The Iterative Planning Model

Jack Welch described his strategy planning as picking a direction and implementing like hell. It’s a funny and memorable way of stating the process. When developing a new site or media initiative, an entirely new one with no existing content, I work on two things:

1. Defining the project’s spine, the reason we’re doing this, our ultimate goal.
2. Drawing a line in the sand in terms of what is an agreed-upon first phase.

By defining the spine, we force clarity on to the project and it suddenly becomes easier to focus our efforts. This is the framework for the rest of the life of the project, so it needs to be flexible and easy to get off the ground. This also helps the team develop specific milestones, which means we can specify a path forward and give the project some momentum.

Use that momentum to get to the agreed-upon first phase and launch. Especially with brand new initiatives, the ideas are so nebulous and there are no specific results to point at yet that things can easily become derailed.

The real benefit of the iterative planning process is that is allows for small failures by compartmentalizing them. A failure at one point is not the death of the project, just the end of moving in that direction. The final result is a stronger product.

The example I read recently was of a worker in a bureaucratic system versus a freelance consultant. The bureaucrat has a steady, reliable paycheck that never changes beyond some moderate increases to adjust for cost of living. The consultant, meanwhile, lives in a world of payday feast or famine. As long as the ends of the spectrum are reasonably controlled, the famines won’t kill him and the feasts won’t drive him insane.

In the event of a downturn, who is more likely to thrive? The consultant. He’s more accustomed to adversity and has been able to develop a better model for dealing with it. The bureaucrat, meanwhile, is blindsided by the loss of his one source of income. He has far less experience figuring out how to get out of the hole he now finds himself in.

The iterative planning model works like the consultant, by incorporating some small, sustainable shocks that can be overcome in order to build a stronger whole.

The tent metaphor

In Coca Cola’s 2020 social media strategy (videos below), there is an offhand comment about a tent strategy comprised of “tent poles” and “tent pegs”. They do not elaborate, but here’s what I think it means:

A tent pole is a guiding principle (the spine) of a project or initiative. Defining those gives us the direction in which to move and the yardstick against which to measure progress.

The tent pegs are the slow variable policies Joshua Ramos discusses in his excellent The Age of the Unthinkable. They are the “get out and speak to the people” portion of General Petreaus’ CION strategy. These are those bedrock fundamentals that we need to be so disciplined about keeping in place, because they are the very thing that will keep the whole tent from blowing away. They’re hard, because they’re easy to forget or to at least procrastinate. Little things like being brave enough to intelligently risk small failures, facing minor confrontations head on and handling them and all the other small factors that can decay a project from the insides.

Finally, we are left with the tent itself, a sturdy ecosystem in which our ideas can thrive and flourish or simply be tested. The poles and pegs are what keep this going.

The Coca Cola 2020 videos are a good watch.

Part One

Part Two

My favorite strategy for getting my ideas implemented successfully is to get buy-in from the “thought leaders”, people in positions of power whether in terms of the organization or as power users who can set a great example. Nothing builds momentum like the people considered to be “in the know” advocating your idea.

Early on in the process of developing a social media policy, a couple of things became clear:

• There are not a lot of good examples in existence to base ours on.
• There is a lot of confusion about what social media is and how to use it properly.

So I developed a clear, easily understood message (http://tomdoepker.com/2011/02/10/social-media-policies/), and then used an opportunity presenting to over sixty of the elected officials, department heads and technical leads during a records retention training to cover the importance of having a policy in place and how it could be used successfully.

The above video is of that presentation. (Note: Pressing play will skip you to my portion of the presentation, which was the final piece of a two hour training.) While I am not the world’s greatest presenter, it really has served to get the County on board with our policy as well as to bring in new agencies with some exciting new ideas as to how we can better use social media to communicate with the public.

Existing Websites

A website that has been around for some time is a bit easier to define; you can get a better sense of what has worked and what has not. Ideally, you would have some analytic tools and reports that could at least tell you what was popular and what was not, hopefully even more.

In this case, the reports were pretty spare, but the team had a great relationship with their audience. We were able to conduct some informal surveys with potential users as well as staff members who had worked in the office for some time to figure out what was likely to be the driving forces of the website.

Without that relationship, the lack of analytic reports would have led me to replicate the site as best as possible in our system, where we would be able to track it moving forward. Usually, there is either someone who has at least gotten some informal feedback that can point you in a direction to focus.

New Websites

It’s surprising how many times the answer to “why will this website exist?” is because they have to have a website. Having your own website is now more common than having your own office, but the focus of the site will drive everything from the initial design and content development to the long-term goal tracking and site maintenance.

Some suggestions:

• Lead generation for sales prospecting and/or creating an email database
• Reducing support costs by providing self-help information
• Providing required forms or research materials
• Creating a customer experience that reinforces your brand
• To sell products online

Simple

I know it sounds really simplistic, but it works. There’s a great Jack Welch quote: “In real life, strategy is actually very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell.” Now the team knows where to focus their time and effort. We have been able to develop short-, medium- and long-term goals to measure against because we know what is strong, what needs work and how to incorporate other goals for the site.

I attended the Google Apps Summit recently and was definitely impressed with what I saw, though I am fully aware that I was at a sales pitch. All the same, their team made some really strong and interesting points deserving of further review.

My organization is considering a switch from being a Microsoft house to introducing some of Google’s services and I have been named to the analysis committee, which means that I have some research ahead of me.

Here are the highlights from my notes during the initial seminar:

Interesting Points from the Sales Pitch

• New features and releases are immediately available
• Access from any device, anywhere
• 80% of current IT resources are spent simply maintaining a “digital dial tone” (this was a Gartner Group statistic the Google Sales Team cited) instead of actively pursuing new initiatives
• Cost. I am not sure of the cost per user to provide Exchange Services (their estimates were $300-600) and Google offers their email and other apps at $60/user/year.
• Scanned documents can be added to the cloud and would be searchable.
• Data would not exist on machines, but in the cloud. Laptops can be stolen, servers destroyed and all data would still be accessible from any PC, tablet or smartphone with a data connection.
• Security features. I would recommend further, more specific talks with the Google representatives, but the high-level overview of their security, additional features from their Postini offerings as well as offerings from outside vendors sounded promising.
• Interoperability. Works with Exchange (can with import PST email archives or even use an Outlook front-end), Active Directory, Cisco phones, Blackberry and more.
• A large and easily scalable amount of storage. Google’s base offerings are very generous in terms of storage space (i.e. Email users get 25GB of email storage) and additional space can easily be purchased and seamlessly added.

Other Interesting Points

• New college graduates are geared to cloud computing and it seems like a solid bet that technology will shift to it with the advent of tablets and smartphones. It is of course still accessible via laptops and desktops.
• Adopting Google Apps would mean that we would be entirely reliant on Google’s survival as a company, but we are already that way with Microsoft.
• Google does not collect business user information, more at www.DataLiberation.org
• Two-factor security authentication is available if desired, though from a third-party.
• The Google Apps marketplace offers a resource akin to the Android or iTunes Apps stores, and it seems likely that some very helpful solutions will emerge from here.

Doubts

• How well does it really integrate with an existing Microsoft set up?
• I have heard bad things about the “Groups”, that isn’t all that it should be. If you’ve got an opinion, let me know! My specific interest would be something I could use as a document library and knowledge base.

While it seems like a really viable replacement for Exchange-based email, I’m not yet ready to sign off on it as a replacement for Office. If you have experience using Google Apps in your organization, please let me know what you think of it.

Update

November 23, 2010: Google now offers an add-on that will allow you to sync your Microsoft Office documents into Google Docs. (via Mashable)

Launching in beta today, Google Cloud Connect is an add-on for Office that syncs documents, spreadsheets and presentations from Office 2003, 2007 and 2010 with the “Google (Google) cloud.” In other words, it takes data on the desktop and makes a backup copy in Google Docs (Google Docs), gives it a unique URL and constantly syncs the data with anybody else that might be sharing the same document.

That’s pretty big, in many ways a very viable replacement for using something like SharePoint as a document library.

This is easily the best book I have read all year, thought-provoking and entirely underrated. Joshua Cooper Ramo’s The Age of the Unthinkable is geared towards international relations, but its lessons can easily be adapted to modern life as a whole. He suggests a revolutionary new way of thinking that is both challenging and effective.

People are looking for a straightforward, linear way to define and solve problems. While this approach may have worked in the past, it is no longer effective. Broad solutions to big problems really are not the answer. Things have become an order of magnitude more complicated in recent years and we need a new, creative mind-set to adapt and survive. This mindset must be radical, revolutionary and ready to toss out any assumptions.

Cooper’s research covers a wide range: from tried and true scientific theories to the information technology and organizational structure of terrorist groups like Hizb’allah.

“…the main problem of this book, which is about how we can best navigate an increasingly complex international order…”

In addition to the sand pile effect I have mentioned earlier, here are three suggestions that really struck me.

Slow Variable Policies

Ramo attributes the success of Hiz’ballah not only to their continued focus on being able to evolve, but to unglamorous, long-term initiatives like ingratiating themselves with the people:

“Why was it when people in southern Lebanon had a problem with plumbing or noisy neighbors or a child who wasn’t interested in the Koran, their first call was to Hiz’ballah?

The answer was that by living in places where Lebanese Shia most needed help and support, Hiz’ballah had become inseparable from daily life — and deeply connected to the slow variables of Lebanon. They drew no distinction between plumbing and making bombs; often the same fighters did both jobs. They had gone deep, and this gave them everything from information to gratitude to quiet spaces where they could engineer their latest terror gadgets or bounce back from Israeli poundings.”

Many books in this genre emphasize flexibility and keep the focus on being able to quickly adapt to change. Cooper does not disagree; he simply adds that there are some low-hanging fruit we need to remember as well.

The “hearts and minds” counterinsurgency strategy of David Kilcullen and David Petreaus that was credited for the success of the surge in Iraq is a perfect example of this in action.

Closer to home, it serves as a great reminder to take good care of our staff and remain focused on good customer service.

Augment our instinct for direct action with a new sense of the incredible power of an indirect approach

The indirect approach is a method of seeing the problem from a different, broader perspective. Bring yourself a bit above the immediate focus of a project to see where it  – and it’s completion – fits in to the larger scheme of what you and your superiors are trying to accomplish. Ramo asks us to see our goals not as the end result, but a part of the larger system. He acknowledges that it is a more complex way to look at things and warns that the different effects you will find are not always what you will have hoped for…

“But the benefits of such an approach is that it forces you to touch as many parts of the system as you can, constantly hunting for signs of unexpected and dangerous echoes bouncing back at you. And in a fast-changing system…that’s a huge advantage.”

So we might not always like what we get, but this more comprehensive approach allows us to spot trouble earlier, and to connect many important dots.

The Revolutionary Spread of Power

At some point, we have all been in a situation where someone else would not give up their control to let someone more capable handle a problem. Usually, we notice this because we think we can better handle the problem than they can.

Maybe so, but it is that same mindset that likely causes us to do the exact same thing to someone else.What Mr. Ramo proposes is to change our focus from what we can control to where we can encourage the growth so often encouraged with the “crowd-sourcing” idea that has begun to really gain acceptance.

“We can’t control the sort of growth we need to foster, can’t dictate what it will look like or force it into existing models.”

This shift will not be easy to accept, maybe an easier way to justify it to ourselves would be to remain focused on the outcome and look at this as a way to free ourselves up for more important tasks. A little vain, but whatever works!

Conclusion

Look at how your current issues fit into the bigger picture. Be ready for unexpected results. Accept that you won’t always like what you get, but with the resilience you have built up by doing the little things, the relationship building, team building, delegation and due diligence you will be better able to absorb new challenges.