Business Architecture, Inc.

Existing Solutions Dilemma

"Control is a double-edged sword; it involves both doing things right (efficiency) and doing the right things (effectiveness). It is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right. Unfortunately, the righter we do the wrong things, the wronger we become."
 – Russell L. Ackoff
"...most companies devote much more energy to optimizing what is there than to imagining what could be."
 – Gary Hamel
"Change before you have to." "Willingness to change is a strength, even if it means plunging part of the company into total confusion for a while."
 - Jack Welch
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For Those Well Practiced with a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail

The Existing Business

There are a couple of major hurdles for management to get over in order to produce and sustain a competitive advantage. The one already touched upon, is to consciously create new business concepts which destroy the existing business concept. This lesson, when learned the hard way, often results in the destruction of the business by its competitors. It is a lesson which needs to be learned, internalized, and then backed up with great courage, as management needs to destroy what is often the current cash cow.

The Existing Tools and Expertise

The other major hurdle is probably more subtle, but no less important to the innovative thinking needed to achieve and sustain a competitive advantage. It is in regards to problem definition. We need problem definition more than we need problem solving. Identifying the right problem to solve is more important than problem solving. Skills to solve problems are prevalent. Skills to define problems are scarce. Problem definition is as much art as science and requires a methodological approach to find the "truth" where it is not currently known.

Tool Using

Professionals, with their bags of tools, when faced with a problem, look to match the tool to the problem based on similar past problems from their training and experience. The presumption is that they have the answer before the question is asked. They are tool users. What we need in a rapidly changing environment are tool makers. This requires a whole different mindset on leadership's part.

Tool Making

The tool making approach produces new and innovative solutions. Solutions generated this way, innovative solutions, present a new conundrum for leaders. Common reference points of where the solution has been used before do not exist. Thus, people often lack the confidence to use the new tool or solution. This phenomenon has been elegantly expressed by Stafford Beer: "Acceptable ideas are competent no more, but competent ideas are not yet acceptable. This is a dilemma of our time."

Criticality of Context

Also, neither problems nor solutions can be entertained free of context. A phenomenon that may be a problem in one context may not be in another. Thus, matching tools to problems is highly risky vs. defining the problems and making the tools to solve them. This brings about the phenomenon of history repeating itself, in a negative way, as leaders rely upon the mythical, context-free, tried and true solutions.