Fresh Paint #10 You Can't Unf**k a Strategic Mess; Liz Truss and Lessons for Executive Leadership; Cognitive Overload; Math Isn't Strategy
A collection of commentary, insight and perspective published in October. Fresh Paint is the Blue Spoon Consulting blog devoted to novel strategic thinking. Any leader who thinks their business (or government) is going to be successful with the Standard Model is unlikely to last long.
Poor strategy is expensive; no strategy is lethal.
You Can’t Unf**k A Strategic Mess
Amanda Pritchard has told local NHS leaders the financial situation facing the health service is a ‘f**king nightmare’, but that it was being tackled at a national level and should not prevent them from improving performance. Included in that is a new proposed quality metric: Elderly people who call for help after a fall at home will no longer be left waiting for hours in agony on the floor.
I guess it helps to have low expectations.
You can't unf**k a strategic mess; you can't "fix" it either. At least not with the Standard Model of thought that only sustains the same action-reaction cycle. Competing through complexity takes a different cognitive pattern, a new mindset for leaders and competency for managers not found on the curriculum of most b-schools and executive education programs.
We're in the era of the long slide.
And unless we seriously question the 'expert knowledge' guiding the linear solutioning and strategies sold with passion and purpose through the PowerPoints, we're all f**ked.
‘The money is a f**king nightmare’, says NHS England chief executive
Source: Health Service Journal
Avoiding a Crisis of Crushing Stupidity
The "spectacular disaster" of Liz Truss becomes not just a humiliation for Britain, but another general lesson in strategic collapse. Writes Tom McTague in The Atlantic:
"Truss’s plan turned out to be like one of those booby traps in an Indiana Jones movie, triggering the collapse of a roof covered in deadly spikes. Whichever way she now turns, she seems destined to be impaled on a spike of her own creation. Having given up on much of her plan for growth, she has removed the very point of Liz Truss. But Liz Truss remaining prime minister means that the markets are likely to continue their squeeze. She has nowhere to go but political death.It would be hard to design a more catastrophic act of political self-immolation."
Poor strategy is expensive; no strategy is lethal.
Note to aspiring business and government leaders and managers worldwide, when it comes to avoiding a "crisis of crushing stupidity" and preserving your professional fate, start with common sense.
The Liz Truss Travesty Becomes Britain’s Humiliation
Source: The Atlantic
Cognitive Overload
“Disease Awareness" campaigns are another category of waste in health care. They sit at the extreme end of redundancy and monotonous repetition, powerless to punch through because they are being shaped and sold around an obsolete theory of communications and persuasion.
In 'Stop Raising Awareness Already,' Ann Searight Christiano, who holds the Frank Karel Chair in Public Interest Communications at the University of Florida, writes on the need for a different model to positioning public health communications.
"For those working on a cause they care about, the first instinct is often to make sure that as many people as possible are aware of the problem. When we care about an issue or a cause, it’s natural to want others to care as much as we do. Because, we reason, surely if people knew that you’re more likely to die in an accident if you don’t wear a seat belt, they’d wear their seat belt. And if people only knew that using condoms is critical to preventing the spread of disease, then they would use one every time.
That instinct is described by communication theory as the Information Deficit Model. The term was introduced in the 1980s to describe a widely held belief about science communication -- that much of the public’s skepticism about science and new technology was rooted, quite simply, in a lack of knowledge. And that if the public only knew more, they would be more likely to embrace scientific information."
The allure of the linear solution is hard to resist.
Most of us have first-hand experience with the administrative complexity, inefficient workflows, obsolete care standards and ample fraud as root cause for around $1 trillion in waste floating throughout the healthcare economy.
Perhaps it's also time to see another dimension:
Healthcare has normalized cliche. Not just cliches of the pen, but cliches of the mind. It's time for a new cognitive pattern.
Disease awareness daze: Do patients and people tune out health condition months and related marketing?
Source: Endpoints News
Math Isn't Strategy
The backstory of every big consulting project starts not with a common sense answer, but with selling the need to study the study:
"Councilwoman Sandy Nurse, who heads the council's sanitation committee, questioned the need for a new study by McKinsey & Company when the city has examined container bins for decades.
“There was a body of work done… [with] a lot of these ideas that is sitting there, and could easily be looked at again,” Nurse said. “Hiring McKinsey seems a little unnecessary at best. The city should be developing this kind of expertise in-house, at city agencies.”
Indeed, government should develop skills for leadership and innovation, but that would mean all those freshly-minted MBAs would have nothing to analyze.
Math isn't strategy.
Disruption starts with imagination and a novel vision, not "data analytics, supply chain analysis, and cost model development"
NYC orders $4 million McKinsey study on whether trash piles would be better inside containers
Source: The Gothamist
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