Tag: operations

Posted on

Strategy says no

If your strategy doesn’t tell you what not to do, it is not an effective strategy.

Because saying yes to things is the easy part. In fact I believe it has never been easier for businesses to think they can take on more and more.

But the amount of human attention we have is finite. Switching focus takes cognitive effort. Increasing stakeholders has a quadratic impact on the number of new relationships to manage.

Straddling strategies (doing both, or many things) doesn’t evenly reduce the time for each. It fragments it, the overhead multiplies disproportionately and the depth decreases.  

So if we want to have impact in our work then we have to choose. 

And so that we don’t have to do the hard work of choosing each time, we write a strategy. It saves us from having to renegotiate our priority every week.

Which means, if your strategy isn’t clearly telling you what not to do, it isn’t doing its job. Instead, it’s pushing that hard work downstream, forcing you to decide every day, creating extra effort and reducing impact.

Strategy does the hard work of saying no to make it easier for you to focus on having impact every day. 

Posted on

Aiming Higher in the System

When we try to apply regenerative design at a project level, it can feel like our hands are tied.

The building regs won’t allow it.

I’ll never get insurance for that.

This project is too small to create that sort of change. 

These constraints are real, but they are also information that the leverage need may not sit at the level of the project itself. 

This is why we talk about aiming higher in the system. 

To aim higher in the system is to look at the system of constraints that surround a project — the operating rules, procurement processes, risk appetite and supply chains — and work to change those. 

This work may look different to the work we normally do. It might involve creating new relationships, developing new processes, challenging big assumptions. 

It may not look like regular design. 

Which is why ‘aim higher in the system’ sits at the top of the Brief for Thriving. If we can influence over the higher shelves on the Systems Bookcase — the operating rules, mindsets and goals — then we can begin to change what gets built, and critically, the impact of building stuff.

Regenerative design is systems change. We have to work higher in the system to ensure that what we build actually makes the world better.

Posted on

The Systems Bookcase model

Have you every wondered why we make the engineering decisions we do? Why, despite decades of knowledge about the climate and ecological breakdown, we continue to design in a way that causes harm to our life-support systems. To help understand the driving forces behind design decisions, James Norman and I proposed the Systems Bookcase model in ‘the Regenerative Structural Engineer’.

Continue reading “The Systems Bookcase model”