How Action Leads To Strategy
I’ve been working with startups, medium-sized organizations, and fortune 500 companies on digital product and service strategies as a customer-focused experience designer for two decades. A client recently asked me to sum up what I learned throughout hundreds of engagements — both on agency and client-side. First, I felt I was put on the spot and struggled to pinpoint what made some companies succeed and others fail at strategy. Then it became crystal clear and amongst many of the insights and tips I could provide, I shared the most valuable one: Doing not ‘drawing’ leads to strategy. It’s almost never the other way around. That applies to business-, innovation-, product-, platform-, community-, API-, UX-, [Add-Anything-Here]-Strategy – as Quibi will testify. This article will tell you how winning companies are already testing in the marketplace, while their competitors are still completing PowerPoint presentations.
How is it possible that so many companies that claim an absence of strategic leadership can not only survive, but be successful and respected businesses? (Mark Ridley)
What do the Wright Brothers, Alibaba, and League Inc. – a healthcare startup from Toronto – have in common? They all had a founders’ mentality, the team(s) had perseverance and were aligned, they moved fast, members were hands-on and equipped with a broad product-tied skill set, they probed and deployed ideas early, collected relentlessly data conducting their own real-world experiments and started out with a vision, not a strategy. How did they do it? Let’s revisit history.
Learning from doing
In 1912, two highly skilled handymen named Orville and Wilbur were the first people to successfully fly a motor-operated aeroplane. From the beginning of their aeronautical work, the two brothers and their team focused on developing a reliable method of pilot control as the key to solving “the flying problem”. This approach differed significantly from other experimenters of the time who put more emphasis on developing powerful engines. Using a small home-built wind tunnel, the Wright Brothers also collected more accurate, actionable insights than anyone before, enabling them to design more efficient wings and propellers.
Orville and Wilbur started their endeavor in May 1899 and dedicated the next 13 years to designing, building, testing, and learning from little and large successes. They eventually succeeded not because they had a clear strategy, they succeeded because they focused all their efforts and the hundreds of gliding experiments unitedly towards gaining control of the plane when in the air. The strategy was DOING not DRAWING.
You cannot get fit without exercising. Digital Strategies must emerge from ‘physical’ experiments and learning. This approach to strategy formulation will be alien to most established companies – but is vital to their survival.
(Jeanne W. Ross, Principal Research Scientist, MIT)
A bet-the-company-moment
In 2014, Michael Serbinis launched League Inc. with the idea to operate an UBER-like aggregation platform for customers to access wellness services. So whether a client wanted a massage or an eye exam, finding a provider, scheduling an appointment, and paying for that service were just a few smartphone taps away. The founder used his previous experience to develop an MVP (minimum viable product) within no time and started to gather feedback from real people, who were trailing and requesting services delivered through the online portal from day one. Through multiple iterations and ongoing conversations with partners, clients, and their own team members, League started to become what it is today; a disruptor and leader in providing Health Benefits to corporate employees. Serbinis did not start out with a PowerPoint enhanced strategy outlining his customer-centric endeavor on a static roadmap step by step. Instead, he assessed what can be put out in front of real people quickly, that does not yet exist, and then iterate on the go. The strategy was DOING not DRAWING.
A prototype sells more than a thousand (marketing) words.
Adaptation wins over anticipation
In 1999 and out of a small apartment in Hangzhou, China, Jack Ma, a former school teacher, spearheaded a group of 18 tech pioneers to build a large scale online marketplace. Before, he used to manage mostly by himself his own website China Pages which went through several design iterations to improve its visibility abroad and in the Chinese market. It was basically a listings page, providing visibility and a proper online presence to companies based in China. 21 years later, now named Alibaba, Jack Ma’s venture is worth ~700 million active users and is controlling ~60% of the Chinese e-commerce market. In a sense, Jack Ma helped build the Chinese internet as it stands today. A strategy of DOING not DRAWING led to his success.
The three examples above demonstrate that you don’t always need a step-by-step, prioritized ‘plan’ for the far-away, often unpredictable future. Instead, teams need to achieve higher-level execution by building capabilities and managing complexity and uncertainty along the way. In my engagements with clients, I always focus on sharing new skill-sets through hands-on workshops and the lens of a customer-centric design practitioner. Easy to learn, applicable and practical tools like behavioral driven customer journey mapping, prototyping, and testing help team members develop new thinking, new routines and change their behavior to better understand (and serve) customers, create an owners’ mindset and eventually open their horizon to new technologically-enhanced digital products and services. Don’t just do more or do less of the same old stuff. Do things differently, more frequently, with heart and dedication. That could be your strategy, right there.
Focus on the customer, then the product, lastly build the company.
