In this episode, Mike and Ian continue their Strategic Partner series, focusing on the indispensable skill of critical thinking as it pertains to developing viable solutions. They advocate for a methodical evaluation of problems, coupled with a creative exploration of potential solutions that account for the complexities of organizational dynamics. The hosts elaborate on several techniques, such as brainstorming divergent options and employing stakeholder-centric mapping, which facilitate the generation of innovative ideas while ensuring alignment with the broader organizational mission. Through their insightful dialogue, listeners are encouraged to adopt a mindset that values incremental improvements and collaborative efforts, thereby enhancing their capacity to influence positive change within their respective environments. This episode serves as a vital resource for any consultant aspiring to elevate their practice by integrating human-centric approaches into their strategic methodologies.

Foreign.

Welcome to Consulting for Humans.

You're with Mike and Ian.

In each episode, we explore a new topic that gets to the heart of what makes consultants happy and successful.

That's right.

On the Consulting for Humans podcast.

It's our mission to add just a little more humanity to the lives of consultants.

And we love bringing some of the skills and perspectives of consulting to human lives, too.

So if you're a consultant who's trying to be more of a human or a human who's trying to be more of a consultant, then welcome along because we think you're just our kind of person.

Mike, where are we at in our journey today?

Oh, thanks, Ian.

We're in part five of our Strategic Partner series.

We are looking at business professionals who want to be a little more consultative, people in advisory or influence roles who perhaps don't have formal consulting background or training.

We talk in each of these episodes about examples of those, and we're talking about skills that can help you be more of a surprise strategic partner using those consultative skills.

So last week we talked about understanding before being understood.

You know, what is the problem or opportunity really that we're solving?

And this week we're going to be moving on.

Ian, where are we headed this week?

Well, we are going to be thinking about critical thinking from the perspective of solution development, getting from solving the problem to making strategic recommendations.

We're going to look at thinking techniques for generating solutions.

We're going to look at how we can involve stakeholders.

We're going to look at how we design solutions with future implementation challenges in mind and spending time in the future now so that we're not surprised by it later.

So, Mike, get us started here.

Where had we got to with this critical thinking thing previously and how does this episode fit into that?

Well, in our last episode, we talked about diagnosing problems, systematically understanding root causes rather than just symptoms.

And you worked on developing the ability to see what's really happening beneath the surface.

And by you, I mean you listeners who are saying, yeah, I'm actually trying some of this.

This is really helpful.

So now comes the crucial next step, going beyond that, to use logic to develop and test a diagnosis of where the problems and opportunities really lie and transform that deep understanding into strategic solutions that create lasting value.

So if you're following along at your Strategic Partner pyramid at home, we're now bridging the middle and top levels of our Strategic partner pyramid.

We're moving beyond understanding problems to developing solutions that provoke new thinking and challenge conventional approaches.

And this transition is where Many functional experts get stuck.

They become excellent at diagnosing issues, but struggle to translate their insights into compelling strategic recommendations.

Right.

And it's a little bit of a change of mindset here, Mike.

Critical thinking for developing solutions isn't about having all of the answers.

It's about making lists.

Right.

It's about divergence.

It's about evaluating options and looking ahead and anticipating consequences and designing recommendations that navigate through that, that address root causes and address the realities of the organization.

This word strategic that we use in the name strategic partner, I think sometimes gets abused a lot.

But strategic partners are the ones who distinguish themselves by developing new combinations of solutions, ideas that haven't been considered or at least haven't been considered in this way in the past, and thinking through implementation challenges that other people with narrower thinking might have missed.

And Ian, sometimes I think we're hearing lots of agility and creation and innovation, but logic still plays a role, right?

We're still starting with logic.

We are.

It's funny, Mike, I think we're a little bit conflicted on this.

As what you might call external outside consultants ourselves, we tend to bring a lot of logic baggage with us into our client organizations.

But here we're talking about from the perspective of somebody who's already inside.

External advisors and consultants train hard on this logical thinking stuff.

The trap for those of us who are on the inside is that it's possible to overdo the logic.

Not by being lazy, but it's possible to kind of overcomplicate the story.

I think that great logical thinkers are tough about the way they draw together combinations of cause and effect, make a diagnosis or make a prediction.

It's important, Mike, but I don't think it's enough when we are sitting inside our own organization and we've got the responsibility not only to compelling in what our diagnosis is, but to gather people with us in a coalition of folks who are willing to fix the problem.

We need to think about what stakeholders see this problem, representing what kind of a solution they might be willing to represent.

When we're persuading and using logic, we might need to use three bullet points rather than 15.

You know, we need to start to understand the skill of rhetoric.

We might be able to be successful by drawing analogies and making associations and generating examples rather than just pure logic.

And we might need to remember that social proof is important.

This is about persuasion and it's about personality just as much as it's about logic and facts.

Yeah, it's one thing to get to the solution.

It's another to get the solution accepted.

I remember, Ian, you had a story about surgeon's gloves.

Remind me, how did that go?

Oh, my.

It's a great story.

Totally not my story taken from a book about managing change, but it's from a world that I'm familiar with.

So I like telling the story.

It's a story about an administrator in a hospital that was trying to persuade a whole bunch of doctors, including surgeons, that they could maybe reduce the number of varieties of gloves, surgical rubber type gloves, silicone gloves, that this particular hospital was ordering because it was a procurement nightmare and a waste of money.

And you look in the reports and you look in the strict logic that it shows that this explosion in the number of varieties of gloves was causing loss of time and money and all kinds of problems.

But taking the intellectual presentation of the problem to doctors and surgeons, very senior, very highly influential people who are used to being sparing with their judgments, right.

It's very hard to get them on board.

So, having been pushed back on by all of these senior physicians and surgeons, the hospital administrator called them to a meeting in a big boardroom shaped meeting room one lunchtime.

And as all of these physicians and surgeons walked in, they saw a huge pile of gloves on the boardroom table.

And they all got annoyed and they turned to the administrator and they said, what the heck is this?

You've called us to a meeting and all we see is this huge pile of gloves.

And the administrator said, yeah, you're absolutely right.

This table contains one pair of each variety of each size of glove that this hospital procures.

And they went, this is nuts.

And she went, that's exactly what I think.

I'm so glad you're with me.

So by, by making a visual idea, by bringing it to life for people, she was able to get past the kind of she or he was able to get past some of the initial skepticism that they might have had with just logic on its own.

Yeah, I love that, Ian.

I love that how, you know, sometimes it really takes that story or that visual or something that grabs your imagination to move it.

And that's part of, again, developing the solution and then communicating getting the buy in to that solution.

So we're not saying that we're going to get rid of structured critical thinking.

In fact, effective solution development requires that structured critical thinking, moving from problem understanding to actionable recommendations.

And that was part of her catalyst in making that actionable here.

So from we don't want to jump to obvious solutions, we don't want to propose Changes that sound good in theory but fail in practice.

So, you know, we talked last time about root cause analysis, about involving stakeholders, and that stakeholder thinking is very important when we were getting it, what the problem is.

And it's really important now that we have to convince them that we have a good diagnosis and get that, you know, having gotten their input into it and share those in generating and implementing options and solutions, so getting them to be part of that journey.

Right, so you and I were talking about this, Ian, and it seems like there are four steps that build upon your problem diagnosis work.

Right?

So you're the hospital administrator, you've got the big dusty pile of gloves on the table in front of you.

What are you going to do next?

The first step is to work with your stakeholders to do some divergent thinking.

We all know that the idea of brainstorming is important, but there's a moment when you need to just get into making a long list.

Get multiple solution options, solutions that are imperfect, solutions that are partial, but get into making a list without evaluating them.

And Mike, people have known about brainstorming for decades in management, but these days, with people working in very highly intellectual ways, people working in very structured ways, people working apart from each other, I worry sometimes we might have lost the knack of really just brainstorming and generating multiple ideas.

So once you get the list of multiple ideas and hopefully the surgeons and physicians are still in the room with you with the gloves.

Second step is to apply some criteria.

Now you get to start to be rational again and start to organize and filter this long list of partially perfect solutions into a shorter list of ones that have actually got some legs, the ones that best address the root causes and also fitting the organizational constraints.

So Mike, once we've got a long list and we've got some evaluation and some prioritisation, what do you think is going to come next?

Yeah, so now I think we take that short list and anticipate implementation challenges on the one hand and unintended consequences if we do this.

What else?

You know, as we always say, what could possibly go wrong?

Well, let's think about that.

Right, right at this point here.

And finally, having done that, develop compelling recommendations that connect the solutions to strategic outcomes.

This systematic approach we've just walked through really helps prevent the most common mistake that well intentioned professionals make in developing solutions.

They often propose what they would do if they had complete control rather than what would actually work within existing organization constraints and capabilities.

Happens all the time, right?

It's a trap that strategy Consultants fall into all the time.

You know, God has given me the power to make PowerPoint presentations, and therefore God has given me the power to change everything on the face of the earth.

Ah, if only we'd known a little earlier in our careers, Mike, that it wasn't so.

Right, right.

Walk a mile in their shoes here.

Well, Ian, let's break down some of these techniques in detail.

Fantastic.

Well, the first critical thinking technique is about, as I said, generating multiple options.

People tend to limit their strategic impact by just thinking about obvious solutions or familiar solutions or approaches that match their functional expertise.

Right.

When you have a hammer, everything tends to look like a nail.

So when they're generating solutions, strategic partners use structured techniques to expand their thinking beyond what's familiar.

So there's a technique called alternative futures.

And in the alternative futures technique, we imagine different scenarios for addressing the problem.

We envision what the future might look like in a few different versions.

First of all, to envision what a minimal intervention approach would look like, kind of hypothesize that you're going to do just the minimum.

And what would that look like?

The minimum amount of resources, the minimum amount of time and investment, the smallest change that you could make that would make a meaningful difference.

That's scenario number one.

Scenario number two is you consider what a really comprehensive transformation approach would involve.

When you have almost as much power as a young strategy consultant and you imagine that the whole world has levers and buttons that you can push and make it how you want to be.

What would you do if you had unlimited resources and authority, in other words?

And then it would be very tempting to say, the third one is in the middle, right?

What's just medium?

But actually, that's not how this technique works.

This technique says the third one is, say, imagine a creative disruption.

Imagine completely reimagining how this challenge could be addressed.

Something wacky, something different, something seen from a completely different perspective.

And if you can apply your brain to thinking through those minimal and then maximal and then disruptive scenarios, there's a pretty good chance that you'll be thinking beyond your initial instincts.

That if you've recruited other people to help you in your thinking process, you'll be considering solutions across different scales and approaches.

And you know what the best, as in the most implemented solutions, tend to be the ones that have had a bit of time to mature and they've fertilized themselves a little bit with some of the minimalist and the maximalist and the disruptive approaches so ambitious enough to create real change, practical Enough to be implemented within the constraints of the organization right now.

So that was one of my favorites, Mike, the alternative futures technique.

We were talking about this and you had a couple of other techniques in mind.

Tell us what they were.

Yeah, again, ways of having alternate ways of viewing these, similar to what you had just talked about.

The constraint reversal method is another powerful tool for expanding these solution options.

So if we list the key constraints that seem to limit our solution options, you know, what might they be?

Budget, resource availability, political resistance, regulatory requirements.

You fill in your blanks there and then systematically ask what would be possible if each constraint didn't exist or could be modified.

Even in personal coaching, I always love this.

Somebody say, I don't know what to do, and say, well, if you did know what to do, what might it be?

And always amazed at what comes out.

Here it is.

So this often reveals creative approaches that work around constraints rather than accepting them as kind of God given, written in stone, immutable.

Right.

I've seen people work it the other way in coaching as well.

Like if people sit there saying, well, gee, I have so many options and so many choices, I really don't know how to evaluate.

Flip them around and say, well, imagine you've got to do something tomorrow with like, with zero resources.

And reversing into applying a constraint, I think can be super helpful as well.

Love it.

Love it.

Well, again, we've got a number of creative solutions.

Next, the stakeholder solution mapping technique is about saying, okay, we've done this with all of these other things, the future with constraints.

Let's also think about potential solutions from each key stakeholder's perspective.

And we can do that, and we can involve them in doing some of that as well.

So what would senior executives, key stakeholders, propose?

What would frontline employees suggest?

What might customers prefer?

What would external experts recommend?

These different perspectives and thinking like that can often reveal solution options that didn't occur to us from our own functional viewpoint here.

Right.

So it's going to take some courage as well.

Right.

Because it could feel like I'm going to go ask the finance function what they think we should do.

And it's going to feel to me like I'm surrendering control to them.

But that's not what we're talking about.

Right.

We're not saying hand the keys of the car to another function.

We're saying go to them and ask for their ideas.

But I'm still going to retain the authority to say, I'm going to choose this one and not that one.

Right.

It's like taking all feedback with graciousness and then deciding what you're going to do on your own.

Absolutely right, yeah.

So we thought about how to broaden the range and appeal of potential solutions.

But what can a strategic partner do to evaluate and test potential solutions?

There's got to be a better way than just looking for reasons to say no or maybe.

Well, it's funny that one of the great kind of fallbacks that you have when you're living inside an organization is you think, my responsibility is just to continue to operate the bureaucracy.

And that tends to slow down and stagnate lots of our thinking here.

So evaluation doesn't mean putting barriers in the way, but it does mean being systematic.

If you're seen as having personal expertise, if you're seen as having a particular set of domain knowledge, it can be really tempting to rely on your.

Your intuition and what you might call your expert gut or your personal preferences.

Your expert gut has a big role to play, but not in being the sole function of new ideas and new ways to evaluate solutions.

So being systematic means that we identify solutions that, as we've already said, address root causes and consider the organizational realities and look ahead to implementation challenges.

So you've probably seen people make structured analyses breaking down benefits and risk and cost and feasibility.

So get into doing that in a structured way.

Build yourself a good picture of which solutions offer resolutions, to which stakeholder groups and to which part of the problem.

And I think it's a potential trap for us to think that a solution can only be good when it sort of explosively fixes magically every single part of the problem in all places at once.

How do you then get to the point where you and your stakeholders are really thinking hard and thinking creatively?

I think, as you were saying a moment ago, Mike, considering other stakeholders thinking on options often reveals the most elegant technical solutions and reveals how they face political challenges.

On the other hand, solutions that seem less optimal and less elegant and beautiful from a technical perspective might actually get broader organizational support.

And if you look at the history of most changes in most organizations, lots of change is incremental.

We're going to come back to this idea of incrementality in a second.

Lots of changes, quite pragmatic and quite limited in approach because it's careful and because it gets us reliably the kind of improvement that we're looking for.

And strategic partners learn to wear the badge with a bit of humility.

Strategic partner doesn't mean being the guru that came up with the one Idea that changed the universe.

It means coming up with the idea that everybody could contribute to that helps to make progress within the organizational reality.

And Mike, we were talking about unintended consequences and I really liked your thinking on that.

Talk to us about that one.

Thanks, Ian.

Right, we're really talking about with unintended consequences, systematically considering what could go wrong with each of these solution options.

So for each potential solution, what are negative side effects it might create?

What problems might it shift rather than solve?

Boy, I remember this from process reengineering.

We just moved all that time, effort and energy to somebody else's division.

But you know, what new challenges might it introduce?

And having anticipated this, really important because we can now address some of those potential issues before recommending solutions.

Now, I'm sure that nobody out there has ever seen anybody gaming the system.

It's another great big category of unintended consequences.

Here's our solution.

How might that be gamed?

What would we do about that now to keep that from happening later?

Very good, Mike.

I love it.

Now that we've got into assessing and prioritizing our long list of ideas, we've begun to dig deeply into the pragmatic world of the organization.

What comes next?

Is this where we kind of step back and light up a big cigar?

Is this where strategic partners just kind of kick back and let everybody else take care of the details?

No, Ian, I mean, I think you can.

Sound listeners are sitting there going, okay, I detect a theme here, right.

That strategic partners really distinguish themselves by designing solutions with implementation challenges in mind from the beginning.

We keep coming back to that.

And rather than developing theoretically perfect recommendations and then worrying about implementations later, they're considering organizational change dynamics throughout the solution development process.

Exactly.

And Mike, I know it seems like basic stuff to keep thinking about stakeholders, but we've got to.

Right.

We've got to think about each stakeholder's journey.

We've got to be good at mapping out how our solution impacts them.

All these different stakeholder groups, how it affects them over time, what's going to change for them, what support are they going to need, what concerns might emerge?

And loads of people will volunteer their experience to help us figure this out.

I think.

Yeah, you had talked a little bit earlier about some sort of different scenarios.

And we're going to borrow another technique from scenario planning itself.

An idea of spending a day in the life, taking a little visit to the future here.

So you know, that stakeholder journey, let's go to the future just a little bit.

I remember getting introduced to some of this with the Mount Floor scenarios.

And I, you know, that's been a while back now, so I'm not sure how many people this still resonates with.

A number of apartheid is in full effect at this point, but some things are about to change.

A number of opposition parties have been legalized that had been stamped out.

There's going to be the first ever in South Africa, all race election.

So part of Mount Floor was part of a bigger effort to gather the broadest range of stakeholders.

So political parties, civic organizations, professional bodies, government departments, trade unions, business groups, you name it.

Real key stakeholders to all work on helping develop a new way forward.

You know what's going to happen here, this is going to be a total huge change and a lot of people with some deeply embedded interests all ready to kind of dictate the way that change should.

And Mount Floor using scenario planning, particularly the ability to spend a day in the life in the future, helped pin the corners on a range of possible alternative futures.

It really helped a very diverse group of stakeholders not argue about their positions, but talk about what the future might look like and get to some of these potential solutions to sort of trial run them a little bit and see what might happen there.

And these day in the life scenarios actually help them find and enlarge common ground amongst the parties.

The scenarios that they came up with, I think it was about a set of five of them were shared broadly, they were printed in newspapers, they were, you know, there was all kinds of public dissemination about here's some ways that this could go.

Not a recommendation, just from what we think might be likely, what could possibly happen.

And it wasn't just what could possibly go wrong, but what could possibly happen.

So kind of combining a lot of the stuff we're doing, it really changed the national dialogue on pretty much all parties here.

And all of a sudden, in the midst of what could have been just a, you know, an incredibly almost apocalyptic situation, I think it contributed to a belief in the potential for a positive outcome, a credible and optimistic story capturing a way forward for people who were committed to finding a way forward.

So, you know, you got these broad connections forming across an extremely diverse set of stakeholders and then lighting the Fire of public opinion the same way.

And we're kind of thinking about those small fire in organizations that kind of grow into changes instead of that one great big fire that we hope will spread to the extremes here this day in the Life technique, involving our stakeholders, involving key people who would need to help make this happen, involving people who would be impacted by it.

Really a helpful way to get to that pile of gloves moment, if you will.

It's great.

I love that you brought to life how scenario thinking and scenario planning isn't about predicting the future.

It's about laying out what's uncertain about it so we can kind of compare our options and our decisions against it.

It's a really great story.

I'll put a link into the show notes to some to some more details of the Mount Flow scenarios because it's a really fascinating example from very recent and very important history.

For people who are thinking, okay, so this is nations and politics.

There are plenty of examples all the way from major business decisions down to individual groups.

Really having spent immense amount of times in planning in as short as an hour session, realizing, oh my gosh, here's a big gap in what we were thinking, here's something that we hadn't considered.

And back to another way of doing creatively but logically and critically, thinking through what might work, how it might work, what could go wrong, and bringing people together and on board instead of arguing against looking for, hey, how can we work together and get to the other side of the table together working on possible futures.

It's also a little bit, I think, Ian, easy for people to get impatient with thinking about the future.

Right?

So unfortunately, and some people are thinking, I got all this stuff to do right now.

Why am I going to spend time thinking about the future, which isn't going to happen?

But I go back, Stephen Covey and a lot of other people have said it's the tyranny of the urgent.

What's in front of us now, that distracting, shiny thing over the important.

If you asked the CEO of Intel back a few decades, what destroyed intel or really crippled them and they had to come back from.

He said it's email.

All of a sudden we're all looking at what just popped in our email boxes instead of what's happening a year, three years, five years down the road.

It's a really good point.

A little bit of it is impatient, Mike.

I think a little bit of is, you know, we want to show off just how pragmatic we are.

So it's very easy to poo poo and dismiss thinking about the future as kind of fuzzy or a little bit indulgent.

But actually we under invest our time in thinking about the future.

So let's go not as far back as the beginning of Intel.

A guy called Gary Hamill wrote a book called Competing for the Future.

And he and his fellow researcher.

So Hamill and Prahalad between them highlighted a trend in the time allocation habits of top managers.

And they noticed the way that focus was given to things outside and things inside the organization, things in the future and things in the immediate present.

They came up with a rule that they proposed called the 40, 30, 20 rule which suggested that senior executives should typically spend 40% of their time looking at things going on outside their company.

And within that 40% of outside externally focused time, they found that actually only 30% is spent considering questions that will affect the organization beyond three years.

And Mike, this was back in the 90s.

We've become even more short term focused and even more to do with the immediacy of what's in front of us.

And Furthermore, of those 30%, no more than 20% is dedicated to developing a collective vision for the future, a picture, a baseline from which to plan.

So if we multiply up all the percentages, this calculation suggests that top managers as identified and analyzed by Hamilton Pralad are spending less than 3% of their total brain space.

40% times 30% times 20%, that's 2.4%.

That's how much time they're spending analyzing the long range future, thinking about its potential impact on their business.

These are people who have responsibility for their organization's stock price.

These are people who have compensation plans that hopefully reach beyond three years.

These are people who, you know, have to sit down with public officials and governments and talk about the future, have to sit down with their customers and talk about their long term decisions.

And they're spending 2.4% of their time really thinking about the future.

It's a really striking, almost scary stat.

And when you look into it, according to Hummel and Pralad's thinking, there's a big lack of future oriented perspective in managerial thinking.

And instead of advocating a top down approach like wagging the finger and saying you all ought to do better, Hamilton Pralad proposed that actually a good strategy process, a good planning process should feature a dialogue that involves everybody rather than everybody assuming that somebody senior to me is Thinking about the longer term and then by the way, getting scared or annoyed when it turns out that they're just as present day focused as we are.

Instead of doing that, there should be a dialogue up and down the levels of a company, including younger employees, including dissidents, people who are skeptical of the status quo, in a kind of Socratic dialogue about what's happening, what's happening in our environment, what's happening in the company and where are we headed.

I love that.

One of the things I love about this idea about being including more people like this is that there are people touching the future ultimately in different ways, touching different parts of the corporation, touching different parts of partners outside the corporation.

And so even when we're thinking about like near level plans and solutions, think about yourself.

You're probably already seeing changes in current patterns in the business.

And so doing a good job of creating solutions includes asking around to see what patterns other people in adjacent teams are seeing.

And this is really powerful in bringing that view in.

Right.

And it's another example of how having a little bit of courage and patience to ask and look outside your own function really yields benefits.

So if you're changing the way your US Contracting team does some of its work, then look outside of the US Contracting team, go talk to finance and customer services, go talk to people in pricing and supply chain so that when you're still thinking through your solution options, you've got their input there.

And then not waiting until after you've chosen your solution and you go into kind of sales pitch persuasion mode.

Don't just think, oh, those are the people in those other functions.

They're going to deflect us.

They're going to favor solutions to their own local problems.

They're going to favor solutions that are minimal effort for them.

Don't get prejudiced about that.

If all you think is thinking that way, then you're treating your colleagues in those other teams as if they are stuck at the bottom of the order taker tier of the pyramid.

So why not engage with your colleagues as if they too want to climb up the pyramid a little and who knows, they might share some great thinking with you.

This is one of these moments where I think, Mike, choosing to be a strategic partner, you can be really strategic.

And being really strategic means thinking longer term, thinking outside of your functional lane, thinking about all your range of stakeholders.

And some of the great changes I've been involved in have had a lot of this at their heart.

Yeah.

And I think some of this innovation is and provoking thinking is developing new strategies in new ways.

And a lot of it is, how do I actually get creative about implementing the strategy we've already set that, you know, we had it, but how do we, you know, make it?

Maybe we made the right strategy.

Maybe we made a strategy.

We're pretty far down the road, and now we have to make it right.

And this is these mindsets that we're talking about.

I think some people might be listening and saying, well, this is kind of a really big shift.

But we're not saying do 50% more or 100% more tomorrow.

Actually, if you get outside your comfort zone and you're just doing 1 to 4% more of this and you do a little bit of that and a little bit that and a little bit of that, just moving forward, you'd be surprised at how quickly we get so much better.

You know, we have a tendency to undervalue incremental gains.

So, you know, getting better at this means getting better at examining the broader context of problems and opportunities, solutions and implementation across stakeholders.

So if we do that, that 1%, those small gains compounded over time, we're becoming much better humans, much better at our job, much better partners.

And I will tell you, as somebody who has been visiting the future for a very, very long time, as part of my career, I've talked to your future self and they said to tell you thank you.

Yeah.

And we invite you to have exactly that conversation here.

Thank you, Obi Wan.

Right.

I love this idea of compounding and I love the metaphor of kind of things toppling forward into the future.

You're telling us here, quite rightly, that we've got even greater potential than we realized to influence the future, especially the future of our organizations, but not only the future of our own organizations.

Let's just think for a minute, as we're at the top of this big mountain of optimism here, what are some of the pitfalls that we might encounter along the way?

What should we be looking out for?

Well, Ian, I think it's no surprise that one of the most perilous pitfalls is the perfect solution.

Trap.

And boy, I, you know, I.

What can I possibly say?

I only have 99% of the data.

Wait.

Many professionals undermine their strategic impact by developing solutions that would work in perfectly ideal circumstances but fail in organizational reality.

We've talked about that.

Yeah.

And how much this focus on technical elegance or theoretical optimization without taking into consideration political dynamics, resource constraints, change management challenges are going to have on impacting those solutions.

So if we aim to design and learn to design solutions that are good enough technically while being exceptionally well suited to organizational circumstances, we're much better off.

That doesn't mean accepting mediocrity.

It means accepting that and understanding that the best solution is one that actually gets implemented, creates value and lasting change.

Fantastic.

So there's a big message about pragmatism there.

And I think there's another pitfall for us at the opposite end of the spectrum, if you like.

There's a pitfall where we say, oh, there isn't an alternative, there is only one.

And it might be imperfect, but I don't have a choice.

And we call this the single option bias.

And we either we either fall in love with or we get glued onto a single solution idea and we don't really consider alternatives.

And this bias towards a single or an inevitable option really limits the impact that you can have as an internal advisor because you miss opportunities to be more creative, you miss opportunities to climb that pyramid and bring new thinking.

So forcing yourself to generate multiple solution options before you evaluate any of them is a great way to keep your sword sharp, I think, when it comes to finding solutions, use structured techniques.

Use the alternative futures and scenario based thinking that we talked about earlier in the episode.

Use those to expand your thinking beyond obvious approaches.

Use the stakeholders around you to reach beyond obvious approaches.

And remember that your first idea might have been impossible, your second idea might have been so obvious and reductive as to be kind of pointless.

The chances are your third or fourth solution will be way more impactful and way more strategic than what your initial gut feel was telling you.

Yeah, and I think if anybody's been really following along, you know, the third pitfall, and that's the implementation afterthought problem.

If we only work on the diagnosis and the solution and we treat implementation as somebody else's responsibility, something we're not going to consider, we're going to have impressive recommendations, perhaps, but they're going to fail to create the value that we mean for them too, because they're not going to get implemented.

We're not going to get the change that we're hoping for because we didn't bake that into the solution design process here.

So thinking about that implementation throughout solution development, rather than addressing it at the end, as we've been saying, and using some of the techniques with stakeholders, some of the techniques with unintended consequences that will let us sort through those concepts as part of baking them into making the solutions even better, rather than leaving that to be handled later.

So, Ian, how do we start to think about bringing this to life?

Here, some exercises for stretching our solution development skills.

Well, Mike, the first one that I came up with here was basically to go back to this idea of three solutions.

Anytime you're about to propose a solution to a big important problem that you've been working on, make sure you go through the three scenario solution design options.

Think of the current problem, think about the diagnosis that you've made, think about all the cause and effect combinations, and don't restrict yourself to one.

Generate three distinct solution approaches, Minimal, comprehensive or maximal, and creative disruption.

And for each scenario, go through the exercise for yourself.

Define what would be required for this solution to be in place.

What outcomes would become possible, what implementation challenges would exist, and you might get some surprising patterns emerging.

When you compare and contrast those outcomes and those challenges and those starting requirements, you might find that some of these scenarios are telling you something new and important about the organization.

Don't evaluate them yet.

Don't start to put your three scenarios in order of merit in your head.

Just spend some time thinking about them as standalone ideas.

Focus entirely on expanding your thinking about what's possible.

Use those as starting points.

And after you developed all those three scenarios, look for those elements from each one that could be combined into a hybrid approach.

And often the most strategic recommendations, as we said before, are the ones that actually pick and choose elements and goals from the comprehensive and the constraints from the minimal, and the creativity from the disruptive scenario.

So I've used this before when I've been creating recommendations and solutions.

And it's a really powerful technique to just push my thinking on a little bit more.

The three scenario solution design.

How about you, Matt?

Yeah, well, for me, of course I'm coming back to implementation again.

Can you tell?

I've sluffered the slings and arrows of it was all good till we tried to, you know, till we took it off the side of that mountain and tried to fly it right, Icarus, what happened?

So take a solution that you're developing.

Apply the implementation focus design approach.

You know, assess the change readiness of the groups that are going to be impacted here.

Design a pilot approach, map the stakeholder journey, identify what would need to happen, what would need to change before this could be implemented successfully, what capabilities need to be developed, what resistance needs to be addressed, what support systems would need to be created, and then modify the solution design based on this implementation analysis.

And you'll soon discover that you're addressing these challenges up front leads to better solutions rather than compromised ones.

And then just a short personal note here.

Don't forget that Day in the Life Technique.

You know, tell us about your experience of the Day in the Life Technique, Mike.

I love this.

It's funny, Ian.

So as we were working on this episode over the last couple weeks, we've been attempting to sell a prior house for over a year.

And we got a very low offer, but we were sitting there like, oh, how could you we do this?

Do we really?

And, you know, we were kind of doing all the logical analysis stuff, but then we said, let's just sleep on it.

And independently, my wife and I both put ourselves about 3 months, 6 months, 12 months down the road having made this, you know, accepted this offer and not having accepted the offer, and we both woke up the next day and said, let's take it, let's take it.

Because having lived in those alternate futures in our minds for a while, let's go.

And not only has it made the decision much easier, but even knowing what's transpired after, there's no regrets about sunk cost or if only we, or what would we have.

It's made, it's accepted, and we've moved on here.

Fantastic.

Congrats as well.

So I love the kind of ready, fire aim of the implementation reality check, but I really, really love the Day in a Life Technique bike.

I think that's great and thank you for sharing the example.

So we've been edging up towards the top of the strategic partner pyramid, that framework that we proposed a few episodes ago.

Let's think for a moment about where this episode has taken us and just how far we've climbed.

So, Mike, one of the themes that's emerged from all of this discussion today has been how our goal is not to develop perfect solutions, it's develop solutions that create change within the organizational reality.

And being a strategic partner doesn't mean inventing a solution that's fancy.

It means distinguishing ourselves by thinking systematically, by bringing recommendations and plans that others can successfully implement and sustain.

And if that sounds a little bit incrementalist and a bit pragmatic, then I think that's going to be a good thing.

And Ian, I love the idea of doing this collaboratively because we're bringing people along on this journey rather than getting to the end and then saying, ta da, look at what I've come up with.

Yeah, very good.

And that changes the impact that people see that you're having in the organization as well.

So this critical thinking approach, this very kind of deep and thoughtful approach to generating solutions positions you absolutely at the top level of that pyramid.

You're no longer just understanding the problem or even developing solutions.

You're provoking new thinking in people's minds about what's possible and creating approaches that other people might not have considered.

And if we can master these skills, Mike, we'll find ourselves becoming the kind of strategic partner that others will seek out when they're facing complex challenges.

And who isn't inspired by the chance to work on a complex challenge.

So, Mike, we're getting to the end of the episode here.

I've really enjoyed the conversation, but.

But it's time for closing thoughts.

Tell us something that you'd like people to come back to.

If they're sitting right now looking ahead to diagnosis, looking ahead to solution development, what do they need to focus on?

What's your big takeaway?

Well, it all kind of.

I think we alluded to it in the opening just a little bit.

But I will tell you, as I've learned time and time again, if you don't visit the future, you're bound to be surprised by it.

And if you don't think that doesn't apply to organizations, go look up Royal Dutch Shell and see what happened during the arable oil embargo.

Very good.

Very good.

I love the idea of walking a moment or two in the shoes of somebody in the future, Mike.

I think I want to reach back to something that we talked about at the beginning of the episode as well.

Outside consultants and experts can sometimes appear to be getting by giving advice based on what you might call cold logic or just logic.

Logic is super important.

I'm not going to downplay the importance of logic, but internal advisors can and should use what they know about people and teams and culture to make associations and bring ideas together and to tell stories, because that's how you affect change.

People drive change because they're emotionally committed.

They get emotionally committed because of ideas and associations that stay with them, not because of charts on a page.

So I think that's my big takeaway for the.

For the session today as well.

So thank you all for listening on with us.

Thank you for getting us all the way to the top of the pyramid.

We've done this through five sessions.

We hope that it's been useful to you, and especially if you're in one of those internal advisor roles, if you're aspiring to be a strategic partner, then we hope you've enjoyed it and we hope you'll stick around for all the other episodes in the podcast that we have to share with you, Mike, what are we going to be talking about next time?

Well, Ian, it's one of our personal favorites.

Next time, it's a listener Q and A on the Strategic Partner series.

So across these five episodes, we've been getting inquiries, we've been people sharing stories, everything.

And if you haven't done that already, please hit us up with your questions, your comments, your experiences so we can address some of those next week.

Fantastic.

We're looking forward to getting into that and joining with you next time on the Consulting for Humans Podcast.

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