When failure takes too long

In a digital world, new ways of working are becoming increasingly common. One of these is Agile, which broadly refers to how we deliver solutions in an iterative and incremental manner, through collaboration between self-organising, cross-functional teams.

This can seem very exciting – an opportunity for rapid development, co-creation and evolving requirements, as the business adapts to learning's and change.

With Agile fast becoming mainstream, this may not be new for those of us already on-board. Nonetheless, where businesses tend to struggle with the introduction of this new way of working is the cultural change that it needs to represent as well.

Now, when I talk about culture here, I’m referring to our fear of failure. In a society that celebrates success, it’s human nature for us to not want to fail.  Failure suggests we didn’t plan, didn’t consider the options and ultimately let down our colleagues, managers, customers or even family.

Consider for a moment the last time you failed, what did that feel like? How much were you willing to share that failure with others? Announce it to the world?

Some brave souls would have stood up straight away and said, “Well got that one wrong, let’s have another go!” Now, think about the idea of failing on a regular basis. No – I don’t mean every day, but how you may have to keep changing directions while working on a project, as you become more knowledgeable on the pertinent challenges, to meet a projects objectives. How long would it take before your manager or even other senior leaders start to question what you’re doing, and wonder whether you’re the right person to be leading the project?

I’ve had some spectacular failures in my career as we sought to try new ways of working, introducing new capabilities or launching new offerings into the market place. However, I’ve also been fortunate enough to have some amazing support from my managers as I sought to pivot, recover or simply stop what we were trying to do and take a different approach (You know who you are and thank you for your belief!).

The biggest thing I have learned from these failures is simply to find my courage and highlight the risk or failure early, however uncomfortable this is, and no matter what the consequence might be. Unfortunately, not everyone has been as fortunate as I have in having some amazing managers – who understand that in the pursuit of some exciting goals, sometimes we get it completely right and other times spectacularly wrong!

It’s not uncommon that when a risk emerges within the business, an early view may be to classify it as “Amber” or even “Green” on the wishful basis that it will probably sort itself out before it becomes an issue. Unfortunately, it’s equally likely that with the passage of time, that initiative may not recover and in fact results in the risk becoming compounded due to collateral impacts.

These compounded risks can reach the point that they start to jeopardise the entire project. Given people’s natural tendency to want to show a project is performing well in its early stage, flagging this as an issue can make many folks nervous. Then one of two things will happen: either they will call out the bigger risk and wait for the bombshell of a response, with everything put on hold while a post-mortem takes place; or break down the main risk into smaller components, with the goal to resolve them individually and show that it is being managed.

I’m sure many managers who read this will say that they’re always supportive of their teams – and that all the team needs to do is raise the concern for the manager to help them solve it.

Now put yourself in your team’s shoe: when you wanted to be successful and prove that you could solve things on your own, how willing were you to call out issues on a regular basis without being seen as incapable of delivering on the outcomes?

At this point, I can anticipate the question many will be asking: what in the world does this have to do with Agile ways of working? Simply put, failure is a core aspect of Agile. In fact, you will meet many Agile coaches who say that the Agile methodology cannot be truly successful without failure.

Agile methodologies can let you achieve outcomes faster, by breaking deliverables down to their smallest component or feature you’re looking to develop. The Agile way of working requires teams to be empowered to define what they should prioritise to build first, to realise new and exciting outcomes without being encumbered by a fear of failure.

Two words leap off the page for me now – empower and failure.  Both are important and intrinsically linked to each other. What level of decision making would you be prepared to cede to someone in your team, who is leading a development project? How often would you insist on them checking in with you?

Insisting that failure is necessary for Agile to work doesn’t mean we simply sit back and watch teams continuously fail. Sometimes, intervention or a change of team member is required. Even as we empower our teams, it’s equally important that they know the standards expected of them –  whether it’s the performance of individuals or the overall team.

In setting the expectations and standards while providing the right coaching, we enable the teams to grow in the direction the business needs. I like to refer to these as the guardrails – giving people the reassurance and sense of security they need in the early days of Agile, that early failure is acceptable in the development of new capabilities. As those teams mature, these guardrails become less necessary as the team knows what is expected, and more importantly start to set their own expectations of the business as well.

To be clear though, giving greater flexibility and autonomy to teams doesn’t mean development paths look more like a bowl of spaghetti, with new capabilities created all over the place. Development teams still work to a roadmap and continue to have a prioritised view of what the sequence should be in the development of features. This lets them achieve an end goal, whether it is a new offer to market, a new system deployment or even customer deployments.

In a nutshell, Agile can be an exciting path for businesses to embark on, but it is merely a set of instructions for business leaders to follow. Simply following the said instructions doesn’t always translate to the desired business changes or accelerated outcome. For this way of working to thrive, it is imperative for business leaders to change their culture by providing the bandwidth for teams to learn, iterate and grow, without the fear of failure.

We need to recognise that without taking on the responsibility ourselves in driving this change in business culture, we will be left with teams that have been asked to embrace a new way of working that will ultimately lead to failure. This comes about when teams try to manage every risk scenario themselves, avoid the “bad news” conversation and try to be all things to all stakeholders. The result?  A workplace fixated on risk avoidance, which eventually leads to demotivated teams, increased cost of change and missed objectives – all because failure took too long.

There be gold in them hills!

A new gold mine has been established, okay not a traditional one, but it is yellow at least! “Pokemon Go” has started a global craze similar to what we saw with games like “Angry Birds” and “Candy Crush”. It’s not uncommon to see people randomly walking around the streets or parks with their phones held up looking for monsters! So where is the gold in that you ask? Well how about the 200 million USD of Net Income that Nintendo saw from the game in just the month of July and this was even before the game opened up into some of the biggest gaming markets like China and Korea!

But this blog is not about Nintendo’s success – that is pretty evident. What I am more interested in is the amazing appearance of the ecosystem around “Pokemon Go”, which is very similar to the pop- up towns that appeared at a new gold rush location. The game itself has been running for roughly three months and, in that time, we now have dating applications so as you can hunt monsters with that someone special (seriously!), or get access to maps showing key locations where monsters hang out and even go to online stores where you can buy Pokemon clothing so you stand out when hunting for monsters. I didn’t realise until my kids were running around an airport that apparently Pokemon monsters are trying to now even board planes! 

We have truly moved into a digital era, one where entrepreneurial individuals are ready to respond to the latest craze and set up their own version of a bar, tailor, supply store or even more mature entertainment. Our world has clearly shifted from the physical to the virtual and these pop up ecosystems are testament to that. What is interesting though is that unlike the gold mining towns of old, these digital pop-up ecosystems will disappear faster and leave almost no evidence that they even existed. This is because the technology of our era has caught up with our childlike behaviour when it comes to our digital lives.

I think Bill Connolly said it best with “I want it now, I want it yesterday and stay awake because I will change what I want tomorrow!” We have always wanted immediacy and, as adults, we grow to accept and understand we can’t always have what we want. However, the digital world changed that with information, collaboration, games and shopping. Hence businesses have always been keen on capturing this market, but much like a child, our interests tend to be brief before we will move on with something else (don’t believe me? Well did you know the average use of an application you download is only 4-5 days? – brief indeed).

For businesses to be able to leverage this opportunity they need infrastructure to be available to spin up and spin down. They also need access to high speed connectivity to ensure their temporary services are always accessible and lastly they need to access both of these elements all over the world in order to ensure they benefit from the breadth of interest these opportunities bring albeit briefly.

Fortunately, our word has never been more connected and as such these pop up businesses can thrive profitably for short periods of time and then quickly pull back on the throttle when interest starts to wane. Of course there is no guarantee of success with these pop up businesses, but because of the elastic availability and pay-as-you-use commercial engagements, they can afford to fail and that confidence can help to increase a willingness to experiment with different types of services. Imagine if you tried to do that in a gold rush town – how many unused buildings or wasted supplies thrown out the back of the building as they tried to forget what hadn’t worked!

In today’s day and age it is all about the here and the now, and I believe it will become increasingly common to see businesses where there purpose is to build capability akin to running a short term project. Their success will also be determined by how long they can ride the coat tails of disruptive market developments by being agile and relevant and equally how many of these initiatives they can run in parallel before scale becomes a burden to their agility. The digital boom town has arrived and I am sure it won’t be long before we start seeing a map of the digital gold mines that exist in our newly created digital world to provide budding entrepreneurs with directions on how to find the nearest pop up town and set up their own shop. Ultimately, where there is gold, there is business to be done – albeit in the virtual hills!

Disruption Starts at Home

The word “Disruption” has become a powerful concept of many executives across all industries today as they seek to lead their businesses to growth in what is an increasingly competitive and ever-changing market for us all. However, what is interesting is that for many businesses it tends to be about the outward facing disruption – to disrupt key competitors with innovative services or commercial models, introducing new technologies particularly with a focus on digital.

As such, many businesses can be left frustrated because in their attempt to disrupt the market they can actually have hit the “destruct button” on themselves. Let me explain why….Disruption just sounds exciting right? Think about your next meeting and starting with, “Okay team, we need to disrupt the market to drive our next phase of growth!” I sincerely doubt there will be one person who will tell you that it sounds like a bad idea. Compare this with the concept of an alternative start to a conversation – “Okay team, we need to run some efficiency programs to cut costs and drive our next phase of growth!” Now if you are managing that team you may have people worried about being the target of that efficiency and, as such, you may end up with only a few murmurs of support.

Being disruptive relies on our employees

So why not turn that disruption initiative to be internally focused to drive employee satisfaction, business efficiency, margin improvements and who knows perhaps even customer growth? We tend to forget sometimes that it is the people of our organizations that actually makes it a business, who determine the culture of the way we work and most importantly, represent the business to our customers. If they cannot be positive about their place of work and products or services they offer, then what chance does your business have in seeing sustainable growth?

We are in an era of rapid innovation, where many aspects of our business can be digital in the way we work whether that is for collaboration, building products or solving customer problems. Many people look at their path to digitisation as simply being the next step of the evolution of their business, build an application, put more documents online, provide collaboration tools to staff and customers. However, these elements are more like the partial ingredients of a cake, and if the ingredients are not complete nor added with the right measures, the resulting changes can actually prove to be of detriment to the business.

A shift in how we operate

The path to digitisation within a business therefore needs to be looked at from a business disruption perspective, what will be the impact on people, processes and existing systems? A disruption in fact is where the digitisation can be the agent of change, but actually represents a fundamental shift in how the business operates. A disruption agenda in the market seeks to drive competitors to figure out how they will adapt to catch up with this change and the same can be said for an internal disruption – however positive it may be. Leaders will need to consider the broader impacts of this change on the way a business operates today and how digitisation will require a change in the way teams work as well.

This is where I believe it will be smaller businesses that will succeed at internal disruption faster as part of their path towards digitisation. The reason being is that smaller businesses can’t afford to customise, request developers to change their software or build something from scratch that fits their needs. Smaller businesses need to leverage available functionality and if that means a change in a process or the way a business operates then so be it. Smaller businesses are like speed boats. They may not have the scale to impact an industry as much as large businesses can, but it is a lot easier to change speed, direction and possibly even the shape of their business.

A large business on the other hand is more like an oil tanker as any decision taken will have an impact on the waters around that vessel and the wake it leaves can result in faraway beaches being impacted by unexpected waves. However the time it takes for decisions to actually have an impact can be a lot longer and therefore much like an oil tanker the route needs to be planned, impacts understood and the action plan to realise that outcome.

Digitisation of a business is no different and like an oil tanker many large businesses will believe they can simply use their weight to push for outcomes they are looking for so that the digital components they select work within their existing business model. This is much like asking a ship engine provider to simply strap the new engine into place where the old one used to be. We already know it wouldn’t work as the new engine will probably have different controls, interfaces, locking mechanisms and so on. Asking an engine provider to change all of these elements to simply fit in with the needs of the ship will most likely result in the engine not delivering the same output as was originally hoped and could actually mean the ship is worse off. You will therefore have simply paid for an expensive piece of hardware with no benefit to the business. Digitisation is very much the same, there are some exciting capabilities out there, but the more a business forces changes of the tools it uses the lesser the benefit that it will bring.

Digital disruption requires organisational change

Digital disruption can be a powerful tool for a business, as long as it is considered simply as that - a tool –  the broader change within the business needs people to engage in changing the processes, ways of working and evolving the culture of an organisation.

If your vision is delivering customer excellence that of course doesn’t change, but your goals as to how that is achieved may need to evolve. There are many partners that a business can work with in driving its own digital disruption, but I would recommend you consider for a moment that the functionality they are developing is based on understanding the needs of many businesses across our increasingly connected world. As such, if there is a feature or functionality that you are looking for that doesn’t exist, consider first if it is the  way you are running your business that needs to change BEFORE trying to customise the software thousands of other companies have been able to work with as is.

Now of course if we follow this journey on its natural course many will say “well, that’s all fine and good Nathan, but actually you have just found another name for business efficiency”. Efficiency which will still result in roles being lost or teams being made redundant. Of course this can always happen, but I believe this can actually be reduced, by digitising the workforce.

A shift to digital

A shift to digital doesn’t mean roles simply disappear, it means different types of roles are required, I am sure there will always be some roles that are made redundant, but that isn’t about becoming digital those are more to do with efficiencies within a business that most likely already needed to be changed. We live in a world where we have three unique working generations; those for whom email and mobile was the biggest development of their time, those for whom social media was a significant change and our youngest workforce where the perceived challenges are more about reverse integration into a business that doesn’t seem as technology driven as their personal lives.

Collaborating with different generations

I view these different generations as an exciting time because it will require all three groups to make any digital disruption possible, for the moment one of these groups doesn’t embrace the change then the disruption is doomed to fail. We need to ensure that we have diverse groups helping to define and evolve the digital capabilities of a business so as they are usable by all, for both internal and external customers. We need these groups to aid in the coaching and guiding of others in how to make the change from a user’s perspective and lastly we need to ensure we have the cross-functional engagement that no one is left behind. For this reason I view that more roles will be created and with training and encouragement it becomes more a change of role than an outright “your job has been replaced by a computer!”

Disruption remains an exciting concept and I believe when brought into the business and adopted as part of a change vehicle on the path to digitisation, it can drive significant business value. We tend to associate disruption with something that can have a market impact, which it definitely can, however having a business that can disrupt itself into driving change, that will lead to sustainable growth will ultimately establish a business that is then set to disrupt the market with a business able to support. This will be executed through creating a culture of collaboration, understanding and most importantly employee pride, because an organization that sees the value in the disruption it brings to itself will quickly become your biggest sales and marketing engine when it comes to disrupting beyond your businesses home.

News Flash – Innovation is dead!

This is a theme I have heard a few times in the last few weeks, at a technology forum recently, in a BBC article and on a tech forum. So have we become so comfortable with our technology these days, that we are no longer pushing ourselves to innovate? Have we reached the peak of our technological achievements? Is the supposed tech bubble finally going to burst? Well it sure got me thinking, especially when I have set up this blog to understand the impact of people and technology on each other, I mean if it really is the end of tech I might need to close my blog … (dramatic silence). Shock! Horror!

Seriously though, it did get me thinking about what is driving this growing theme of technology stagnation? In the amazing world we live in, why would people feel we have reached a period of innovation stagnation? I learned from a development coach recently that there is 10% truth in anything someone says (yes you know who you are!) and hence felt that this was a good place to start. We have had some amazing technology developments over the decades; The Mobile Phone, Putting a Probe on Mars, The Internet – and I am sure many more I could mention, but are these really representing the end of our recent technology improvements? I mean if people are saying it, some aspect of it has to be true, because as we have also learned in our increasingly connected world, perception can quickly become reality.

I have seen some amazing developments recently, but it is not so much the developments themselves. Rather, I find something amazing has happened in the realization of these developments; they are no longer referred to as ’technology innovations’ but more simply as ’industry innovations’. The ability for doctors to operate using a virtual operating room, using robotic hands and cameras as if they were really there. Or for Manufacturers to now use 3D printers for manufacturing, or my personal favourite to have driverless cars on our roads – despite some of the recent incidents. Now these are all quite recent innovations – in my view anyway – but there are two things happening in our society that we need to be aware of.

1. Technology has now reached a point where it is infused in every industry, whether traditional or new, to the point that new jobs exist within these industries that are no longer ONLY about the core discipline (whether that be Medicine, Manufacturing or Engineering), but about how technology is being embedded into that industry. I love for example that IT managers in a hospital are not there to make sure the network remains connected, but to ensure the systems directly supporting Health Care services are running at peak performance. Or the Programmer working on self-driving vehicles, who needs to ensure the code used to speak to the ‘road aware devices’ are running properly. I believe this development has moved forward so much that the jobs of the future, for those seeking roles in the technology space, will rapidly evolve into multiple specialisations across industries. For example, you could become a Medical Engineer or a Manufacturing Programmer. I have previously talked about the concept of the changing profiles of roles, but that was merely from within an IT perspective. Where we are headed with cross disciplines - with technology and innovation playing a lead role, is even more exciting!

2. The lifecycle of innovation is actually now moving so fast that we are no longer seeing the leaps that we have in the past, in fact in many areas the life cycle of innovation is now occurring in months and no longer years, which could have led to the perception that innovation has simply stagnated. Technologists now have access to platforms and tools which help to rapidly reduce the cycle of innovation from the drawings on the back of a beer coaster, to a working model - whether software or even these days hardware. Many innovations failed to see the light of day, because our ability to promote those innovations was limited to what we can see - and the era of social media means that our world has never been smaller. What I mean by that is Innovations are no longer successful based merely on who has physical visibility of them in the real world, but now they are successful based on who can view them in our digital world. Platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo are creating the funding enablers for people, anywhere in the world, who share a common interest or a belief, to connect. Kickstarter alone has supported over 100,000 creative projects raising over two billion US dollars to date a figure which I am sure would have some VC's envious! This to me, raises the view that innovation is being realised faster, broader and with a greater chance of success, because these crowdfunding platforms are not only bringing in funding, but also evidence that there is interest in that creative idea, whether it be technology based or Fashion or even food! I share this with you as I believe this growing crowdsourcing trend is accelerating our innovation journey - and businesses are starting to catch on that crowdsourcing is not only a great source of ideas, but when an idea is supported it can immediately translate into customer demand, as Lays found out when developing a new chip (Hmm Cheesy Garlic Bread)!

These two factors of technology now being embedded in everything we do, along with the speed with which new ideas can be realised are in my view, key drivers for this perception of innovation stagnation. In fact I think it is the speed with which we now see innovation occur, that gives us this perception that it has become stagnant, much like looking at a wheel that is spinning so quickly that it appears to be standing still., Technology innovation is occurring so often that we are now forced to filter out what is relevant to us. I spent an evening looking through some forums and came across some exciting products such as Evadrop, Seatylock and Phree (I should note these are ones I picked out at random, but there are many more). These are exciting innovations, which on the surface can seem small and without the impact that the arrival of the mobile phone did, however if these innovations realise their ambitions, they could change the world we live in and hopefully encourage others to open their minds to the possible.

So to answer the question ‘is Innovation dead’, well in my view… no, but I can understand why people would see that it is. The era of huge technology leaps has past and the era of constant innovation has arrived - an era where technology is embedded in every industry and where the speed with which concepts and ideas can be realised, is faster than ever. So fast in fact, that it can seem we are viewing simple development steps. Yet it is the development platforms now available, that are creating the opportunity for innovations to be developed quickly and either realise their potential or fail fast and avoid the risks of high cost failure.

Ultimately we have entered an age where we are embracing a greater appetite for risk - in trying out new ways of working or other concepts, knowing that if it doesn’t work the first time we can try, try and try again, as we continue to refine our innovations in an iterative process across days or weeks instead of years. I look forward to the next era where innovation merely becomes a class you take in school and where you learn to create new concepts and new ideas with the platforms that start-ups and other businesses are using today, so that Innovation doesn’t die, far from it, it simply becomes a way of life.

Ctrl-Alt-Del

We all know what happens when we press ’Ctrl-Alt-Del’ on our keyboards – well, at least I hope you do, otherwise you may find this article rather uninteresting (now, I know a few of you just checked by doing it, so welcome back to the story). When we perform this ‘three button miracle’, we get to see the task manager, i.e all of the active applications we see on our laptop. Imagine for a moment, that you have closed all of those active applications and you are left with a desktop with no activity. Would you continue your work by simply reopening what you closed, or would you think about how you would do things differently?

In today’s “digital world”, we are increasingly comfortable to evolve our collaboration choices, social media, applications for our phone (yes, both for fun and the more serious activities). This is often because there is a better tool for us to use, or the tools we have aren’t working in the right way, or we simply want a change. Interestingly though, most of us don’t do this in our business environments. Think for a minute and ask yourselves, “Why do we do the ‘Ctrl-Alt’Del’ magic combination”? Perhaps our application isn’t working, or our PC or tablet is running slow? Are we worried that our device is stuck within a loop and can’t move forward from? Now, consider the business environments we work in. These reasons can seem very similar, yet our response tends to be a shrug of the shoulders and we continue to push through.

As you read this, consider for a moment that you could ‘Ctrl-Alt Del’ your business. Take a moment to pause and reflect on what is working, and think about whether your processes, systems and tools are doing what you need them to do? Which ones are consuming too much time or resource? As you reflect, you may also sense a glimmer of hope – that idea that pops into your head of the “What if?.

However. then the reality of how complicated or hard it can be leaps to the front again and the hope is gone. I encourage you to force that “What if” concept back to the front just for a moment – let it breathe and consider a minor application or toolset in your business that could be changed with minimal effort and would help your business start to realise the impact a pause and change could have on your organisation.

Of course, many of you will say, “But Nathan, we are already doing this we, are going through significant change as the market evolves”, or “We have tried it before and ended up in the same place”. I tip my hat to those who have not only achieved a rethink, but equally to those who are continuing to try. Without this commitment to change, then businesses will continue to plod through using what they have.

In essence, businesses can’t simply pause and then create a change. It needs to be embraced by the leaders of organisations. Congratulating one another for doing something new, without understanding how to create the right environment for it to be continually successful will simply doom it to failure. One such example was for a start-up business unit which was a business’s efforts to pause and use a fresh approach to change direction for an area of their business where they were being challenged by competitors.

I was fortunate enough to have a discussion with the start-up business unit, working under a large parent company the other day (no, not mine!), where they were being given conflicting direction – “Go forth and conquer this market as a disruptive player!”. Sounds great, right? However, this was followed by the second part of the conversation – “You must of course remain within the architecture and capabilities of the parent business so as we maximise our assets”. Now, after being ready to jump for joy, I was left staring into my coffee cup hoping that my disappointment for their predicament didn’t show. Unfortunately, this is very common for many incumbent businesses seeking to jump on the start-up bandwagon, without truly understanding the changes they need to make in their own thinking when considering what they set out to achieve.

In the case of this business unit start-up, that change from the parent company needs to be in giving them the opportunity to be disruptive or accepting that the goal in establishing the business unit is to disrupt the broader organisation. The latter would require some serious commitment, and a jump off a sizable cliff given the risks it may be perceived to have within the business, particularly as in many large established businesses, the employees are the culture, and they represent the way of working – hence changing this overnight can be challenging.

In this case, providing that new business unit the flexibility to define its market approach, its IT architecture and ultimately its culture will help to define its success. Of course, we can say “But what if it fails?” At least, if it stays within the way of working of the parent company then the assets and people can be reintegrated into the business”. If this is your thinking, then I’m afraid you will never know what success could look like. We don’t see business start-ups wondering about how they might mitigate failure, but how can then create the best chance for success.

“Hackathons” are a great example of how businesses can create the best chance for success, and to date have always been synonymous with technology led businesses, and in particular start-up environments. The idea of throwing a problem into a room with some really bright people to design and develop with a new widget or code to address a bug in a platform is increasingly common. I would however propose that hackathons become the tool of choice for our ‘Ctrl-Alt-Del’ moment.

Once we pause our business, what are we going to do? How do we ensure we don’t go back to our old ways of working? How do ensure our staff embrace this change with us? In any organisation, there are lots of bright people in their field who are keen to get more involved and with the right tools, they can have  a phenomenal impact on helping to improve the way a business achieves its objectives. The people that make up an organisation want their business to be successful; it’s what makes it a great place to work, so leveraging their commitment and channeling that willingness to succeed through these types of tools can create a great environment for change.

This for me is why leaders really need to ‘Ctrl-Alt-Del’ their businesses and have a serious think about the way they are running their organisations. Can it be done differently? Yes, I hear some of you saying –  it is simply impossible to change your business given how long you have been working in that way, but I say give your teams a chance to embrace change, a change made of their own interest, engagement and outcome. It might start small – from how a team collaborates, or how you engage with your customers, but ultimately if it gets the business thinking about the “possible”, then that can only be a good thing … right?

Fail fast or suffer slow

Telstra recently released its Connecting Countries thought leadership report, which was based on a survey of some 4,100 executives across Asia capturing their views on best practices, challenges and overall business performance in the region. It was exciting to read that there were a number of management lessons that businesses can take with them as they seek to invest into Asia as well as an insight into the profile of an Asia Business Champion – one who doesn't only recognize best practices but also lives and breathes them.  While there were a number of takeaways from the report,  there was one which jumps out at me particularly as it relates to driving success in an Asia market place. One of the key management lessons for success in Asia was looking at the need to move forward with multiple growth strategies concurrently.

Now I have always believed that a person cannot multi-task (despite my numerous attempts to try!) hence this strategy could only ever exist for a large size business and not an individual or SMB. But the need to look at multiple strategies is important for international businesses to consider in order to balance the potential risk of one failing due to internal or market challenges. I must make clear though there are limits to running multiple strategies. A couple of years ago for example, one vendor shared with me their plans to run 25 new initiatives in parallel. Now I don’t care how big you think you are or how mature your strategy execution process is, but when you talk about multiple strategies to this degree it is simply a death warrant for the strategy itself and puts the business at risk of losing its way. I am glad to see that San Francisco based vendor has since realized this and re-evaluated how many initiatives it takes on at the one time.

Now when a business is looking at multiple strategies it needs to understand the levers it can use, for example how quickly a strategy decision can be moved into action and equally, how quickly it can be shut down. These days it is increasingly common place that a strategy is dependent on people, systems and communication. Now, we know we have the ability to redeploy people to other projects and – as hard as it can be at times – sometimes people choose or must move on , however for Systems and communication platforms we often have to make investments that tend to have a pay back only after 3-5 years,. This can cause a challenge as businesses then need to assess how they can mitigate risks to drive a strategy to a positive outcome. For this reason it is important for businesses to adopt what is increasingly being known as a “Fail Fast” principle. The Fail Fast principle looks at prioritizing initiatives that need an investment based on requiring limited capex and leveraging platforms that can be turned up quickly and equally turned off with very little delay post a decision, if it is not working.

Take for example the idea of replicating a solution into a new vertical, which  might require assigning people temporarily, adding  system capacity for marketing campaigns, tracking opportunities and managing customer deployed solutions. But what if all of this could be set up within weeks and taken down even quicker? Would that make you rethink your prioritization of business strategies and equally consider additional initiatives, knowing your investment risk is significantly reduced and not committing the business to years of investment? Well hopefully the answers to both are yes, if not then perhaps a multi path strategy is not for you (either that or you have money and resource to burn).

Historically this would have been a challenge; however the virtualization of IT and communications means that businesses are now more empowered than ever to introduce the Fail Fast principle into their strategy decisions. Now considering the feedback from the Connected Countries survey that businesses need to consider multiple strategies in order to achieve success – at the beginning of this article it would be perfectly normal to think this is only achievable by either very large businesses or for those who have learned through expensive or painful experiences of what strategies work and equally which don’t. However hopefully now you are thinking about how your business could introduce a multiple path strategy by leveraging the advancements of technology that exist today, combined with the key principle in defining which strategies to go after based on their ability to align to a fail fast approach.

We are not talking about transformation or changing the way your business operates. This is very much about understanding how a business can be successful in a market like Asia where the only constant is change. But there are clearly multiple market opportunities and with the right approach –  as demonstrated by the Asia Business Champions – combined with the right principles, businesses can create the environment needed to succeed by failing fast, which ultimately has to be a better approach than suffering slow and not reaping the rewards of a multi path strategy.

You can find the Connected Countries report at the attached link - http://www.telstraglobal.com/connectingcountries/?concountries=tgbanner