Roger Martin about his book “A New Way to Think: Your Guide to Superior Management Effectiveness: “If you base your strategy on analyzing the past, then you are implicitly making the assumption that the future will be identical to the past. Because it’s based on rigorous analysis—and you’ve been taught in business school that rigorous analysis is correct—then you will not be ready for the future to end up looking different than the past, and you’re more likely to stick with your strategy for longer because it’s ‘right,’ based on the analysis…It’s mainly an exercise in freeing people up, in saying to them that in order to shape your strategy for the future, you don’t have to go by what the data say. What you can do is imagine things that you think would be better for us, better for the consumer, better for the world, etcetera, and then we’ll test those.”
FT on the idea of a “tactical meeting”: “The format comes from Holacracy, a type of flat organisational structure, but tactical meetings can be useful regardless of how your company is organised. A tactical starts with some general housekeeping: everyone checks in, then a facilitator runs through action items from the previous tactical, and receives updates on whether they’ve been completed. A note taker checks off action items and records other relevant details, such as if the due date of a project has changed. It’s important that these updates don’t spin off into discussions — hold questions and concerns for the next phase of the meeting. Next, build a rapid-fire agenda of “tensions” — these can be questions, requests, updates, or other issues that need buy-in or collaboration from the group…Once the agenda is set, work through each tension. Problems aren’t necessarily solved within the meeting, but as long as a next step is discussed and assigned to someone as an action item, then you can declare the “tension resolved”, cross it off, and move on to the next one.”
Read: Portrait of an Unknown Woman by Daniel Silva
