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 i...

It is recently that I have consciously started practicing Inquiry. Let me explain. I am a consultant who constantly looks at the situation and comes up and implements the solution to progress from there. While I do that, I constantly use Inquiry as a means to progress - one of the key facilitation technique specifically in multiple stakeholder situations.

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.

Retail Operations have always had challenges with scaling. Most of the challenges are related to typical operation processes and some of them are related to personnel and training. Operational process challenges include designing process for operational efficiencies, identifying bottle necks, typical logistical challenges, ability to matchup supply to demand - both increasing and decreasing supply to match demand. With the advent of science in the last 30-40 years, most of the operational challenges have been solved. Personnel and training is another challenge - trying to continuously up-skill people on new technologies and processes. This is a constant challenge. However, with the advent of universities that tie up with industry, this challenge is also partially solved. Vocational training helps industry with more trained candidates for the industry. There are organizations at various levels of maturity that still face these challenges However, Retail operations ...