Navigating Artificial Complexity - Part 4 - Ducks and Horses
Ducks and horses
In Navigating Artificial Complexity - Part 3 - Cognitive skills are incredibly valuable we talked about the value of our brain and the importance of applying this in our work. Now for something a little different, ever noticed or observed how analogies can do a great job of taking something complex and delivering a simple explanation that diverse audiences can resonate with.
Last week I was fortunate enough to be invited to deliver a keynote at Sit-Down’s CDO ANZ event in Sydney.? This was a great opportunity to share some insights around the ups and downs, successes, and learning when it comes to taking a business on a journey of enabling new data capability.? Whilst always a pleasure to share insights on a journey I made sure to work into my presentation an analogy - whilst somewhat quirky this made its way through many a conversation for the remainder of the day and then onto social channels.
So,,, what was that analogy?? To describe a way of thinking and illustrate an approach I used an analogy that I picked up some years ago, in fact I’ve frequently used this when interviewing candidates - by way is disclaimer no animals were hurt in the making of this:
“Would you rather fight a horse sized duck, or fight 100 duck sized horses”
How do we land that analogy and relate it to our work and business? Let’s leverage the very organ we talked about in Artificial Complexity - Part 3. Let’s think about a business transformation program, for most businesses these could run for multiple years which means for those involved this requires attention and management throughout that whole process.? We know where we want to get to, we have an idea on the required budget and resources however there are multiple paths from here.? The analogy allows us to compare two common approaches and determine which best aligns with our program of work.
To begin, ducks are unpredictable.? A program of work that only looks at the end goal and assumes a continuous plan of work to get there can also be unpredictable.? From an optics perspective the Executive and Board see the money being spent, the resources being exhausted yet must wait until the end of the timeline to see outcomes.? They’re part of those difficult conversations where we make good progress then need to completely overhaul the plan because we bit off more than we could chew in one go.??
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It’s easy to immediately think this could be the harder of the two approaches based on the number of horses.? Here we need to think again about the optics, that same business transformation program is instead broken down into 100 manageable and sequential pieces.? We still have the ambitious end goal however our planning breaks down the work into logical iterations that support our ability to work towards that end goal.? The Executive and Board observers get to see a better cadence of progress (including improved transparency/visibility), as the number of pieces (horses) decreases over time confidence improves because the optics allow that progress to be recognised - we can even show incremental value build or ROI. As we reduce the number of horses we reduce the cost of failure, improve the feedback loop and drive learning back into our work at a faster pace.? This then leads to more sustainable change over time.
Take some time over the next few hours, days and/or weeks and think about your projects.? Could this analogy apply and help you better manage a program of work to outcomes in a transparent and visible way???
Until next time
My objective:
I want to share some of my learning, approaches and thinking around simplifying our work with a desire to help people navigate what is becoming a more complex world. Through this I will also look at how we take what may seem complex and break that down into manageable elements that allow us to show sustainable progress and improvement
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