David brought up the point that strategy usually requires a longer and more futuristic timeline.  For example, he said that it's hard to be strategic for two minutes.  

Dominic led us in a discussion of the definition of a strategy and there were many different thoughts and opinions.  Someone defined a strategy as choosing an approach or an approach chosen ie a decision and commitment was necessarily made. I brought up the notion that it is hard to create a perfect product but many people disagreed: that within a domain, there can be a perfect product.  But there is a context, and knowing this context well is critical for product success.  Dominic wanted us to separate 'strategy' generically with 'strategy with a purpose' (a clear why). I brought up an issue I was having at work making a decision to build a feature for a big customer or not.  I am in the process of determining whether their request is qualified or not.  There is much skill required in qualification of certain issues.  Many at the table believed that 'if you are going to fail, fail fast' and people didn't like the idea of dragging on some elaborate process but others believed that caution and due diligence, not just action, were required in certain ambiguous political situations.  There are also scenarios where people cannot afford to fail fast, especially when there is not yet a powerful coalition, agreement and a clearly articulated and communicated vision.  

Richard wanted to know, "How do you know you have strategy?"  It's a good question.  We agreed that force, power, belief, authenticity, conviction and in many ways consistency were required for strategy.  But flexibility and other leadership qualities are also required.  We talked for some time about whether models were important or not.  David did not believe they were beneficial.  I gave the example of NoSQL database strategies where the data gets stored independent of a rigid table schema.  Many new data storage strategies do not rely on a centralized schema.  Differences between abstractions and concrete proof, evidence or data were interesting.  "Insight" or mental models are interesting when derived from data or science.  Steve talked about millennials and their needs.  He says that they share a desire for a better world and have this impediment of the rest of the world who is still alive, their elders.  

Someone pointed out that it is important to seek out anomalies in your data and to test assumptions.  Andy Scott made the point about the import of assumption testing on Episode 2 of the podcast.  Assumptions are a category or area of risk.  Steve shared the saying, "The presumptuous assume, the sumptuous consume."  People do need to build and test (at least mental) models.  Jean brought up the saying to test early and test often.  I shared about test-driven development (TDD), which is about only writing enough code (doing enough) to pass the next test.  It is a Lean approach.  Richard talked about the Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) role at Netflix and how they have build their strategy and plan around mitigating risk.  Managing and reducing risk is a key element of good strategy.  We talked a lot about design, design thinking and its import and spent quite a bit of time talking about Steve Jobs as a visionary and who else he surrounded himself with that helped make him successful.  It was suggested that Jonathan Ive at Apple was very critical to Steve's success and controlled and manipulated him in many ways.  He did of course have many failures as well.  Someone shared the idea of designing for failure, not success.  

Dominic wanted to make it clear that strategy was not linear and that it runs off of principles related to non-linear dynamics and non-linear systems.  Berry shared that it is our intention as managers to create systems that control and constrain--and this is necessary--but does indeed rub up against the truly dynamic nature of people and systems; feedback loops and quality systems that continuously transform and improve systems are indeed required.  We talked about automation and its important and how design decisions like 'who does what' plays big-time into strategy.  In my opinion, users should be the preferred and default / de facto actor and some (many?) of them should have the option to do a task themselves (value add) or delegate a task to a computer or someone else.  We started talking about the podcast toward the end of the event and Bruce recommended The Boss Show, which is a Seattle-area recording about bosses.

Berry posed the question, "How do you know that your vision is not a unicorn?" which is basically to say that you are not living a delusion or tilting at windmills.  The book Black Swan was recommended.  Richard talked a lot about the many types of currencies which relates to the idea of non-monetary economies.  I wondered out loud and Steve agreed that there is some sort of harmonic mathematical equation that describes a leader's oscillation between hypothesis tests and failures.  Bruce brought up 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey and I mentioned that The 8th Habit is about "finding your true voice and helping others find theirs".  The book also talks a lot about connecting strategies of the head with those of the heart which is probably truly about authenticity, believe and conviction.

Questions and topics for further consideration:

• A Strategy (noun) vs. Strategy (verb) - What are the differences?
• The skill of qualification; how to qualify, what to qualify, what to ignore?
• Modern automation thoughts - who does what and what to do with the displaced workers?
• Why do the ideas of internal/private/closed and external/public/open help us in thinking about strategy?
• How do you know you have strategy?  (What is strategy?)
• What are the differences between real-world models and mental models and/or thought processes?  
• Test-driven design in management?
• The applications of flexibility and rigidity in strategy development

Which topics, ideas and points would like to see covered on the podcast about Vision & Strategy?

Managing Enterprise Risk, Compliance and Resiliency - Recap of October AppsJack Business Services Share meetup

The AppsJack Share team gathered on Tuesday, October 25th at Big Fish Grill in Kirkland, WA to discuss "Enterprise Risk, Compliance and Resiliency".  The guests were seasoned professionals who shared many interesting ideas about the topic.  Here are some of the biggest ideas and highlights.  Next month's topic is Managing External Relationships.

What is an acceptable level and/or amount of risk?

Risk can be scored and quantified but it is quite hard to measure.

Risk is comparative and/or relative, not absolute.

Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) can be a handy tool for looking at the dark side of situations and understanding potential impacts.

Risk Priority Number (RPN) is used, commonly in the automotive industry, as a measure of assessed risk and helps identify critical failure modes associated with a design or process. RPN values range from 1 (absolute best) to 1000 (absolute worst).  RPN is somewhat similar to the criticality.

Quite a bit of conversation was had about differences between risk (perceived negative impact) and opportunity (perceived negative impact).  Weighing both of these sides is critical for decision making.  Both live within the context of uncertainty.  Information gathering, research and assessment are  good tools to reduce uncertainty and increase the ability to predict outcomes.

David Slight brought up the point about the cost to mitigate.  Just because a risk could be mitigated, the question is raised "is it worth mitigating?"

Risk reduction is indeed a measurement and tool that is commonly used.

Paul, a first-time attendee and new Seattleite (welcome to the group, Paul), shared about the tool of Potential Problem Analysis.  PPA is a way that can help analysts anticipate problems before they happen and to identify the actions needed to be taken to prevent them from happening, or to minimize the effect.

David said that many people assume that there is a 1:1 relationship between the problem and its solution, which is a fallacy.  And that risk is oftentimes hierarchically decomposed, which presents issues since things are multi-dimensional and multi-faceted (do not fall into simple hierarchies).  NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) provides a Risk Management Framework that is common in industry.

Fred said that a lack of a Business Continuity plan is one of the biggest risks that companies face.  Without this plan, they have no plan and are therefore at risk.

There are many types of risk: financial, reputation, technological, infrastructural, contractual, relational, global, service, project, corporate, enterprise, operational.  This page has many of the risk types explained and differentiated.

Controls and compliance are big parts of the risk management process and plan.

Eric shared about extremely significant cultural differences about risk between companies in, say, healthcare, and those in, say, fashion.  Stark differences in language and behavior can be seen between these two cultures.

Jean, who was at the group for the first time and is currently taking a Building your Own Theology class at BCC,  shared about a big difference between the occurrence of the risk and the actual harm that results from it.  The risk event and the following harm or actions are two different areas, each requiring management, caution and care.

There are many situations and scenarios where we as humans choose to "look the other way" from a risk or issue so we maintain focus on our current projects and mission.  We "accept" (by ignoring) the other risk and therefore are at risk to its potential harm.  Risk and strategy are closely related.

We spoke quite a bit about authorization and systems including roles.  The BART system (Boundary, Authority, Role and Task) is a good way to clearly define roles.

We moved onto the topic of resiliency.  We agreed that scalability was related, as is the idea of "foreverness".  A clear plan that is aware of various thresholds, steps and milestones can help with communications about foreverness, a commitment to permanence and resiliency.

Many organizational and management-level issues can crop up in the topic of risk, authority and resiliency.  For example, there are many scenarios when people have a lot of responsibility but no authority.  Legitimate power delegated is a key to organizational success and growth.  (Managing down the chain).

Reba and others commented on individual-level requirements such as "if I found it, then I fix it".  Leadership and care at the individual level are required for organizations to survive and grow optimally.  Tableau has a core cultural value of "We Work as a Team" and that works well but it can also get into a blaming situation where no one (only the team) is accountable.  I felt that a similar cultural value of "I either hand-off well or I win." was a good one.

"I either hand off or we win."

Bruce, an always great contributor at the meetings, shared the phrase "you can't manage a secret".  And Leland, also new to the meeting, shared about the need for positive handoff.

Ultimately culture and individual attitudes, aggregated, play into the ability of an organization to identify and effectively manage risk, be compliant and be resilient.  Next month, we will talk about Managing External Relationships that plays into this topic very well.  Keep your eyes and ears peeled for our podcast on these and other topics coming soon.

We are considering naming the AppsJack Share Podcast "WonkTalk", "Community", "Communities of Purpose", "Practical Organizational Theory", "Building Communities of Purpose".  Do you have a preference in the name?  Plan is to have a podcast about the topic preceding the month's meetup.  The reason for it to be before the meetup is to prepare some, get a high level framework and understanding of the topic, get feedback from our audience on the most interesting areas.

We talked for over two hours.

At the meeting were Eric, Paul, Dominic Wong, David Slight, Fred de Boer, Chris Ingrao, Jean, Reba and Leland, Andrew Sengul.

Outline for Managing External Relationships Discussion on November 24th in Bellevue

Here are the various aspects of the Managing External Relationships topic we may cover during our November 24th meeting in Bellevue, WA about this topic:

• Public vs. Private
• Open Innovation (via Phil R.)
• Relationship and communications with:
• Channel Partners
• Collaborators
• Joint Venture Partners
• Gov't 
• Fed
• State
• County
• Local
• Investor 
• Employee 
• "Board"
• Industry
• Community
• From Conversation with John A.
• Provincialism
• Homogeneity and Heterogeneity
• Inclusive and Exclusive
• Open and Closed
• Economic factors like war 
• Threat rigidity hypothesis
• Specific
• Joe: 
• Public Adjusters (in Insurance) and Insurance Brokers.  
• What are the types of agreement documents used to clearly define the expectations of the customers.
• tips on how to work with them in ways that are mutually beneficial

We'll update this page as we learn more from our audience and participants about what they want. Sign up for the meetup via our Meetup.com page.

What are the other issues would you like see as part of the discussion on this topic?