The Crux – 3
Gartner book review: “Rumelt defines true strategy as the mix of policy and action designed to overcome a significant challenge. Rumelt calls these significant challenges “Cruxes”. A crux is further defined as a challenge that is both critical and appears to be solvable. It is a very simple, but immensely powerful way of thinking – particularly compared to the current goals first. Using this view Rumelt effectively advocates that strategy is a special form of problem solving with the ability to deal with Gnarly problems. Gnarly problems or situations … may have no clear definition of the problem itself, it tough because the issue is not self-evident nor self-defined. This means that gnarly problems are either overlooked or avoided in favor of simplistic goals, because you have to work at them and face the truth … [They] do not have a single or simple goal, rather they often require addressing a number of potentially competing ambitions. Again, they are hard to solve and cannot be wished away with a goal of mission statement.”
Rumelt in McKinsey Quarterly: “A gnarly challenge is not solved with analysis or the application of preset frameworks. A coherent response arises only through a process of diagnosing the nature of the challenges, framing, reframing, chunking down the scope of attention, referring to analogies, and developing insight. The result is a design, or creation, embodying purpose. I call it a creation because it is often not obvious at the start, the product of insight and judgment rather than an algorithm. Implicit in the concept of insightful design is that knowledge, though required, is not, by itself, sufficient. The way through a gnarly challenge may not seem clear at first but working to grasp the structure of the challenge is often the best way of seeing a path through. As a number of problem-solving researchers have found, “at the least, problems must be deeply analyzed before an insight solution can be achieved … The skilled strategist recognizes the heart of a challenge as the thing blocking an easy solution. Attention is drawn to it because it hints at leverage—that if we could only just move the keystone, the whole wall can be breached.”
Rumelt added about how Elon Musk identified and solved for the crux in the early days of SpaceX:
As an example, the entrepreneur Elon Musk is passionate about populating Mars. He imagined promoting this idea by sending a small payload there. In 2001, Musk had tried to buy an old rocket but was unhappy with the style of bargaining and how the price tripled during the negotiations. He began to look at the challenge of cost—why did it cost so much to put payloads into orbit? He was quick to see that the high cost was because rockets were not reusable. There was no cheap way to return to Earth through the furnace-heat of blasting back through the atmosphere at 18,000 miles per hour. Was there a way around this problem, the Achilles heel of the old space shuttle? Then Musk had an insight: fuel was a lot cheaper than vehicles. It might make sense to avoid the huge complexity of super-high-heat reentry by carrying more fuel and using it to slow the rocket’s return to Earth. Like many old science fiction stories, Musk imagined a rocket that would turn around and slow down by firing its engine, leading to a soft landing. No violent reentry furnace would char the outside of the vehicle. The process could be automated, as well—no need for a human pilot. The key would be engineering a rocket engine that could reliably start and stop and accurately throttle and direct its power. With this insight, soft reentry became the crux challenge for SpaceX.
As I read the initial chapters of the book on the flight from Newark to Mumbai at the end of my vacation, the question that came to me was: What is the crux of the brand-customer relationship? In other words, what is the hardest (“gnarly”) problem that marketers need to solve to help them in their journey of maximising customer loyalty, revenues and eventually, profitability?
