Charities partnering Service

This Southbeach model describes some of the challenges and capabilities that charities have, and how if they could find a way to partner with other charities with complimentary capabilities and needs, they could help each other more effectively utilize their own capabilities to produce solutions that meet their goals.

The idea is that a Charity Partnering Service could consume capabilities from some charities that are then paired with challenges faced by other charities to help them meet their mutual goals. For example, one charity needing funds for projects may receive donations from another charity where those projects also meet the needs of the other charities charter. Similarly, one charity may have a distribution network in place for delivering aid, whereas another charity may have access to supplies that could be delivered through that distribution network.

Social media is sited as one example of how such a service could enable charities to share information about their resources and needs to enable a 'dating-agency' for charities to match them with potential partners.

The model was inspired by a discussion with Andreas Rindler, the Finance Director of the UK arm of the Mental Disability Advocacy Centre-UK (MDAC-UK).

Obama's Prisoner Dilemma: Reject Torture, Defend Torturers

According to Wired [Feb 04, 2009] President Barack Obama finds himself in a quandary of sorts over his public position opposing torture and secret detentions.

The new U.S. president has renounced those Bush administration practices, but government lawyers continue to defend the previous administration's top officials accused of authorizing and carrying out those policies.

Unexpected events

As many companies ponder the financial downturn, no doubt some are wondering whether there needs to be radical changes to their strategic plans, risk management programs, and planning processes for resource allocation. This model illustrates the dilemna many will face as we go into 2009 and beyond.

Based on the article 'African investment could be hit'
Interestingly, whilst drawing this model, the use of Southbeach clarified several points that were not explicitly stated in the article.

Window pane diagrams

Southbeach contains a Grid tool. Grids are used to 'separate' elements of a model in various 'dimensions' of separation. In this example, a 3x3 grid is used to represent the past, present and future (time epoch) resources associated with the sponsorship of a project, the customer and the team delivering the project (system structure).

The template comes from page 530, Systematic Innovation for Business and Management, Darrell Mann, 2004.

Elements inherit attributes off the grid - from the cell in which they are placed. The modeling software allows grids of rows only (pools), columns only (swimlanes) or window pane diagrams as in this example.

Each dimension is called a 'separation'. Separations can be typed: for example in space, time, by structure, by perspective, around system aspects, by role, on probability and on conditions.

Modeling trends

Southbeach can be used to model trends. Here, two well known examples of observed trends in commerce are illustrated. A potential hybrid trend, I refer to as 'amenity' is shown as the convergence of maturity on two existing trend lines.

Earth 3.0 - Scientific American

This model celebrates the launch of Earth 3.0, a new high quality publication from Scientific American. (www.sciamearth3.com). The model describes what is said in the editor's letter.

Note the use of a separation by Time to describe the three epochs described in the SciAm article. Focus (yellow), Goal (block green) and Risk (block red) have also been used to good effect. Note the use of an 'insufficient counteraction' (dotted crossed line) to denote that early argiculture produced only local impacts, not global harm. Note the use of the 'overloaded' (doubled line) effect to show the industrial consumption. Note the use of 'oppose' (double headed jagged effect) between the concerns about the environment, and the necessary third world development. Note also the use of 'required' (solid circle at source end of effect lines) to signify the necessary actions to bring about the potential (dotted line box) for economic and environmental progress.

Being more productive with Southbeach

This Southbeach model shows the potential harmful consequences of an unstructured approach combined with a lack of discipline and planning. It's a common picture. Let's break it down: Many people feel forced into this situation by the amount of work they receive and the amount of support from others they don't receive. This increasing work leads to increasing urgency which leads ultimately to dropping the ball (or less and less sleep, stress, less collaborative; more insular behaviour)... It has the further consequences that there is no time for planning, and no time for prioritising activities, leading to a reactive behaviour that becomes more random with time.

The Southbeach approach can be used to re-establish the discipline necessary to deal with complex situations and high workloads. It is a structured approach that enables you to break your problems down into manageable chunks that can be shared with others. Structuring thought, planning, design, work, and collaboration in this way can create more reuse in everything you do and can reduce the workload for others, giving them more time to help reduce the workload for you.

Another benefit of this collaborative approach is the wealth of experience and different ideas and approaches that can be brought to bear. More information, with more techniques for combining it enables better decision making to enable you and others to focus on what is important to get results and achieve your goals.

Managing Enabling Technology

This Southbeach model shows an impact analysis for using Technology in business. Reading from bottom left (Technology) to top right (Increasing Profit), we can see a chain of useful and harmful effects as the intended results of automation and combining information in new ways to create new capabilities and business oportunities have their shadow harmful consequences of loss of control, information overload, and increasing cost and complexity resulting in risk of technology outages.

There is a significant management overhead for all enabling technologies. Additional risk management erodes away profits still further, whilst the use of technologies like Business Intelligence to find correlations in market indicators through data mining and provision of multi-level active drill-down reports for management to make sense of the increasing information overload permits evidence based decision making at the highest level in the organisation.

New business opportunities are identified and this often results in yet more technology to overcome the limitations of previous IT systems, and restore control to the business so that opportunities can be properly exploited.

This represents an interlocking of two evolutionary systems in an organisation; the business, and the Information Technology. They enable each other. The boundaries become blurred with time, and the politics of deciding which side of the fence to pitch your tent increase as the cycle of improvement on one side amplifies the other, and technology and business change fall out of sync resulting in solutions that were intended for one purpose being used for another, or investment being targetted at exploitation of existing technology beyond its capacity to support the growth in demand from the business.

Managing enabling technology requires a thorough understanding of both the business and the Technology, and a foot in both camps. In today's world, neither can exist without the other; Building value with business-led inovation requires a supporting culture in the people and a collaboration rooted in relationships built on trust.

Building Value with Business led Innovation

In his article Would you kiss this Pig? on his blog, Innovating to Win, James Todhunter describes a situation that is all too common in Industry. This relates directly back to my example from October on Holistic Problem Solving, describing a more evidence-based approach to strategic planning rather than focussing on short-term tactics that end up wasting company resources and people's time by investing in projects that are ultimately doomed to failure, or worse, result in missing the real opportunity that is just around the corner. In holistic problem solving, I presented the risk that if those diverted by such misguided short-termism represent a stronger force than those seeking to understand the bigger picture and obtain alignment to move forward from a sound strategic basis, then a downward spiral will result.

This Southbeach model explores the same problem from another angle; how to apply the process of innovation to building value in organisations. We see from this diagram how the perspective of innovation as "building new stuff" from a technology perspective often leads to failure to deliver the desired impact whilst understanding the business opportunity leads to building new stuff with a pre-destined purpose (as opposed to a theoretical purpose).

Clearly Technology led Innovation is an enabler for Business Innovation, and certainly for tecnology companies it is often directly applicable to building value, creating differentiators, and growing their market share. For non-technology businesses, however, Technology is almost always no more than an enabler, a means to an end, some say a necessary evil. For sure there are plenty of harmful side effects of technology; the cost, the complexity, the dependency, but it is predominantly useful as it allows us to make massive leaps in our capability through automation and combining information in new ways that can lead us to identify and exploit the new business opportunities in our markets. Managing enabling technology effectively is key.

Marketing applied to ill-conceived concepts that result in poor value propositions do not get very far, and to reuse again the colourful metaphor on which James based his article, this is no better than putting lipstick on a pig... no one is going to buy it, and if they do, they may soon regret it, as may you.

Focussing on understanding the business opportunity, or business need, to determine where to invest in enabling technology results in "the right new stuff"; stuff that has an application, and if communicated effectively by marketing, will sell, and grow your market share, and create success for your organisation and its customers.

The same concept of perspectives is used in this Southbeach model as in the one on Holistic Problem solving; there are two behaviours in the world, and they often coexist in the same organisation - these behaviours are in oppostion to each other. Those that look for ways of spending their budget on innovation or new things are putting the cart before the horse, jumping the gun, doing things the wrong way around, and they will create an increasing cost base that has no corresponding ROI; they will effectively be counteracting the work done by those that are spending the time understanding the business need to determine where to invest their budget in creating new value. Laying these two behaviours side by side like this demonstrates how they are working against each other throughout their evolution.

Companies often combine techniques of pay for performance to influence the individuals towards behaviour that is better for the business (rather than the individual), however, the annual reward cycles for individuals, and reporting cycles for companies encourages short-termism. A more effective way to create behaviour that builds long term value is to build culture; see my previous post on Drucker's Spirit of an Organisation.