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I don’t think “not seeing IRL” is particularly remarkable fwiw, it remains surprisingly rare to see any documented strategy of any kind in any company. (Even rarer for the strategy to make much sense.)

Wardley mapping adds a lot of clarity to ideas, but also seeing your ideas so naked is hard. such clarity can be emotionally difficult

Will Larson

@lethain.com

Absolutely, I think only a subset of strategy practitioners care about their strategy working (as opposed to compliance with the strategy, whether or not it works), which is a hard starting place for any technique ime!

as long as you don't evaluate if it actually works, you can lean on "true [x] has never been tried". I will only speak for myself but its easier to reject failure in that in context 🙃

I've had some really good chats with @cedricchin.bsky.social about this in the context of "being data driven". the endgame of data analytics is that its up to you, the Manager, to influence change in the metrics. If you cannot do it, skill issue, a new manager is needed.

1/12/24, 5:10 pm0 reposts4 likes

Will Larson

@lethain.com

I have to work through @cedricchin.bsky.social's being data driven series at some point :-)

Duncan Howes

@duncanhowes.bsky.social

Super interested in this point. Is this because a data or analytics team manager is the right organizational node to understand both the details underlying metrics and the levers that could affect them?

Haha sort of. It’s more that the mechanism to understand the causal model of your business is analytics. The people making the decisions (not analytics people) in general prefer less visibility on the causal model than they should, for political reasons.

Matt Menzenski

@menzen.ski

That’s a really interesting point re: preferring less visibility on the causal model 🤔

Visibility for me but not for thee.

Why? Because if you understand the causal model of your business you can’t just make up reasons why your product line / team / company isn’t performing. And if everyone (other execs) has visibility to it, it’s doubly true. Very tough dynamic if it doesn’t come from the CEO downward.

Ah as a footnote, this is why it’s hard to land analytics asymmetrically from the bottoms up. The part of the org that is most explainable bc they have the best causal model is also the most vulnerable to external assault by adversarial managers. Needs to be somewhat evenly applied.

Deming et al (including Cedric) have written about this more eloquently than I have. YMMV of course :)

Duncan Howes

@duncanhowes.bsky.social

Ah ok. So effective data driven orgs in this context is more about decision makers (managers) gaining more natural visibility and fluency with the org details via metrics and supporting analytics.