Learning

Focus on understanding what learning can come out of the next quarter, and steer conversations with downstream stakeholders to close a short loop.

Plan Next Quarter

As a business leader, your decisions flow downstream to the contexts that deliver value to your overall business workflow. Business leaders leverage systems that track how the investments are being used to fund Teams, fuel Plans, and drive the Work needed to change the business capabilities. These systems show the connection from strategy to execution, often through the investments of the portfolio. Constraints on the amount of work planned can be placed via the concept of managed Bets. Remember that these choices of “which teams”, “which work”, and “what plans” are not made by the business leader, but by the recipient leaders and the teams themselves.

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Try this:

As business leader, focus on reviewing the Sub-Goals and Desired Outcomes established by the recipients of the investments. What insights and learning will they yield next quarter?

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Decision Architecture tip:

In highly competitive and uncertain environments, tighten the feedback loops with a mindset of Observe-Orient-Decide-Act.

OODA Loop

A model designed by John Boyd, a fighter pilot, that involves observing, orienting, deciding, and acting, with the goal of gaining a competitive advantage in uncertain or rapidly changing environments

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Feedback Loops

Product and program plans should reference ceremonies where business leaders can go and see Outputs and assess whether desired Outcomes were met. These assessments yield the shared Insights on outcomes, between the business leader and product or program leaders. The insights provide the feedback needed to check whether any Delivered Value was truly/actually realized, as previously speculated in the Hypotheses.

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Try this:

As business leader, create a simple value stream map to model the delivery of a single change in a business capability, and the observation of feedback that can be obtained about the impact of the change. Remove the waste to shorten the loop as much as possible.

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Decision Architecture tip:

When assessing outcomes from outputs (e.g. at a product demo), recognize that the causality between the change you made and the impact observed is uncertain as well. This is best handled probabilistically, to acknowledge the uncertainty.

Fielding Outcomes

Evaluating decisions as "bets" against future uncertainties and measuring good/bad decisions based on process - distinguishing between skill and luck.

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Learning

Plan Next Quarter

OODA Loop

Feedback Loops

Fielding Outcomes

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