Right now, our creative talent is very open to new opportunities.
And one of the main reasons people (really) move? It’s because they perceive there’s a better chance of seeing their creative work realized in the hands of real customers in a new firm.
With this in mind, there is one question that is the holy grail of questions in strategy implementation. Unless it’s answered well, your valuable creative people will see their best work get stalled by the noisy call of the day-to-day demands of the current product and service:
How do you cross the risky moat between your current market/product alignment and meet the emerging needs of your clients?
As we are all gaining momentum in the great reset driven by the COVID pause, this question is even more important.
Trust me…I get calls everyday from your best team members – and their LinkedIn & text messages are blowing up with inquiries. Our world has changed dramatically in the last year and half and your team members have gotten a huge insight into “home life.” They are now asking more of work – and recruiters have the advantage.
So, what can you do? A great deal. And you don’t need to be perfect and without conflict to attract and keep great talent.
Today, we’ll talk about how to put the best possible work in front of them (and you), so that when contacted by a recruiter, they can answer the following message with integrity:
“…no thanks, I’m confident there is no better place that I can achieve my career goals….”
And have it be the truth.
Pillars of Certainty to DeRisk the Uncertain
Working with dozens of leaders who have enjoyed the benefits of the second journey, it reveals a pattern that is rarely shared: leaders who cross the moat of risk and uncertainty do it by standing on a solid foundation that is just below the water line. And once their team does it together, they are welded together as a unit.
These rock solid pillars include things like channel competency, supply chain management, product execution and solution delivery – and they allow the skilled leader to venture into the zone of uncertainty with confidence. Through no fault of their own, these pillars are frequently hidden in plain sight. And while they don’t get cool marketing logos like Artificial Intelligence or Internet of Things, they are critical competencies that allow the skillful strategist to discover real, lasting growth that lies on the far side of what appears to be chaos (only because it’s not been decoded yet). They are typically found by objective diagnostic work with partners and customers in your current and emerging market (I can help make this efficient).
The formation of certainty starts with identifying the key “knowns” that provide leverage to discover the unknowns. In many cases, it takes just one more ingredient to pull a firm into a breakthrough.
Examples are everywhere when you start to use this lens:
- The progression from exploratory space flights to land the man on the moon to private space travel
- The development of gorilla glass for touch screen phones without “clicky” keyboards
- Cloud services driving ubiquitous voice-based interfaces
The Powerful Guardrail that Allows Confidence when Crossing Uncertainty
Each of these breakthroughs would not have been possible without the shrewd partitioning and iteration through risk and certainty. By carefully parsing the known and the yet to be known using commercial experimentation and learning, each of these products and services came into being.
Leaders who succeed in this space have a learned ability to test only one new variable at a time. For example, in the early days of Tesla, vehicles were built around the hypothesis that high-end consumers wanted low-emission cars that performed at a high level (now validated market demand). They then built a high-performance vehicle out of the best tech they could source and proceeded to test a direct-to-consumer marketing model (the uncertain part). Once confirmed, they then iterated along a trajectory that built capability in componentry, brand and market reach. Viola! A car company with a market cap that eclipses their conventional brethren by several decimal places.
Entering a space of uncertainty and creating new pillars of certainty is the essence of agility, and when aligned with the market, provides a firm with outsized rewards for their work. This leads to the first truth that firms that know how to learn faster, win.
The important, and rarely voiced, second truth is that firms that limit their appetite for uncertainty, by keeping their exposure to risk partitioned by building on rock solid pillars of people, processes and technology, live to make it to market.
The Next Steps
The pandemic has been the ultimate “pause,” and provides a real opportunity to build solidly for your future as a firm. Those that see this as a fresh start are winning.
There are three steps to mobilizing what we’ve discussed above:
- An objective, practical view of the competencies you have as a firm or team by looking through several lenses of individual, process and technology competencies. This step frequently involves some precise interview work with the firm and its key upstream and downstream stakeholders.
- The work to discern and catalogue the valuable opportunities you are saying “no” to that your customer constantly asks for. This work is accomplished through targeted internal dialogue with your subject matter experts.
- Forming a discovery-based group to mine the uncertainty that is keeping you from this economic opportunity. This work is delivered by a cross-functional “tiger” team with a very powerful set of tools to put together the clues that lead to insight into the new niche.
(If you are curious about what this work looks like at a more detailed level, I’ll be happy to go deeper on our complementary, 20-minute chat.)
By anchoring your work in those zones, you’ll develop a very valuable portfolio of work that consistently uncovers fresh external opportunities.
I Can Help
If you’ve read this far, you know implicitly that you are on one of three tracks. The first track is you’ve kept this material at arms length in an academic way, and you’re going to repeat what you’ve been doing. This will result in drift, and not get you closer to your goal. The second path is to take bits and pieces of this note and append them to what you already know, which will likely tweak your results, but not lead to the breakout that you were hoping for. Finally, you can hit the link below and start a journey that could geometrically improve your results.
Here’s the bottom line: you’ll never be closer to better results than you are right now. Keep in mind that with time, those three paths get increasingly more divergent – and a jump from one level to the next takes more and more energy and effort.
If you’d like to know more about the strategic assessment and the implementation framework, please select a time on the calendar with this link for a personalized 1:1 call with me.
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