Task Set 2 – Draft or Modify the SAM
After organizing the program with Task Set 1, in Task Set 2 the team begins drafting the SAM (detailed in Chapter 10). You will complete the rough draft of the SAM in Task Set 3 when you add scenarios. Detailed plans, tactics, metrics, and assessments are touched on only lightly in Task Set 2. The focus here is on:
- Values and aspirations
- Diagnosis
- Fitness criteria
- Strategy alternatives
The tasks and principles are the same whether you are drafting a new SAM, modifying one later in the process, or improving one after a period of implementation.
Hint: When drafting the SAM, use the five disqualifiers lightly. Like when brainstorming, focus on understanding what ideas mean, not on whether they are good. When components fail, note it, and fix the problems later when you have more context.
Task 2a: Choose a SAM Template and Capture Your Current Framework
You can draw the SAM as you go, but it’s easiest to start with a full template such as Figure 10.1 in Chapter 10 (see emergentapproach.com/templates/, for additional templates). More detailed features, such as nested frameworks, can be added later if needed. In a simple endeavor, you might use only the StrategyBottleneckAspiration triad and a simple SAM like 2a1:
One benefit of starting with the more complete template is that you are forced to think about all components. You can always get rid of components later if they are unneeded.
Hint: Don’t worry about how many columns to use. You will almost certainly add and subtract alternatives as you go.
Unless you are embarking on a new endeavor, articulate your current-state framework as best you can (as discussed in Chapter 16).
Hint: Use the first column on the left for the current-state approach, because it will not need to be moved or removed like other alternatives may be.
B i k e S h o p
Because the zTeam is new to the SAM and the emergent approach, you pick the full template so that you can help them see better the connections among its parts. You add your current approach in the first column. Calling it “Keepin’ On,” this approach is to continue to grow organically. You recognize that you will likely need to take substantial loans with this framework. That’s a plan.
Task 2b Articulate/Discover Your Values
Chapter 12, EAS, describes the various ways that values are used to communicate information in companies today. Values can be strict “core values” not to be violated, maxims that describe the desired culture of the organization, or values for inspiration. Regardless of how important your values are to the organization, only include those in your SAM that will influence your development of framework alternatives.
Hint: Values must pass the excluded disqualifier. A value must apply to everyone and everything in the nested organization.
B i k e S h o p
You have never been willing to sacrifice your independence, and while you have been forced to bend at times, you hope to avoid traditional business activity if it comes at the expense of your connection to biking. So far, your team has felt the same way about these two values. But you wonder if you can maintain independence and stay so close to biking now that you have the dream of helping people and the environment on a large scale with Yo! Bike it. You may need to focus on the realities of finance, organization structure, operations, and other aspects of expansion. Team members will likely have to do the same.
You express this concern to the team. Everyone agrees to keep the two existing values, but they recognize that either or both may have to be demoted to fitness criteria. You add the values to your SAM:
Task 2c: Draft/Modify Aspirations
In Task 1a, you articulated why you are embarking on your endeavor or why you were triggered to modify your existing framework. Now capture those motivations as one or more well-stated aspirations using the principles from Chapter 12:
- You do not always need all three types of aspirations: visions, missions, and goals. Start with one and only add others as needed.
- Be wary of visions and missions that are “over the top” and deeply fail the opposite disqualifier.
- Look out for lists. You can have lists of plans and subgoals, but if you have more than two high-level aspirational goals, the red lights should be flashing.
- It is okay to use SMART or similar principles for subgoals, but not for the high-level goals of your aspiration; avoid “stretch goals.”
- The ambition of your aspiration depends on factors including organizational capability, the consequences of failing to achieve the aspiration, and whether a difficult aspiration will be inspirational or discouraging to the organization.
If leadership supplies your aspirations, and you can’t or don’t want to change their minds, you are simply stuck with figuring out how to achieve them. In some cases, leadership supplies only the big-picture aspirations, leaving you to create the specific goals. For instance, you may be told to enter a new market space or to improve a functional unit, but the details are up to you to propose. If the aspiration is your
choice, do not worry about finalizing at this point. Allow the aspiration to evolve along with all the other change framework components as you work the SAM. Bottlenecks can particularly influence your choice of aspirations. Keep it fuzzy.
B i k e S h o p
To make biking a bigger part of people’s lives is a pretty clear vision for the zTeam. Your mission is similar: increase the rate of expansion of the Yo! Bike it. model. You could combine these into a single aspiration that could be a mission or a vision—bring biking to the world by expanding the Yo! Bike it. model—but you
keep them separate for now.
Your specific goals are less clear. How many added shops per year to target? Should the shop design remain the same? Be bigger? Expand to which parts of the country? Will the Yo! Bike it. model succeed in big cities or colder regions? What resources will be available? You leave specific goals as an open question (you write TBD), recognizing the rate of expansion you can achieve depends on whether you get help from investors or partners. Your SAM now looks like this:
Task 2d: Draft/Modify Propositions and External Constraints
You started your diagnosis in Task 1d when you captured your initial beliefs. Here, you draft your proposition and external constraints in a more systematic way.
As with values, you do not have to capture your entire value proposition or business model in the SAM. Include only those aspects that are relevant to creating framework alternatives for your current endeavor. As discussed in Chapter 12, aspects of a proposition (or a value proposition) will be captured in different sections of the SAM.
External constraints are external to your system. They can come from outside your corporation (e.g., government and community regulation and laws) and inside the corporation (e.g., a constraint imposed by the parent organization). The entire parent framework is a constraint on the child.
Reminder: You don’t design the diagnosis; you discover and articulate it.
B i k e S h o p
Before your success, your proposition was to provide what other shops in your town could not. Now your proposition is stronger—the ability to not only implement, but teach other organizations the Yo! Bike it. model, including store design and operation and the evangelism with the community and government.
As for external constraints, the only true constraint to date is the requirement to pay back the few small loans you maintain, which doesn’t warrant registering in the SAM because it is obvious. The team realizes, however, that any venture that involves a significant amount of other people’s money, brands, or operations, in partnership or otherwise, will likely come with external constraints. Some of these—loan covenants, lack of freedom to operate the Yo! Bike It. model correctly, too much focus on short-term returns—might be so important they become fitness criteria. For now, these possible constraints are listed TBD.
Task 2e: Draft/Modify Bottlenecks
The techniques and guidelines for discovering bottlenecks are presented in Chapter 14. It includes a discussion of the following places to look:
- People or culture related
- Intelligence related
- Lack of process capability; digital capability
- Lack of methods• Lack of capital/resources
- Complexity
- Lack of alignment and common language
- Bad framework/missing strategy
It also includes the following three guidelines for ensuring that the bottleneck is the right one:
- The bottleneck should not be extremely easy or impossibly hard to bust. Super easy bottlenecks are a waste of time; just go fix it. Impossibly hard bottlenecks are useless because no strategy can bust them.
- The bottleneck cannot just be a different way of expressing the aspiration.
- The bottleneck must be in the way of the full aspiration for the system.
Chapter 14, EAS, discussed dealing with multiple bottlenecks, including break into nested systems, tactical policy for lesser goals, and finding root cases. It was also stressed there that making every effort to find the dominant bottleneck is a key to avoiding “strategy” as a laundry lists of initiatives. If you are still exploring multiple aspirations, capture bottlenecks for each.
Hint: As you find lesser bottlenecks as you search for the main bottleneck to your aspiration, keep note of them—you will create tactics to bust them later.
Remember that finding the bottleneck can be as hard as finding a strategy to bust it, but finding the bottleneck is half the solution (or more) to solving it. And as everything else at this stage, your bottlenecks are provisional, and you may fully discover them only by evolving the SAM or even implementing the framework.
B i k e S h o p
For bottlenecks, the zTeam identified and labeled several possibilities when brainstorming beliefs in Task 1d. You capture these now with a little more detail in the influence diagram triad format Figure 2e.1:
You start to use the abbreviation YBI at times now for Yo! Bike it. You leave the discussion of scenarios till after you have drafted your SAM.
Task 2f: Draft/Modify Fitness Criteria
Some ideas for fitness criteria may have come out during Task 1d. Now draft a more complete set. Chapter 15, EAS, describes the basic principles for fitness criteria. You find fitness criteria by “moving back” from the overall aspiration until reaching criteria that are sufficiently disaggregated to be assessed. Figure 15.4 lists thought-starters for fitness criteria in several categories, including customers, diversity, aggressiveness, and complexity—many require qualitative assessments. The following guidelines are supplied in Chapter 15 as well:
- Think of the criteria from both internal and external perspectives
- Include any criteria that would influences your choice of an alternative
- Omit an influence only if you are certain its assessment will be nearly identical for all framework alternatives (but keep a record of it in case somethingchanges)
- Try to work with four to eight criteria if you ca.
- Chose criteria that are (mostly) independent; follow the mutually exclusiveand collectively exhaustive (MECE) principle
Because strategies must bust bottlenecks, fitness criteria are, by definition, indicators of how well you imagine the strategy to perform in that role. Therefore, your bottlenecks may suggest fitness criteria.
Hint: Check for balance of good and bad. Give equal billing to both the potential benefits and detriments of your strategy alternatives. Do not underestimate the upside, thinking it better to be conservative, per discussion in Chapter 15, EAS. It might be helpful to create larger categories to group the good and bad such as Figure 2f.1.
B i k e S h o p
The bottlenecks found in Task 2e give the zTeam ideas for the following fitness criteria:
- Speed of expansion
- Quality of expansion (execution of Yo! Bike it. model)
- Shared vision and values shared by investors and partners
- Personal financial risks
- Time required for running businesses versus working in the biking world
You separate speed of expansion from the quality of expansion because some alternatives might improve one at the expense of the other. By the quality of expansion, you mean how well the organization will be able to execute, that is, stick to the Yo! Bike it. framework. You are especially concerned about the community service and the at-risk kids.
Marie says, however, “Isn’t potential financial gain a consideration? Isn’t that missing?” You take the high road and say, “Let’s not worry about that just yet; our mission is bringing biking to the world.” But Marie answers, “We can’t do that if we’re broke.” You realize she’s right and begrudgingly insert a making money criterion to the SAM: “profit potential.”
Task 2g: Draft/Modify Strategy Alternatives
Unless you have been exploring multiple aspirations, the tasks so far have been to draft components that are common to any alternative. Now you need to diverge and draft strategy ideas that distinguish alternatives. Yes, plans, tactics, and metrics distinguish alternatives too, but it is the strategy alternatives that force these other components to be different. Be guided by the strategy design principles shown at the start of Chapter 16, EAS.
Because you haven’t yet captured scenarios, you aren’t in a position to consider strategies in detail, but considering strategy alternatives here will supply cues as to which aspects of the environment to consider when you design scenarios in Task Set 3. Capture the essence of the alternative and why it is different. Aim for qualitatively different alternatives. Do not get discouraged if you can’t articulate strategies as rules that meet all design requirements at this early stage or that fully meet the five disqualifiers; just note the problems and prepare to rectify them in Task Set 4. However, there should be tension around statements that obviously fail the tests. The act of asking people to state their ideas as a rule may help, especially as what not to do. It’s okay if you use more than one rule to express the sentiment— you will nail it later.
The team will have likely started imagining strategies or snippets of ideas while setting the stage in Task Set 1. But to get more systematic, use the Strategy Bottleneck Aspiration triad. Then place the more compelling alternatives in the SAM. Or, you can capture alternatives directly into the SAM, which lets you see all the information generated so far. But using the triad lets you be more expansive. Use multiple triads as in Task 1d if you are still exploring aspirations.
Hint: You may benefit from creating a row in the SAM where you capture the essence of each alternative in less than, say, 25 words.
B i k e S h o p
Right from the start the zTeam has thought about loans, partners, and investors as some of the ways to bust the resource bottleneck. And though the consequences of getting them were recorded as bottlenecks too (unacceptable external constraints), it seems that resources need to be busted first, so you focus on them in the influence diagram (Figure 2g.1).
Figure 2g.1 Adding rough strategy ideas to the triad
The team knows these are not really strategies yet, and don’t pass the disqualifiers, but they capture alternative approaches well enough for now, so they add them to the SAM.
Task 2h: Add Any Initial Tactics, Plans, Metrics, or Assessments
Completed tactics, plans, sub goals (Chapter 17, EAS), and metrics (Chapter 18) are not required in the SAM. Add these components only when you believe they provide inspiration for creating and distinguishing between alternatives. Examples at this point might include:
- The plan to spend significant money.
- Tactical policies that show the implications of a given strategy alternative; forinstance, polices for dealing with constituents or customers that would bedifferent in each.
- A tactical policy that constrains the range of action the team can takethroughout the design process; for instance, Courier Inc., (Chapter 10) specifying they will make no contractual agreements longer than two years untilthe regulatory picture on love potion transport by drone becomes clear.
- A metric that will be the focal point of implementation. Courier, for example,may feel that protection of love potion transport reputation is so important(Chapter 18) that they establish here, early in the process, that every alternative will include measurement of adherence to potion handling techniques.
B i k e S h o p
A few things come up: You remind the team of the August deadline. This is not really a part of the framework, but it influences the process dramatically, so it is kept in front of everyone as a plan. Wrenchy proposes a metric that measures the percent time the Yo! Bike It. people spend on biking-related activities versus
administrative tasks. Marie proposes that the framework should include doing something about consolidating or helping people understand the many mobile bike apps—this is captured as a subgoal.
The team makes a few initial assessments, noticing that control and speed may be counter to each other. The greatest challenge seems how to judge partners’, investors’, or acquirers’ willingness to stay with the Yo! Bike It. model.
Joey councils that partners may say one thing and do another. They might at first truly have every intention of sticking with the model, but then change under financial or other pressures. She explains that even if you have a contract, if key supporters leave the partner, or even change position, their interest—or even understanding—of the YBI model may be lost.
Another early belief is that the speed of expansion might be inversely related to the amount of control the zTeam has, because resource control is inversely related. Adding these thoughts, they get SAM 2h.