I want strategy development to serve a much more useful purpose than crossing something off a leader’s to-do list.
So, I’ve set about looking for strategy “in the wild” — watching for how it’s being implemented in practical, helpful ways in real life.
At the risk of sounding partisan, I want to use Mark Carney, the newly elected Canadian Prime Minister, as my first example.
Continue reading “Strategy Sightings, Episode One”One of the books I think about often is Factfulness by Hans Rosling. One of the lessons in that book is not to assume you understand a trend by looking only at a portion of a graph.
When we only have a few data points, we often assume that the relationship between them is going to continue. So if things are trending downward, we assume that downward trend will persist into the future.
Notice that assumption, then call it into question. Why?
Continue reading “Extend the Graph”Did you know that king crab are an invasive species? (At least in Norway). But that’s not the point of today’s post. The point of today’s post is to notice what it feels like when your shell is getting too small.
King crabs get a new shell once a year, and fishers can’t catch them during the time that one shell cracks and a new one hardens. Despite being an invasive species, they are known to be too vulnerable during that transition time and need to be protected.
Continue reading “Your Shell is Too Small”My friend Alex Hagan is fun and quirky and brilliant. I wish we lived closer together. And today, I would rather you read what he’s writing than what I’m writing. Here are a few nuggets from a recent post of his:
“A scenario isn’t a prediction, but rather a plausible piece of fiction…[and] even a plausible fiction about the future can profoundly shape your choices right here and right now.”
Continue reading “My Imagination Pit Crew”It’s funny what strikes you when visiting a new country.
In Norway (I’ll stop talking about it soon, I promise!), it was infrastructure.
There were tunnels and bridges everywhere, which I guess is what you need when your country is made up of mountains and islands. But these massive construction projects connected, in some cases, very tiny communities that appeared to be in the middle of nowhere.
Someone thought the investment was worth it, and it often left us shaking our heads in disbelief.
