Life of a Business Principal in Consulting

Organisations go through a lot of change and the predominant cause of these changes is growth. Every organisation would like to grow - though the dimension of growth would depend upon the purpose of that organisation. One of my responsibilities as a Business Principal is to understand what growth brings to a specific organisation and how it can impact if the specific actions taken is not mapped in context for future. I had an opportunity to facilitate an exercise for senior leaders in my organisation that had come together to make sense of an organisation-wide study of processes. There was a lot of chaos in the room since there was no one lens through which to view the findings of the study. We used a simple system archetype called "Growth and Underinvestment". This post is a quick experience report on running the exercise for the team.

In my previous post, we discussed principles that can be used for designing Anti-fragile systems. There were some feedback that the case study was not easy to relate and understand the principles better. With the spirit of making it easier for all of us - including me - to understand, I am taking a very recent and relevant case study to understand Anti-fragile systems.

I have been trying to make sense of what anti-fragility means and how do I use that in my day job. As a Business Principal, I tend to work with the abstract but orchestrate a program of work that needs details. This makes my job a little difficult in the terms of designing for more self-preserving systems that preserve the spirit of the abstracted strategy or vision. I came across an article from Daniel Russo on anti-fragility and his attempt at creating a manifesto similar to the manifesto for agile software development. For more reading on Daniel Russo, here is his profile:  http://djrusso.github.io More reading from his paper here:  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877050916302290 This post is an attempt for me to understand what goes into developing a program that uses every opportunity to strengthen itself and achieve its objective - the vision.  I liked the approach of principles for developing systems that are anti-fragile. It is a very valua

A part of my responsibility as a Business Principal also involves facilitating conversations on end user feedback and how it maps to business goals. There are several tools to map end user feedback to business goals. However, the intent is to understand how users perceive a business goal.  We designed a more engaging exercise that can lead to more detailed inquiry on how the business goal impacts the end users. This post is a quick experience report on facilitating an exercise Appreciative Inquiry that helped us in this intent.

A Business Principal needs all the tools and techniques that is available for solutioning. With Machine learning emerging as a key trend in the upcoming years, it makes more sense to understand how to use it for solutioning. I have used a lot of the material for this post from here:  The Step-By-Step PM Guide to Building Machine Learning Based Products

As a Business Principal, I have been coming across the term Machine learning for a long time. Several business executives have wondered what this animal is and how does it help them. The series of posts is to list out what Machine learning means to a business principal and some basic industry standard approaches that has been tried out in the past few years.

Organisations need to grow. However, they should not grow for the sake of growth. That would be a virus. Orgs should not grow to survive as well. Orgs should grow with a purpose.

Team leadership in self-organised teams In a typical self-organised team, Team leadership is not appreciated. However, there are going to be instances when you would need this capacity and have to understand how to appreciate and inculcate this important characteristic as well.