The Strategy Alternative Matrix (SAM) with Peter Compo

Again the beautiful serendipity that comes from the innovation show reading widely worth brilliant people so in, a future episode hasn't aired yet i haven't even recorded it yet with byron reese in his new book "We Are Agora" he mentions this little passage and it set me off man he said in the nineteen forties john steinbeck.

Join marine biologist ed ricketts on a six week expedition in the gulf of california their journey is detailed in the log from the sea of cortez, it was more than just a scientific endeavor it was a meditation on the nature of truth and the limits of human understanding while collecting fish specimens.

Steinbeck observed the ways in which scientific observation can capture certain facts while distorting others, he noted that when a fish is preserved in formalin, its color, texture, and even its scent change, and that led him to reflect that, The man with his pickled fish has set down one truth and has recorded in his experience many lies and this insight i felt underscores a crucial point and is the source of a blog that i'm writing that what we perceive as truth is often limited

an incomplete version of reality." And that jumped into mind because i was still researching your book and preparing for your episodes and i felt it was a beautiful segment that nods to Rumelt's heisenberg principle.

As well that as you observe things they change people behave differently etc i was even thinking this about, anything like any type of my wife is doing a sleep clinic recently they were monitoring her sleeping as i can, because they're monitoring her she's going to behave differently so what's the truth i thought i'd start up with that because it really sets us up for it.

The nature of strategy and when people change towards strategy strategy changes there's a lot in there but i'm sure there's something in there that you'll pull on. Peter Compo (2): You're bringing in a lot of, a lot of ideas into one, but I think maybe relevant to creating strategy and, the theme of our talks here. Is that the model will never be the truth. Right? And, and I'm not the first person to say this, right?

But how do we incorporate that reality into into strategy and into innovation? It reminds me of when I hear someone say, Well, you'll never have all the data. No, sometimes you'll have to make a decision without all the data. And I look at them and I like, wait a minute. Well, first of all, is there such thing as all the data? And second of all, even worse, There's no data of the future. There's no data about the future. Only models, only thought, only constructions that we make about it.

And they're going to be wrong, but the idea is to create a model that helps bring some coherence to thought that brings people together, that has a higher probability of getting somewhere that you think you want to go. And I love that example with the fish is that. As you think about it and work it and other people look at it, it'll change. And it. may get better. It may get worse.

You have to keep that in mind as you're going about how difficult it is to make a model of what's the right thing to do.

I did it an episode recently with ellen langer she's the first tenured professor in in harvard business school and it was about her concept of mindfulness . That when you're mindful in the moment things change that not the mindfulness like the kind of yoga type mindfulness that practice but just being present and she was talking about one of the biggest problems she sees with both students and most people and i thought it was relevant to strategy strategists.

I was telling peter i'm working on this new book and there's a line to use that i thought was just perfect for when you're paralyzed by.

Decision fatigue or the fear of making the wrong decision and emergent strategy she said don't paralyze yourself with, Whether or not i'm making the right decision she said make the decision and then make the decision right and i thought that was just beautiful don't worry about making the right decision make the decision and then make the decision right like live with the consequences.

Because they were the best decision you could make in the moment because you made one and i thought that was beautiful for the idea of emergence and the strategy of emergence. Peter Compo (2): Yeah. I understand what she's going after there. You have to do something. You have to test the system. You have to You have to probe it. You got to do something and see how it responds. And I think there's some subtlety there. Every, every decision doesn't work like that.

There may be certain decisions that you can work that way and say, okay, we're going to try it. Let's see what happens. We're going to be vigilant. about what happens and not think we know what the answer is. I think that's great. If you're in a big organization and people are all spread out and there's big money, that's going to be spent by that decision, then maybe you have to be a little more cautious, but I do.

I think that there's a lot of power in what she says in that you have to learn how the system works and you can do that by making some decisions and seeing what the response is.

Thanks for adding your color to your interpretation i was gonna build on that because again serendipity .My son. At the moment is torturing my wife because he has the kitchen table covered in lego so he's in a lego mood again he hadn't been for a while leave these boxes of unfinished lego and i was it was torture me as i can i go. Subtly saying, Hey, let's finish that Lego, anytime we'd start watching TV or whatever the Lego incidents.

I mentioned this before to you i'm always torn about lego now. Lego is a great such a great thing it's a brilliant for kids to be able to have that, outlet of creativity but it teaches them a certain type of creativity today and what i mean is when i was a kid.

We just had a box of lego pieces it was like lots of greens and all those colors i think there's only six colors maybe at the time, i'm the rock and all the other the six block or the eight block of the four block of the two, don't think they even had the one block back then and you're it was up to you to create whatever was in your mind and that creation would emerge.

But today they follow very specific directions and even so much so that you miss a piece it's like the old ikea fear you miss a piece you think you're finished and all of a sudden it's like on no i have to go back sixty steps or take the whole thing apart, i remember this with my older son when he was younger making lego and he was so angry about.

I'm disappointed and sometimes even crying about oh my god i miss that piece and i was like the lego fairy like the elves in the shoemaker come down at night like taking the thing apart trying to fix it to avoid these breakdowns, what is the problem and it's a problem with strategy because it almost teaches kids in that way that later on that same dynamic unfolds in boardrooms all over the world and i want to tie it

here together to your work because i love the piece that you wrote about here and let you take over here you wrote that, "an agile adaptive approach treats change and innovation as a puzzle to be solved. Puzzle solving captures the spirit of the ugly, messy, and sometimes frightening, but exhilarating process of making real change and innovating.

By focusing on what's needed to solve the problem, the puzzle and collecting information only when the process demands that the team can keep its energy through tough times. The objective is not to pick the answer.

A prescriptive plan, easy consensus, or as authors of beyond the hockey stick, our previous guest on the show, Sven put it, it is not about getting to yes, or the single proposal brought into the room, it is not as the authors of playing to win deride, to find the single right answer, build unassailable arguments to support it and sell it to the rest of the organization. The objective is for the team to internalize the possibilities for shaping the internal and external world.

and through hard debate and analysis to get to the possibilities right into their guts and it's this internalization that enables emergence of innovative ideas for achieving aspirations and conceiving new ones, the answer will be the survivor the last standing after destruction of all weaker and unfit ideas." This is a nod to also your idea of the darwinian nature of emergence. Peter Compo (2): You put a big quote out there. Nice, isn't it, man? You wrote beautifully there.

Peter Compo (2): Oh, I appreciate it. That was the introduction to part two of the book, right?

Where part one was the theory, the derivation of a strategy, execution, tactics, and the tests. But what you read there was. the spirit of how I'm viewing the strategy design and innovation that follows from that. And , I always use this puzzle analogy and you've turned it into the Lego analogy, which I think is fantastic because My son's 23 now, and I think he grew up during the time that Lego went in this completely new direction in a big, big way.

Where you, where you were given a recipe, essentially. And maybe in the bigger ones, it was a little harder to follow that recipe. So there was some degree of skill involved, but for the vast majority of the ones that I saw him do, it was just follow the steps and they had them. So you didn't even have to read English or whatever language you had. They were in this universal pictorial hieroglyphics method. And there really wasn't much judgment involved. There was very little uncertainty.

And it's not very much of a creative process. And, Like when I grew up and you grew up, the Legos was building blocks and you had to figure out what to build. And I think that that distinction is really good to distinguish between different strategy processes. There's many strategy processes that says, do this, now do this, now do this. Pick a great. aspiration, do an environmental scan, go do some research otherwise, choose your alternative, choose some plans, choose some metrics, and so forth.

And there's many, many, many variations on this theme. But I don't think it's a very helpful process. And I instead propose that think of it as a puzzle where you don't have all the pieces, you never will. Some of the pieces will change as you're looking at it, like you talked about with the fish. A puzzle where you don't know where the boundaries are or where they should be even. And then probably the most important thing, and you hit it.

There's no picture on the top of the box that tells you what the puzzle should look like. You have to decide. You have to evolve it until it takes a shape. It takes a form that's compelling and that you've figured out could be compelling enough to take on to implementation. And I want to throw in your point from the Harvard professor. Sometimes you can't know exactly how to build this puzzle and you have to run experiments. You have to go try something, put a piece here and see what it does.

But that image doesn't capture as well. What a organization might have to do, go run an experiment, go try something with a customer, go try something with a supplier or an R and D and see what happens. before they can even decide what their final strategy is. And I don't even, I hate to even use that word final because we all know that strategy changes as conditions change. And as you improve.

You do need at some point to have some kind of picture, some kind of puzzle that everybody can rally around. So the Lego analogy is really terrific, and it's saying exactly what I'm saying. Think of strategy, development. Think of innovation in general, whether you're writing a piece of music or doing a strategy for how to grow in a new market. It's like a dynamic puzzle. and not a recipe. There's a beautiful table in the book that you share.

And I thought we'd just share our, to our audience, just to show this idea of, of the old way and the new way, or, or actually the puzzle, when you have all the instructions and then the puzzle as it, as it real life is with no real instructions that you're, that you're, that you can do. And I thought we just show this on the screen.

And again, The book is full of these and peter's website is full of these where there's loads of graphics like this maybe maybe i thought maybe you want to pick a couple peter and just share a couple of these just to show maybe the the most relevant ones that you see that people struggle from today Peter Compo (2): Sure. , what we're looking at here is two views of the world. A planned step wise recipe view versus an adaptive view. Puzzle view.

And I do want to say nobody is on exactly one side or the other, right? Different methods are at different places here, but some of the key differences between those two extremes are in one case, you're calculating the future and the other you're internalizing what could be about the future. In one case, You're trying to aim for an easy and clean process. Those recipe processes where you do this and then you do that, just like that Lego process. It's, there's no anxiety in it. It's, it's clean.

It's stepwise. It's it's managed. You know where you are during the process. And that sounds really good, but it's exactly the opposite of what innovation is because you don't know where you are when you're innovating. So the alternative to that is. Accept that it's going to be hard and it's going to be ugly and messy and that that's part of the joy of creation. That's part of the joy of going to the unknown.

Another alternative, a very simple one, and some good people are, make this point a lot. Don't even put alternatives into the process in the recipe process. Why would you need alternatives? If you know the steps that you have to take versus make alternative options and alternative futures scenarios inherent to the design process. right from the beginning.

There's a a good quote in the book from, um, strategist Michael Raynor, who says most strategists in corporations don't ignore uncertainty and alternative views. They just put it at the end. They just make it like a, all right, we'll do like a little test on this, but it's not inherent to the process. So I would add that.

One more I'll, I'll throw out there is considering words soft and numbers hard is a very old school way of seeing the world versus admitting that both numbers and words are soft. That there are no numbers of the future only models. We started out by talking about this only models. The models are wrong, but they might be useful. We have to treat numbers with the same respect.

We treat qualitative thought, because there, there is the illusion that if you put something in numbers, You have certainty, you have knowledge, and that's just not true about the future. We had Michael Raynor on the show by the way i just want to tell the audience that i'll link to that episode as well because he has.

Three books as well that we promised we'd come back and do a series on those three books in the future so that is coming down the line just bear with me i have a lot to get through here behind me i was telling you as well man that, Henry Minzberg is coming on the show as well for people who are strategy fans. Proves to be a great treat. The way I did it with him, because he's like 20 odd books. I said, Peter Compo (2): I you pick which books you want to cover and we'll do three.

So that's what we're doing. So that'll Peter Compo (2): I I know that his work has migrated from the strategy processes in corporations to what I do understand more social science and policy issues. Yeah. And that was one of the books that rebalancing society was one of the books that, that he wanted to cover for that reason, let's keep going because I thought we'd be.

Incomplete if we didn't show the sam so the strategy alternative matrix and i have to tell you man, is you say this can apply to anything like music for example and i let you describe how that can apply to music so as a consultant.

I go into organizations, I work on their vision mission for the future. Out of that comes some accountability for people, et cetera. And when I saw the Sam, I was like, Oh, okay. And this is genuinely why one of the reasons I love doing the show, it's a competitive advantage to get to talk to people like you truly study your work.

And i'm constantly challenge myself and go am i actually living that am i am i taking that into my wheelhouse actually integrating these new ways of thinking i'm challenging myself as well and the SAM, i felt really challenge me so i'd love you to take us through a lot of consultants listen to the show. A lot of one man one woman band consultants as i call it lone wolf consultants do that so i thought this sam was really important and.

I'd love to take a little bit of time on that if that's ok i thought i'd show just one of the. What one of the variations of the SAM on the screen for those who can join us and maybe we'll have a bit of empathy for those people who are only listening peter Peter Compo (2): Sure. No, I can describe this. So SAM is the acronym for Strategy Alternative Matrix. And as I say in the book, I truly apologize for adding another TLA, another three letter acronym into the world.

I tried my very best to avoid that, but I didn't feel like writing Strategy Alternative Matrix a million times. And so. We go to the Sam. Being childish the way i am i thought of some you know the guy separate the sound from. The looney tunes in the guy with the big moustache yeah, well, whatever image you need to make this work. So the idea of a strategy matrix is not new, right? It's a time honored concept. There's some differences here about what.

The structure and the design processes for this one. All strategy matrix in some way or another have three sections. The alternatives you're evaluating and they usually go as columns at, at the top. The, what I call the fitness criteria with a nod towards fitness as in a Darwinian fitness, which is, which is the. the best for this environment for this task at hand. Those criteria are then usually somewhere on the left.

And then there's an assessment field where you assess each one of the alternatives against each one of your fitness criteria. And in principle, the one with the best assessment, the sum up, the best overall assessment is the one that should be the best strategy. Now, what are some of the differences between the SAM in the emergence approach and other strategy matrix? The first is that you have to actually have strategy as a central rule and that's what's truly differentiating the alternatives.

Remember that in a great number of strategy processes and strategy definitions, there is no single strategy statement. It is more a collection of , of sub goals , and aspirations and choices and so forth. Here, It is the central strategy rule that differentiates the strategy alternatives. You can also add in other things that differentiate the alternatives, like a key tactic or a key plan, or even a different aspiration can be explored here.

For example, you might use a matrix to evaluate whether to go big Or to start in a small way. That could be two approaches that are evaluated in the SAM. Another difference with the Emergent Approach SAM, and this is really important, is I strongly recommend do not try to make assessments of each alternative using numbers only. And I strongly recommend not to use a weighting system to get everything down into numbers. It needs to be numbers where they're useful.

If you can estimate costs, if you can estimate share, if you could estimate growth, okay, go ahead and do it. But huge number of ideas in developing innovations and changing what you're trying to do can't be expressed in simple numbers and that numbers actually reduce clarity. and rigor versus add clarity and rigor. And that's an illusion. I think people have that once they start to have numbers, it means they're being rigorous. No, I think it's often quite the opposite.

The last point I'll make about it that's different in this matrix is that you have to get fitness criteria that are lower level than the things you usually think about caring about. So, for example, One traditional way to do this is to use something like an MPV or an EVA or a RONA, whatever number you like your what we can characterize all of these as aggregate financial measures. I highly recommend against using these concepts as a way to evaluate alternatives, because all the richness is lost.

All the detail is lost. All the fight is lost. And what you end up having to do is nearly make up numbers about the future to be able to calculate these things. And we can talk about it later. I recommend getting much more diverse in how you define your fitness criteria and how you're going to judge your alternatives. And that can include people, things like complexity and emotional impact on the organization and on customers. It can include.

it can include things that , are related to shareholders. It could, and I don't even want to go through them. We can go more systematically through them, but I do want to give the impression and the view that your fitness criteria and your assessments, if you try to take them to NPVs or return on investment with all numbers, all the richness and all the internalization is lost. And that's why the SAM has to be words and numbers, thought and calculation.

And that's why we want to keep it on one page. So that people use what's in it as symbols of the thought that's behind it, rather than pages and pages of detailed calculation and words. So that's one of the most important facilitation features of a SAM. Keep it on one page, keep it simple, but make the debate about it, the fight about it, the experiments that we're going to have to run to make those assessments clear to everybody in the game.

that always reminds me that quote attributed to twain i think mark twain where i didn't have time to write you. A short letter so you wrote a long one instead it takes way more work to get to this one page there's so much work behind this one page Peter Compo (2): Yeah. Simplicity is very time consuming.

. Aidan McCullen: One thing that's constantly coming up and i've heard people say it to me clients and observers so you run a strategy session and people go oh AI has to be in there somewhere and it drives me nuts and you're going you are you actually i think you did a Linkedin post about it recently about your thoughts on that and i thought it was important to share your thoughts on that because.

Even at looking at the sam here where does AI fit in there it's not a line item it's an enabler in some way it has to be thought about very differently. Peter Compo (2): I think that's how to use AI in strategy development is a terrific discussion because it's rich. And I think we can go back to the Harvard professor again. Sometimes you have to make a decision, but you could test that decision with AI here. For example, you could use AI to assess these alternatives. in a very simple way.

They will not be able to tell you the whole thing. And AI, we've been experimenting with this, has difficult with the format of a SAM. And we're experimenting in ways on how to get that. But you can use AI to ask it questions like an assessment. What do you think, AI, if we do this one versus this one on growth or on cost or on competitive response? I think AI can be used in a very targeted way like that. Here's another way you can use AI in this, in creating the SAM.

You can give it your story, your diagnosis about your value proposition. your constraints, your scenarios, your bottlenecks, what you believe all these things to be. You can then, and your aspiration, you can then ask it, well, what fitness criteria do you think would judge alternatives in this story, in this world that I'm living in and trying to figure out?

I think AI does a very good job then of coming back to you with a whole list of things you might have to consider that might be useful for making this decision. But in both cases, and we can talk about others, you're targeting it. We've been conceiving it lately as the idea of just treat it like another person in the room with another viewpoint, with another skill base.

Because the AI has access to huge amount of information that no individual can use, but it doesn't have the same synthesis style as the AI. So I think there's a lot of ways to use AI here, but it's not just, go ahead, do it. i was thinking about the music and maybe if we gave your view of how you use this from a music perspective it might deepen the understanding a little bit more. Peter Compo (2): No, it was, I really had a fun experience.

A colleague of mine who were working on writing the next book in the emergent approach series. Angus Grundy, he's saying, Hey, you say that this applies to everything. You could use this for any decision. How do you use it for your music? Yeah. Yeah. And of course I had never done it for myself with my music, but I took the challenge and he put me through it. And it was really pretty fun. I expressed to him all the things I'm trying to constrain myself.

So as background, I write music and , what people would call modern classical music, but not crazy modern. Classical music for those in the music world. It's not a tonal. It's not so wacky that only six people in the world can play it. It's very kind of straightforward classical music with a bit of a twist. And I I have several things that I'm trying to achieve in it. I don't want it to be too hard because I want it to be accessible to students and to other people. I don't want it to be atonal.

So that people actually want to listen to it. And it's not only for the very few or an academic exercise. I want it to be for instruments that are needing new music of this type and so forth, and he helped me. think about those as part of my fitness criteria. And then we got into, okay, how does this help you think about how you approach a piece? Because I expressed to him that I was really struggling, that I've been creating pieces, piecemeal, little sections, and then putting them together.

And I've been thinking that it's not making a coherent piece of music as much as I would like. And I even got some feedback from a composer that I asked for some feedback. He says, well, you're like a block composer. You have a section here and then a section here and then a section here. And I said, well, he's right. So what am I going to do to keep all these constraints? And get more of a cohesive piece. And we immediately thought of two alternatives.

Well, the current is always put the current of what you're doing today. The current is to write these sections and then bring them together and add and subtract. The other was force yourself to write a whole piece, even if it's ugly, even if it's, messy and not good and all kinds of problems and even violating those criteria that I talked about. But at least it will be coherent. It'll be one thing, one idea right from the beginning. And then we explored other possibilities of how to do it.

And I think it really showed him. That this is a universal concept of strategy alternatives versus some kind of criteria. It doesn't need numbers. There were no numbers in my alternatives for writing pieces. And I think people can really make these SAMs their own once they learn the basic techniques. If you're interested, In hearing some of this music, you can go to Peter Compo Music on YouTube and see the kind of music that I'm talking about. and I heard you on SoundCloud as well.

You have SoundCloud as well, right? Yeah, SoundCloud, Spotify, there's there's, it's all over the place, yeah. I was gonna say for people who are interested in this, I know this is difficult and I know when you're confronted with so many frameworks, so many new in pieces of information, et cetera. One of my goals this year, in the year, I try to give myself a new goal of, of taking on a new an scur jump in that.

It's gonna take me a bit of a while to learn this new thing i have a way of doing things it's really difficult to do the new thing.

Mine this year was AI tool for editing video and it took me a long time to learn the stuff i was doing and relearn this new way of doing things but when i saw this tool I was confronted with the same thing i believe in emergence strategy, this seems to me like the tool i need to learn so for people like me who are listening because i'm sure if you're sticking with us now listen to all the other episodes you're into this stuff not everybody's into this

stuff so you're here you're a diehard so congrats and thank you for continuing to join us, but if they are interested. Peter where can they lean in more it's after to find out more about this tool Peter Compo (2): So obviously the the book, The Emergent Approach to Strategy, Adaptive Design and Execution, lays out all the things we've been just talking about. The design of the SAMs gives some examples of simple ones, very simple ones and more difficult ones.

Some of the theory behind doing it, but then Online, there is something called the five task sets and it goes through detail parts of the SAM and essentially a little bit of a guidebook on how you can take that theory and those design principles that are in part two of the book and go through them step by step. And after each step, there is a continuing example of the bike shop that I start in the book that illustrates that step.

So for example, there's a discussion of doing fitness criteria and then an example of the bike shop fitness criteria and so on.

i just wanted to make that clear for people that that's there and that's actually the way to do it we don't have time to do that we wouldn't do it justice by doing it in this medium as well so let's move on to something that is so so important and i was so delighted to see it in the book and the way i was gonna frame it for you is at the moment and i'm i started i started writing an article on this for my thursday thought article because this inspired it but again it was the serendipity.

So what happened this is the event that happened me so i injured my elbow actually both my elbows. In the last two weeks by it wasn't overdoing my training. It was just a dramatic change in how I did my training. So I had made a load of progress. I'm doing a lot more strength work. Now I'm lifting heavier than I was when I was a professional athlete, loads of positive stuff. And then I was like things are going well, I'm going to try and do a little bit more.

So really what I started to do was just lift a slightly different where it's really straightening my arm in a lift overhead lift. Damage both my elbows i'm set back right and what was really funny was the physio andy Dunne this physio that i got a friend of mine used to play rugby with he said to me you know as you grow older no offense it didn't say no offense is my friend as you grow older, you can only make very gradual changes to an exercise.

He said so it's very very slow and then another physio i know guy Mark McCabe

he said to me you know he said the same thing and a couple of days later he said it's like the bend of a river as you get older, because your brain won't even let you do that and sometimes the pain is your brain punishing you for bringing change on a quickly and i was like on, in my head of course the way i think it metaphors like that's exactly what happens in organizations.

pay a consultancy come in try and change wanna justify that change really really quickly and then today as is beautiful within the show i read this piece, you wrote, "the anticipated time and in brackets and possibly the cost it takes to make a real change) should give pause. The organization may have to learn new things .Create new habits and accept new rules of what determines success and failure.

It is hard to build consensus on trade offs when multiple functions and regional organizations are involved.

Not an easy consensus based on a lack of awareness of what is being suggested and not a trivial consensus where everyone gets their personal and often conflicting, bullet point added to the list of initiatives giving them the confidence to go back to what they've always been doing before, it is a hard fought consensus when a team truly internalizes, And accepts the implications of a new framework even if it's frightening and in brackets you say here the five disqualifiers head off

trivial consensus by ensuring that list of initiatives and goals do not pass as strategy and i love what you say here. "The last pain in the plan is the fear of and admitting that no matter how well designed and researched and no matter how well agreed by the team, the framework may still fail and articulating and acknowledging the range of outcomes reduce the fear and gain alignment. On risk tolerance.", a lot in there, man. But this idea of this is going to take time.

There's change fatigue out there for very good reasons. Throwing too much on people at one time, absolutely leads to elbow pain and you got to take it slow. You got to emerge the way that a river would take a bend. Peter Compo (2): I know it's not very popular to talk like this, because what consultant wants to tell their customers that they're going to take time? And what CEO wants it to be slow.

But we're too inundated by examples of fantastic billion dollar successes, multi zillion dollar successes and how quick it changed and how easy it was and , how everybody was aligned. And I don't know, for most of the world, it's not like that. I don't believe. for the most of the companies in the world or organizations and governments and militaries and you name it, people trying to write music or whatever you're trying to do.

The reality is there's a certain time constant for change and you can improve it, I believe, or you can decide to try to achieve less. Or maybe you want to put a wrecking ball into something and blow it up and start all over. But if you do, you have to recognize the collateral damage. There's just no free lunch. And I think admitting that and facing that in strategy is is very valuable.

I thought was important when you said that desired pain in the plan does not mean the pain of crisis, but it means the pain of avoiding crisis and preparing the organization to pounce on opportunities by unearthing and facing difficult issues in the design phase to the extent that is possible. I thought that was important. That may seem like a. An afterthought, , but , people don't think about that.

And I think that that's really important that, I once thought about it this way, that a leader of an organization is almost like. She's the captain of a ship on the ship. There's definitely icebergs out there somewhere, but by doing the work early to avoid hitting the iceberg, nobody notices and nobody goes well done for avoiding the possibility of hitting that iceberg out there.

That could be there someday versus you wait and you wait and you don't do much and you start to maybe get a bit lazy, chill out on deck, maybe take one of the junior officers take over. And then you see it coming, you go, I'll take charge now loads of layoffs, loads of problems, loads of downsizing, loss of customers, whatever. And it's noticeable that you took action and this, that, that dilemma is always there. I don't know if it's even a dilemma, but , the avoidance of the crisis.

Is the work but the avoidance of the crisis doesn't get recognized so much and i always think of jfk's book "profiles in courage" the people who took these really, political leaders who took these really unpopular decisions to avoid future crisis but actually didn't get any credit for this and This little paragraph read there reminded me of that Peter Compo (2): It's a time honored question, right?

About great leaders versus charismatic leaders who look like they're taking action and who are fighting dragons and, and, and managing crises. But what about the leaders who avoided the crises? What about the leaders who, who were thoughtful about possibilities that we don't see yet and and prepare the organization for that. And the passage that you read related to the fact that I'm saying real strategy work, real innovation, real effort is, is painful.

It just is, even if you do what the Harvard professor said go ahead and make a decision and make it right. Well, that's not easy necessarily either. And by the way, that's an old line captured by instead of ready, aim, fire, it's ready, fire, aim. It only applies if you get to make a lot of shots though. And I think that's very important. If you only get one or two or three shots ready, fire, aim may not apply.

But I think what I'm trying to suggest is that real innovation, real strategy has pain in the preparation, in the practice, in the, in the, in the design phases. But that's different from the pain of crisis. It's different from the pain of failure. It's different from the pain of anger. And, how come we didn't consider this? How come we didn't consider that? And does it apply in any field?

Preparation in sports, preparation in, in being a musician, preparation in in , military, when you wait for there to be a crisis, an example I always think about is MacArthur, the general during World War II, the American general, he was such a hero for, for doing bold things after the disasters, before the disasters, he was quite complacent. He made himself into a hero. It would have been painful to prepare for possibilities. It would have been, but that was what was needed.

Yet, we hold him up as a great general. That's the problem isn't that and then we don't call it out you know that don't call it out that you know it's easy to be, the person who repairs it not that it's easy But it's like what did you do to prevent in the first place and that's cause often times.

As we've spoken about over this series is there unrecognized efforts as in sometimes it's the effort so it doesn't happen and nobody recognizes that the board don't see it it's very hard to talk about it it's almost like cyber security. We invest loads. So it doesn't happen and you're go, you don't even see it. I think that's a, that's a huge, huge problem. It's human nature as well. Not to, that for saying Apremol, a deluge.

So the flood come after me, whatever , I've done well under my watch, not investing in the academy and a sports perspective, et cetera. There's a thing you said there, man, I think it's so important to say. I worked in a very. Bureaucratic toxic environment for not long. I didn't last long. I was there for eight months and my boss was probably my biggest Machiavelli in there. She tried to be Machiavellian all the time. And once she was, she was openly insulting me.

So she goes, Aiden, this was in front of an audience of people. You're just a bit fire ready aim, and I was like, Oh, thank you. Well, that, that, that should be the way for, for what I'm doing. And to your point, I was like, I wasn't being insolent. I was actually saying with the level of responsibility that I've been given and the low level tasks that they are, I should be doing fire ready aim. These should be just trying loads of different things.

If it was high level, then no, and the, the analogy I thought of to your exact point was in sports. So I was a coach for rugby, like you don't try all the trick moves or the experimental plays in the big game. You do them in the friendly games. You do them in your training sessions. When the stakes are low, you don't wait and bet the farm, with a hail Mary pass in the big game. You should have done that.

ages ago if you're waiting till the hail mary pass for the big game it's too late Peter Compo (2): And then what about the coach that does it? And in the one in 50 chance that it succeeds, they're a hero. we talked about before i remember the guy who went against deviated, deviated from the norm by the way i wrote another blog about that positive deviation that sometimes it works out and what do you do that in those instances.

That's the dilemma Peter Compo (2): This brings us back to something that I didn't stress enough about the SAM and about the entire thought process of innovation in an emergence approach. And that is that The real aim of the SAM is not to calculate an answer. It's hardly even to choose an alternative. The real aim is to internalize what the world is, to internalize the outside world, the inside world, to internalize the dynamics of it. What could be, what might be, where are we?

How do we fit into this world? And in many cases, you , find you don't even have to finish it. to come to an answer. As I say, another sports analogy, the answer comes to you, because you've learned it. You've internalized it. You've suffered through it. You've debated, you've fought it out. And I, I think of Michael Jordan, of course, the great, one of the greatest basketball players of all time in America. They'd ask him, how do you do it? And he would say, I let the game come to me.

And I always think of that as an analogy for developing strategy that you let it come to you, but it's hard work. It's painful work to do that. But that's what the SAM is for. It's not a calculating machine. It's an internalization machine. And there's a big difference. i'm so glad you said that there's a quote i have here it was my final. quote. Should finish on this actually and maybe get your comments on it but you wrote that and i thought this was beautiful.

"Internalization is the key to creativity and innovation and internalization requires emotional connection" and this line in particular and this is why you don't outsource everything to consultant and i am one and i totally against this don't get me to do the work. Because as Peter writes, "when people struggle through the design process and if they are heard and hear others, then it becomes their design, the people's design, and that actually is the job of the consultant.

You may be the sounding board, the mirror, the black mirror at times to hold up the accountability because you say, then. Not only will they have internalized it, but then they can have an emotional investment in the chosen framework, loving it and preaching it. And you mentioned here that this is often referred to as they become pride builders.

And I thought that was really beautiful to aim for that because many, as I said, many consultants listen to this, many buyers of consultant offerings, listen to the show. That's what you're looking for.

But I just want to say, it's not easy to do this. This is something to aspire to and you need techniques and you need, you need skills. But I think it's very much worth it. I think the worst cases of consultancy use that I experienced, we would summarize as they did it to us. It wasn't even they did it for us. Is they did it to us. And what we wanted was they do it with us, the mirror, holding up the mirror, filling in where they don't know what to do, giving some guidance, helping along.

There's a million ways that a consultant can make things better in a company, but doing it to them, unless there's just one decision to make and that's it fine. But how often is that the case?

That is not real because one session, a keynote and I'm a keynote speaker, a keynote is not going to make a difference. If it's part of an overall ongoing slow bend of a river, then it's going to make progress. But this is slow work. Peter Compo (2): this is slow work. And slow is a relative term. When do you get faster progress? When do you get actual improvement? The slow to go fast is the old line. And even the five day courses for a new program, we used to call it sheep dipping.

Most of what's remembered is the slogans. You have to do to learn in anything, right? And that training and those consultants need to be there for the entire learning process over time. But this is very hard for companies. Consultants can be expensive and they want it. They, they fear that it's going to be slow and drawn out. We're not going to get results, but the real deal is that slow and drawn out gets results usually.

And I know people will can twist this and say, Oh, look at how fast we were here and here. But when we're talking about creating something that wasn't there before, really creating something new, a new capability, a new service, a new product, a new way of doing things in the factory or in the, or in AI, it's not instant. And anyone who says it is in the vast majority cases will be wrong and they're fooling themselves.

Beautiful beautiful man i think we'll wrap on those inspirational words cuz that's that's the truth and this show tells the truth i hope people know that by now, peter you mentioned during the show where people can find you in case people missed it where is the best place for people to reach out, Peter Compo (2): Sure, you can hold up the book there, the red cover, Emergent Approach to Strategy on all online outlets. EmergentApproach. com has the guidebook we talked about.

We're turning it into a hardcover book as well. Yeah. And it has a few other examples and some chapter supplements and so forth. And then you can find me on LinkedIn where I post often and give little blurbs on things, you mentioned one just this morning, and then those three places, you can find me pretty well. author of the emergent approach to strategy peter compo thank you for joining us Peter Compo (2): Thank you, Aiden.