#8. You get to create your own How [The playbook for HOW! A journey to sustainable performance in the digital age]

The “Why”? Is your vision, or purpose, or value proposition. It’s “why” you exist as an organisation.

The “What”? Is your strategy, or plan. It’s “what” you do at the high-level to deliver on your “why”. Before the internet enabled the global proliferation of ideas, thoughts, frameworks and role model examples, determining the “what” was often delegated by enterprises to the domain of the external global strategy consulting firms who through their multiple engagement experiences had aggregated/ consolidated all their learnings into a “what-for-sale” that was affordable only to enterprises. Today the broad strategic directions are more readily conceptually available; be customer led, be data driven, digital first/ mobile first, focus on customer experiences, personalisation, etc.

Then the “How”? Is all the details of how you make your “what” happen. And now it gets complicated because along with the “what-for-sale” the external strategy consulting firms often also provided enterprises with the comfortable, complementary and guaranteed “how-for-sale”; workable in yesterday’s more static world where there was appropriate time for external assessment, review and identification of the better ways and aggregation/ consolidation of the learnings into discrete options; not so workable in today’s and tomorrow’s more dynamic world where time is ever-more compressed, the determination of what worked is quickly overtaken by what’s coming now and next, and the options are many and connected with subtle differences.

In this world enterprises need to acknowledge:

• that there is no known certain guaranteed “how” externally available off-the-shelf and you shouldn’t over invest seeking it;
• that the “how” will need to be more internally generated to be timely and contextually relevant; and,
• that the best current way forward is to transition to more agile/ iterative methods that better manage the short run risks of not getting it quite right or not knowing the right way with 100% certainty, with the on-going demand to innovate to survive.

The great organisational challenge is that you have to create you own "how".

The great organisational opportunity is that you?get to create you own “how”.