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.

Wicked problems are now a well discussed and an on-going subject in various disciplines - predominantly public policy and design. They do apply to IT strategy as well. I am consciously using the term “IT strategy” instead of something more tactical as software development or even more strategic as “Business strategy”. I will explain my choice later in the post.

For the last 25 years, IT systems - be it COTS (Commercial Off the shelf) or custom built - are started with trying to understand how they can accomplish a business process. However, it ends up with business stake-holders having to make compromises to the business process to use an IT system. For some time now, the focus has shifted on the users - finding their pain points and trying to design with the users in mind. This change has done a lot of good. However, that is not enough