Getting Signal from Noise

Elevating Thinking

A strategy consultant colleague and I both ran notable sessions with clients this week where we felt particularly invigorated and deeply satisfied afterwards.

Why?

Because in each of our sessions there were at least two people who possessed a distinctive — and rare — talent.

Most directors arrive with well-defined expertise packages — financial acumen, operational knowledge, marketing insight, legal prudence. Many bring governance experience: they know how to evaluate options and shepherd decisions through corporate structures.

But truly exceptional directors wield a far rarer competency: the ability to elevate collective thinking.

This intellectual catalysis provides ‘new eyes’ in three ways:

• Asking incisive questions, not only offering perspectives;
• Suggesting novel connections or patterns;
• Amplifying others’ perspectives.

As facilitators, we ignite and fan conceptual sparks. But sessions become truly transformative when directors and executives bring this particular kindling — creating environments where ideas evolve, strengthen, and interconnect rather than merely compete for attention.

Question: How skilled are you at elevating others’ thinking?

When the Emperor Has No Strategic Clothes

I continue my car-crash fascination with US politics.

In this week’s New York Times, I read Janelle Bouie’s brilliant comment about the US President’s ‘flooding the zone’ tactics: “There is a cottage industry of observers who have given themselves the unenviable task of transmuting the president’s tics and utterances into something like a calculated strategy — an intellectually defensible set of doctrines rather than the thoughtless patter of an outer-borough confidence man.“

This reminds me of how some organisations try to create strategy: they take their static and mush, and try to detect an internal logic. That struggle for coherence becomes the strategy.

Yahoo's decade-long strategic wandering is an example. Under a revolving door of CEOs (six in seven years), the company lurched between incompatible strategic identities — sometimes a media company, sometimes a technology platform, sometimes a search engine, sometimes a social network.

When Marissa Mayer became CEO in 2012, she made 53 acquisitions in her first three years, spending over $2.3 billion. Analysts valiantly attempted to discern a pattern — was it a mobile strategy? A content play? A platform approach?

The reality was that Yahoo had become a collection of tactical responses to competitors' moves rather than a coherent strategy with internal logic. By attempting to be everything to everyone, they ultimately became nothing to nobody. A company that was once valued at $125 billion sold its core business to Verizon for $4.8 billion in 2016.

Question: Is your organisation creating true strategic coherence, or merely manufacturing a narrative to justify a collection of inconsistent initiatives? How would you know the difference?

Why Predict?

The best businesses are sentient.

They’re self-aware — of two things. Firstly, dynamic changes in their external environment. Secondly, the effects (both positive and negative) of their internal actions.

Alan Weiss has developed an entire approach to strategy on this insight. I use it frequently with my clients too, and within an hour, we can do better than what used to take days using the old PESTLE approach.

The essence is to make potent and powerful predictions about critical determinants. A blood products client came to this existential “a-ha”: “Less and less young people are donating blood”. Why does this matter? “In ten years we will have only 80% of the blood donors we have today, while growing demand will require 150% of the blood.”

And we don’t stop here. The most important questions comes last: “So what?”

“This means we urgently need to find more contemporary ways to engage younger people, and get them to donate twice as often as people do today”.

The key here is significance. It’s easy to make predictions about AI, or an ageing populations, or climate variability, or the rise of polarised politics. But, are these critical determinants of your business? I challenge my clients with to arrive at just five predictions.

Here’s what a hospital client of mine came up with:

• "Management of age-related chronic diseases will shift from episodic intervention to continuous management" — So what? "We must transform our care model from facility-centred to hybrid digital-physical delivery."
• "Patient expectations will mirror consumer experience standards from other industries" — So what? "We need to redesign the entire patient journey with ease and transparency as core principles."
• "Clinician burnout will reduce our effective workforce capacity by 15% within three years" — So what? "We must fundamentally reimagine clinician work to reduce administrative burden and restore meaning."
• "Advances in AI diagnostics will outpace our ability to integrate them into workflow" — So what? "We need to develop an agile technology adoption framework that incorporates the biggest innovations rapidly"
• "Rural healthcare delivery will become financially unsustainable under current models" — So what? "We need to develop hub-and-spoke delivery networks that combine digital and physical care in fundamentally new ways."

This very focused set of predictions isn’t exhaustive. And, that’s the point. Instead, it created strategic clarity that had eluded the organisation for years.

Question: What are your five most powerful predictions (a-ha’s) and what is their significance (so what’s)?

If you've found value in these reflections on strategic thinking, please hit the 'Like' button to let me know.

I'm particularly curious about which of these themes — elevating collective thinking, recognising strategic incoherence, or making powerful predictions — most impacts your organisation right now.

Drop me a note with your thoughts or experiences, and let's continue our conversations about strategy that truly matters.

Until next Friday,

Andrew