The Five Level Strategic Fluency Ladder

You become a better corporate strategist. So I imagine that you're someone who's engaged in corporate strategy. You're either a consultant or an executive or a manager or someone who sits in on corporate strategy planning efforts, and you ask the question, how do I make a better contribution, a bigger contribution? How do I make a bigger difference? How do I move more quickly, think more quickly, react more quickly? How do I give better quality input? And how do I assure that what comes out at the end happens— the strategy that gets produced happens in the shortest space of time and has super high quality? And in other words, it moves the needle. My friends, if you're here to answer that question today, my name is Francis Wade, and I'm the founder of Framework Consulting. I'm also the creator of Strat Cinema, and joining me in the chat is my co-host Dale Pilgrim-Wade and also Shavonna Hilton, who works with us— Houghton, sorry— who works with us. And I want to make sure that I'm not just talking to myself and that you're hearing me wherever you are. If you could just drop a note in the Q&A tab over to the left, are you hearing me or am I just talking to myself at this point? Comes kind of echo chamber. Drop a note. Okay, great. Peru. I'm seeing some names I know. Hi, Celeste. Thanks, Giovanna. Great. And seeing as I have your attention, let me go ahead and launch the first poll because I want to get a sense of who exactly we have in the room and what kind of experience we have so I can tailor my comments on what I'm about to say to you and see your Folks have found the emoji buttons. Oh yeah, excellent. Okay, so let's launch the first poll. It's going to show up in the left, uh, the left column. Okay, so here we go. Go ahead and answer that poll. In the past 3 months, have you taken deliberate steps to strengthen your corporate strategy skills? And it ranges from no, I haven't taken any steps, yes, I've taken one to two small steps, yes, I've taken several meaningful and I make consistent ongoing. You're someone who's in the game. Let me see where you're at. Looks like so far we have one to two steps is kind of the winner. Okay, well, actually we have a split between folks who have taken one to two steps and folks who have made consistent ongoing progress? Okay, if you haven't voted, go ahead. Otherwise, I'm going to close that poll and let's do another one related to this one. Okay, should be able to see the results, and let's launch the second poll. So this one is more detailed and gets to the heart of the matter of what we're going to be talking about today. In the past month, how many strategic case studies have you actively engaged with, which means that you've read them, analyzed, or discussed them with a colleague? 0 to 2, 3 to 5, 6 to 10, 10 plus. So if you're a super crazy nerd like me. I'll explain why I'm in the 10+ category in just a minute, but it looks like most folks are in the 0-2 category by an overwhelming number. Oh yeah, yeah, two-thirds. Okay, well, we have a lot to talk about today, so let me pull up my slides here. Okay, let's get going. Sure, now. Okay, yep, we have a clear winner from our poll. 0 to 2. That's going to be very interesting based on what I'm about to talk about. You shall see why I'm laughing. That's what the whole— everything I'm going to talk about today is all about that. Okay, so let's get past the poll and let me talk about you and folks, why I think this might be perfect for you if you're here with us today. Let me publish the results of that poll. So you're in the perfect place if you attend or will attend HCT planning meeting in the next maybe year, or you lead a company which has a corporate strategy. I know some companies don't have a strategy, a few of them. If you're a consultant, you work with clients who are developing a corporate strategy, so you're a consultant like I am. Or if you're just a fan of corporate strategy, let me know in the chat which sort of bucket you may find yourself in at this point in time. Just drop a note so that I have a sense of where you're at in terms of your involvement in corporate strategy. I'm going to be bugging you like this all the way throughout, so you can expect all kinds of questions like me and for me to expect answers from you. Go ahead, let me know which, which category you fall in, and any one of them is fine. Even if you're not a fan of corporate strategy and you're not even sure why you're here, that's fine as well. But those of us who do work with, you know, in corporate strategy or track it very closely, um, one reason why this is for you is that you may have wondered why you your attempts to grow your ability to be a great strategist have not borne fruit in the past. So we're going to talk about the reason why that is. It's not because you're not smart enough, in case you've wondered that, that's why. It's not because you need to go and do an MBA or do another advanced degree. That's not the reason. You don't need to be in a classroom to achieve the kind of growth, because what we'll be talking about today are new emerging, different, fresh, never before conceived of ways to grow your abilities as a corporate strategist. You, you, you probably, you know, don't want to sit in a classroom and take exams and, um, got, you know, God forbid, get grades, pass some, not pass others. You don't want to be a part of an academic, um, situation anymore. You've been there, done that, and that's not the way you want to become a better corporate strategist. You suspect that there are better ways, and you want to be someone who is at the heart of the place where the biggest decisions and the most consequential decisions are made. So here in Jamaica, we just got hit by Hurricane Melissa, as you may know, and that was, you know, that's a very, very serious business. But one thing it's made clear is that there were decisions that our government could have made that it didn't make. Not to just point the finger, but to say that in the future, in the very near future, they're going to be needing— they do need to make decisions that no one else has ever made in our history, that have not been made in Jamaica's history. And that those decisions that they make of a strategic nature which have consequences with respect to how well we do with the next Melissa, because one thing we do know is that there's going to be another hurricane coming. So how do you grow as a corporate strategist without all of the baggage of burning out by trying to study too much, too often, too frequently, subjecting yourself to exams or stressing yourself out? So let's meet Carlo. And I'm just going to read this particular case, a short story. Carla is a group CEO, and she also sits on the board of one of her company's subsidiaries. The subsidiary just completed its strategic planning meetings, and she's not happy. So she's a group CEO, she's not happy with what she saw in the strategic planning session from the subsidiary. The plan they spent weeks working on in the subsidiary is a mere continuation of business as usual. It was as if the creativity of the team was stuck on a low gear, unable to look beyond the limits of its own industry geography or size. She's very concerned. Why? Well, because in a few months' time she's going to be leading the group's corporate planning effort, and her chairman has demanded a game-changing strategy that shakes up the organization. The truth is the organization has become sluggish, been coasting on the sort of the momentum of its prior successes. But she has some time, right? She'd like to intervene immediately so that the participants in the upcoming group-level planning meetings are somehow brought up to a higher level of creativity and courage. But it's not like she can issue an executive order, tell people, come to the session and be more strategic than you've ever been before. What should she do? So if, as you hear this, you may— it may bring, bring up memories or situations that you've been in, maybe retreats where you realize that there was very little strategic thinking happening. And that what was taking place was more like business as usual, problem solving. That what came out of the retreat or the strategic planning activity was business as usual, mundane, mediocre. It definitely wasn't game-changing. It definitely wasn't preemptive or extraordinary. So what should she do? She's sent to the webinar, right? All right, well, let's to put this in sort of real, sort of concrete terms and use an example, Kodak versus Fujifilm. So the film industry made record profits in the year 2000. And as strategists, we ask ourselves sometimes the question, tell me if you do also, I wonder if I were there, what difference I would have made? So if I had been in the planning sessions for Kodak, would I have been able to help this company? Because what happened was that around 2001, Fujifilm, with its record profits, made a pivot that allowed them to exceed their revenue over time. That's where they are today, more successful company than they were in the past, as opposed to Kodak, which went bankrupt in 2012. And as you know, if you have kids or nieces or nephews, you have to explain to them what film is because they don't know what it means to go to a drugstore and buy film for a camera, which you'd have to develop. They don't know what that is because what both companies knew, they had a common set of facts, was that digital photography was on the way. And we ask ourselves, or we should ask ourselves as strategists, what if we were in those Kodak meetings? What would we have said? Could we have said to make a difference? What could have moved the needle so that Kodak wouldn't have to destroy $13 or $18 billion of profits and laid off 100,000— sorry, revenue— and laid off 100,000 employees? Because that's what happened because their strategy was flawed, bad. So there are reasons, specific reasons why Kodak strategy worked and Fujifilm didn't. And we are the people, we strategists, whether we're chairman of a board or a CEO like Carlo or a consultant, we're the ones in the room when these decisions are made or not made. The ball is in our court. Also, you know, what if instead we were in the boardroom of Blockbuster Video before it went bankrupt, or Nokia before it went bankrupt? Would we have what it takes to rescue these companies? That's what today is all about. Now I'm gonna assert that the missing element that allows us to be great strategists, that has the experts be the experts, is not their ability to write a book on a fancy new framework. Instead, it's that they demonstrate behaviors that are a little bit like balance. Now the thing about balance is that you could put someone in a classroom give them a curriculum, show them a lecture, teach them the physics, the physiology of the body, what— you could go to town in teaching them everything you think they should need in order to achieve balance. You put them on a bicycle and they fall off. Well, I want to have you consider that being a great strategist is a lot like that, that great strategists aren't born from getting an A in a strategy class in an MBA school. That comes from somewhere else, and there are specific reasons why the experts get these skills from this other place and why we have to look in different places in order to make great strategy, in order to produce a Fujifilm versus a Kodak. So if it's a little bit like balance, it's not a function of knowing a bunch of stuff, theory, frameworks. And by the way, I'm going to throw frameworks under the bus quite a bit today. My company is called Framework Consulting, so this is not a good idea, but anyway. There's a huge gap between knowing something like a framework and doing something like working to produce a great strategy. So how do you get more of this balance-y type stuff? Well, here's an idea. It's tacit knowledge. So experts demonstrate tacit knowledge. They understand what it means to learn skills in a way that is Nonlinear. That doesn't come from a textbook. Doesn't come from the kind of frameworks. Because I promise you, you take someone who's only studied, gotten an A in our course, and you throw them into a strategic planning actual project, I've seen it happen, it doesn't work. They don't work. So what is tacit knowledge? So it's knowledge that can't be properly transmitted via verbal or written instruction, like the ability to create great art, assess a startup or drive your strategy. This person says it's— I can't quite see his name— Sample says that it's a form of intellectual dark matter. All right. And he gives a bunch of examples. So the last example is interesting, heart surgery, because heart surgery happens to be One of those skills that you, as you can imagine, you cannot learn from just a classroom. So medical students who come out of the classroom and come in, you know, start to do the practical work in their internship for the first time, bump up on this fact that they, they know nothing and that the experts seem to be relying on some kind of intuition that they can't use, they don't have access to. And all the stuff that they learn in the classroom, they struggle to apply because it doesn't seem— how do you go from the concepts to here's somebody who is undergoing a heart attack right in front of you? Heart attacks are interesting because there's what we think of as a heart attack, which is that you have a pain in your chest, your face goes red, you have some mobility issues on the left side of your, your, um, arm, um, you're on the ground. You know, there's, there's things that we see from Hollywood, but what the experts say is that heart attack can take 3 days, that it could just be indigestion. Because when you've seen hundreds of people have a heart attack, you start to develop a pattern. You start to recognize that there's more to it than you were taught when you were in school, more than in common framework. So what the novices do, you know, the new interns do, is they cling to the one or two examples that they see and they think, okay, this is what it looks like. And we strategists make those same errors. So for this line of thinking, I'm going to rely heavily on Cedric Chan over at commoncog.com, and I discovered him after sort of experiencing what I'm going to be talking about myself. Which is becoming a great strategist, becoming, picking up and accelerating expert capability doesn't happen the way that we think it does or it should. I'll explain why. And he's an expert in what's called naturalistic decision-making, which was pioneered by the military. So for me, I had the same challenge as someone who was taught to lead programs. I was trained by an organization where I was a rank novice for the time that I was there. I left before I got to the higher ranks. I had led 5, 10 seminars. Others had led over 100. And the way they spoke, I was clearly in the presence of people who knew things that of which I could not even appreciate. And one of the things that they talked about was being able to read the mood of a room. They call it listening to the listening. I didn't understand it at the time. Fast forward about 10 years, 15 years, and I'm in this retreat with another consultant. Let's call him James. And I was invited just to observe this retreat, this 2-day retreat, as a part of a team. And James is at the front of the room and he's doing his thing and the room is is going south. So something bad is happening. Please, your planning session is going the wrong way. So I jump in because there are things happening I noticed that I'm seeing them happen and I don't believe he's seeing them. I basically jumped in, intervened, and led the retreat for the next 2 days unplanned. But what I used was what I had learned 50 years before, struggled to come to grips with. I had developed some tacit knowledge without even noticing it. And I've tried to develop more of this tacit knowledge, and you can see I have a whole list of things that I've tried to do, the last of which is Stratcinema. We launched Stratcinema in order to have the long-term strategy conference earlier this year. I produce content, and part of what I'm really looking for is ways to expand my I always look for ways to expand my tacit knowledge. And then I started to ride my bicycle indoors. So when COVID started, I picked up an app called Zwift. Now that picture that you see over there on the right is a typical Zwift setup. There's a— my screen is not as large. I use a computer screen. But anyway, there's a screen in front of you. And you're on a bicycle which has a sensor that is picked up by the screen, and as you pedal, you're able to make progress on the screen. So you can race, you can experience different terrains, it's all fun. Anyway, I'm a 6-hour-a-week cyclist on Zwift as a result of COVID and I started off, you know, as you could imagine, as you're hearing this, you're probably wincing and saying, oh my God, 6 hours. Not 6 hours all in one, one fell swoop, but different sessions each week. I was on for an hour and a half this morning. For example, you are saying to yourself, how boring that must be, that sounds terrible. And it is, it was. So of course I said, well, maybe I can watch Netflix. I got my tablet and I kind of put it to the side and Netflix became my friend. And that lasted me for a while, but then I ran into something that Samuel mentions here. There's a YouTube revolution happening in knowledge transfer. So I mentioned before that 10 or more videos per week, case studies. Yeah, maybe more because 6 hours you can watch a lot of 15-minute case studies in 6 hours. That's essentially what I've been doing and who I've become. Unfortunately, there's a big problem because YouTube itself is a mess. Having said that, let me tell you a quick story about Warren Buffett and Katherine Graham. So Katherine Graham was the former CEO of the Washington Post. I forget the exact year that she came, she started as CEO, I believe it was the late '60s, but she did so after spending 20 years as a housewife. She had no business experience. She was 46. One of the earliest investors was this guy from Omaha nobody had ever heard of called Warren Buffett. She invited him to be on the board because he bought a bunch of shares. He believed in what she was doing and sat down with him. And as he started to get to know her, he realized that she really didn't have the business basics, and she felt like she was way out of her depth, and she didn't want to screw things up for her stockholders, including Warren Buffett. So Warren Buffett said, oh, oh, maybe I can help. And what he did every time he traveled to Washington for a board meeting was that he brought along annual reports of— he had like a library of old annual reports, and he would use these annual reports as cases to train Katherine Graham in how to think strategically and how to think as a business person of a mega enterprise, and it worked. So once again, Cedric Chin is he has this set up as a whole video case study. He's come up with a method that follows this particular line of reasoning that exposure to cases is something that the frameworks don't give you. So now I've watched hundreds of videos. There's a bunch of stuff I can do or I can see now the way I couldn't see before, a little bit like the tacit knowledge that I picked up from being in that training course that I used with James. I now see myself increasing, my tacit knowledge increasing. Today is all about what the heck is he talking about, how did that happen, how could I make that happen for me. So I'm going to share with you 3 secrets. How can you use entertaining videos to grow as a strategist without struggling with the mess that YouTube is? Second secret is how can you bring a new level of strategic insight to meetings where you can make a difference without losing other people? And third, how can you scale pattern matching without even referring to frameworks? I'm not saying frameworks aren't useful, they are, they are essential, but that's not where the big growth, perhaps that's not where the big growth will come from for you in terms of the next level of being a strategist. All right, let me just quickly check the chat to see if I have any questions. Alex says passionate about it. I think Alex says he's passionate about it. If you have any questions, this is a good time to drop them in the chat— sorry, the Q&A. Celeste says more of a fan. No, Giovanni, these were the answers to the questions before. Anyone who have any questions, or should I just put— just put go ahead if you think I should just go ahead. I'm not— I'm following, I haven't gotten lost yet. Let's drop a note in the chat. I think I'm seeing all of the go ahead says Shakira. Shakira, go ahead says Kasan, great. All right, so entertaining videos as a strategist. All right, so I want you to think of this crazy idea that strategists have 3 seasons. So if you're a retailer, you know that this season that's about to start is the most important season of the year. If you're someone who sells to— you're a B2C company, this is when you make half of your profit or 90% of your profit or whatever the numbers are in your business. So you have a Christmas season that's really important. If you're an accountant, you have a tax season and that's also important to you. Well, I discovered that we also have seasons as a strategist, as strategists, and it roughly parallels the work that companies do to develop strategy. So I'll mention what the three of them are in just a moment, but when we're in these three seasons, we behave very differently. So couple that with an insight that I got from fella named Callaway to tackle this messy YouTube problem. So Callaway said in one of his videos that there's two kinds of channels you need to set up. So if you're trying to solve a messy YouTube problem and trying to not watch and be distracted by politics and music and all you want are business case studies, then what you do is you set up a new channel and you train the channel so that you don't have these distractions and it doesn't— the algorithm doesn't send you a bunch of stuff. Like I get sent a bunch of stuff because I'm in Jamaica because I want everything Jamaica. It sends me a bunch of stuff. It's difficult to focus and to have that experience and to make progress when you're watching YouTube. So setting up the channel is one way to try to tackle the problem. So this fellow Callaway, who is an internet marketer, said, oh, make sure that if you have setting up channels that you don't mix entertainment and education. And that threw me for a loop because I said, no, no, we're all about education. I'm not in the entertainment business. And then it struck me that I had created this thing called Strat Cinema back in time for June, in time for the conference that I mentioned. And do you go to a cinema for educational purposes? Probably not. A cinema is a place that you go for entertainment. I also noticed that when I was trying to contact my clients, that if I were lucky, my prospective clients, if I were lucky, I would catch them maybe about 2 months before they plan to engage in their strategic planning. But most times it was just purely a matter of luck because it's, you know, it's not— doesn't follow a calendar. And I started to say, you know what, they have an off-season and an on-season. In a company that does strategic planning, there's an on-season where they focus on peak performance, and it's intense, this on-season, as opposed to the off-season. Where they're not engaged in developing strategy. They're doing other things like rest, recovery. They're building their foundation. In this sense, they're like professional athletes who have an on-season and an off-season. I wish I looked as good as this professional athlete. So I want you to consider that strategists have 3 seasons. We're going to start with the third. Continue with the second and then with the first. So the third season is when we are operationalizing strategy. The second season is when we're developing our personal skills. And the first season is our downtime, which is filled with curiosity. All right, so the third season, this is the time when you are working with a team. The output is a new strategic plan. There's always other people. It's very focused, and the outputs, you know what the outputs are going to look like specifically. And these are the times where you— this is what you recover from if you're a strategist. This is like the main part of kind of your career or being part of what you do. So we had about, in my company, about 5 projects this year when we were in season 3. With different companies during this season. If you are in a company, you're building capacity because this is where you need to be building, building the strategy you're putting in place. You're implementing, you're coming up with the strategy. But a lot of people never reach this because they disregard what happens in Phase 1 and they burn out in Phase 2. What does that mean? Let me explain. Explain in a minute. So Phase 3 takes a lot of energy, a lot of focus. Phase 2 for a strategist is when we are engaged in improving our skills. So for example, you're in a classroom, or you're researching a topic, or you're practicing different ways of, of doing things of, for example, engaging other people, um, for you're taking notes, you're buying books, you're reading academic papers, you're doing all the things that you need to do to build new skills, and it's hard. You may hire a coach, you may hire a mentor to make things easier, you take an online course, but you're not in the mode of delivering strategy here. You're in the mode of improving the way you do things, and it's hard. So I keep emphasizing this word hard because this kind of learning is not the kind of learning you engage in casually. You're extremely conscious of what's happening, and your limitations are sort of right in front of you all the time. So you're— if you watch a video, you may watch it 3 times, 4 times, 5 times. You buy the person's book, like a Roger Martin. You engage here as if getting better is all that there is. So you can't spend all of your time in this stage. And some people in this season— and some people do— and then they burn out. So let's talk about Season 1, and this may sound like, oh, this is Francis, now you're talking nice. This is where most people have a nice long Christmas season, which is probably going to be your time for downtime. So you're looking for fun experiences which are enjoyable. You're looking to be entertained, but you're not like other people. You actually, if you were to go to Disney World, you'd be more interested in Epcot than you would in Fantasyland. Should be Fantasyland, not Fantasy World. You like to learn in your downtime. You like to pick up new things. You like to discover. It's a bit like, you know, imagine going to another city like New York. If you're not in New York, you go into the Museum of Modern Art, wherever you join in, and you pay your entrance fee And as you walk through, you're like, oh, oh, oh, and things are happening because you're now learning and you're seeing things for the first time. And walking through a museum is kind of like this serendipitous, fun, entertaining, but at the same time somewhat stimulating kind of activity. It's a season. It's not about stress, it's about learning, you know, see, and even if I use the word learning because when I use the word learning I think of learning, I don't think of the serendipitous kind of discovery that I'm talking about. But why is this important? That's why you're taking us going this way. Well, it's not time wasting, It's not merely entertainment. It actually has something to do with why I watch these 20 videos on corporate failures in the past month, because there's something happening as I'm on Zwift pedaling, listening to these videos on these business cases. So if you're to take and split all the different ways that we do education, entertainment, and edutainment in the beginning, You can see that there is this curious blend that has arisen in the last few years and especially on YouTube. So what makes Season 1 so important? For that, I need to give you a little bit of theory. That strategy is what's called an ill-structured domain. So according to Cedric, my friend, It's a domain where concepts exist, but the way these concepts show up in the real world are always unique and endlessly varied. So tacit knowledge usually is best applied to ill-structured domains. It applies everywhere, but in an ill-structured domain, business, for example. So business is not like chess, which is a highly structured domain. Business, there are always unique and endlessly varied kinds of things happening. And what experts do in order to pick up things like balance or tacit knowledge is that they expose themselves to fragments and cases the way Katherine Graham of the Washington Post exposed herself to a huge number of cases via Warren Buffett. Because what the expert does in the moment is something the novice can't imagine doing, which is that they're pulling from cases and fragments in the moment to produce a result. What am I saying here? Well, if you want to produce Fujis rather than Kodaks, you've got to be the kind of strategist that has a huge library of case studies stories and narratives, knowledge fragments, and that you're able to pull them together in the heat of the moment so that they can make a difference with a live group of people who are looking at you for guidance. The reason why I mentioned before, you can't take an MBA who got an A in strategy and plug him or her into a retreat and have them be effective because they don't have the fragments. Strategy is an ill-formed domain, and as a result, you need to pull these fragments, and that's what the experts do. They tell stories, they have breadth, they won't say that I saw this in one place, therefore do it now. They would tell the stories and inform the group and say, you know, there's this thing over here that, you know, maybe it might apply here, I don't know. Because it's the nature of what we do as strategists and the nature of the domain in which we have decided to be experts. To that, another nuance. It makes it harder as well that In corporate strategy, there's two outcomes that are always— we're always trying: intellectual outcome, the other one is a social outcome. Intellectual on the left, social on the right. Unfortunately, MBA is only taught the left. Oh, I just saw my microphone. Folks, if you're still hearing me clearly, just drop a note in the chat so that I'm not doing switching microphones on me, all kinds of stuff. Are you hearing me clearly? Just drop a note in the chat. Yes, hearing. Okay, so we know. So we as strategists, expert strategists, those who are experts can always see 2 kinds of objectives that need to be accomplished, and they're well aware that they need lots of fragments in order to be effective in this particular kind of domain, an ill-structured domain. And YouTube is an emerging place to pick up this tacit knowledge. So what do you do? You just watch lots of, lots of videos. This is not just as easy as that, but that's where we're at at the moment. All right, so let me take any questions you may have in the chat. I said a lot, and I'm not prepping us to say— what about YouTube? Do we just park ourselves in front of a screen and watch and watch and watch and watch and watch and watch a whole bunch of business cases? Is it that simple? That's the question on the floor. But let me see if there's anything with respect to what I said before. Anything that I've covered up until this point. This is the interactive part of the webinar. If no question, put no question so that I know that your fingers are working and that you're not watching YouTube while we're doing this webinar. Let me see some fingers working in the chat. There is a bit of a lag. Oh yes, there's no questions, no questions. You have to be deeper than that, says Ronald. Transition from strategy to results execution— how do we translate the YouTube into know-how? Brilliant, says Ronald. Ronald. I don't know, I don't think that we've met before, but appreciate that. All right, so there's more. So how do you be strategic in meetings? So you've been in meetings, maybe your boss is giving you feedback, you need to be more strategic, and you're like, what the hell does that even mean? So how do you do, how do you be strategic? What does it mean to be strategic? So I'm going to introduce you to the Strategic Fluency Ladder. And if you sat in this webinar, you probably saw me describe these 6 levels, and I said this is a way for you to evaluate where you are and figure out a plan of improvement. Because the point is not just to watch videos. The point is to be able to see patterns that others couldn't just, couldn't see in their watching, and then to use those patterns so that when you walk in to make a presentation such as this one, you're being effective. So I had a, you know, one of the patterns that I picked up is long-term strategy. And typically my company, we turn down opportunities to work with companies that won't do a 5-year strategy because we say that's not sufficient for what needs to happen in your neck of the woods, any neck of the woods, we don't differentiate, but we say 5-year aspirations just aren't big enough to move the needle. So I make the argument. So anyway, we had this one client, and this one client said, oh yeah, no problem. And then a week before the retreat, they said, oh, we need to do short term, we can't afford to do long term. So they probably paid us already, we had already agreed. So I said, Jeez, okay, I'm going to make an exception, not what I usually do, but let's do short-term and not long-term. By long-term, I mean we offer companies, we recommend that they choose 15 to 30 years. Somewhere in there, there's a sweet spot for their industry, their company. Anyway, we did the 5-year strategy and then went to present it to the board, and the board said Why are you coming to us with all this small, short-term, in-the-weeds kind of stuff? We want to do the big stuff. We want to be talking about the mega changes that need to happen. In other words, we want long term. So when you're able to see these patterns and then draw on examples to use them. So in a typical retreat, here are the examples that I use. I, I, maybe I'm not, I don't know if I've memorized every single one. Maybe there's a couple in there I'm a bit weak on, but watching YouTube, picking up, picking up cases where long-termism, long-term thinking beats short-term panic, myopia. I have lots of examples, and I have a library that I pull from, and I show this slide in every retreat. I probably didn't show it in the retreat that I'm talking about, the one exception, but every other retreat, we've done 60-something of them of a long-term nature, and we have this conversation about the power of setting big aspirations and being game-changing. Okay, so what level are you at right now? So here's a chance to— so there's going to be a replay, there'll be videos, there'll be slides and the whole thing, but you could go ahead and take a picture of them if you are— a screenshot if you want. So level 1 is recognizing patterns like the one I just mentioned, being able to see them in different cases, different videos on YouTube. You can't use what you can't see, so In Season 1, the kind of watching that you're doing is not just what patterns am I noticing, but which companies are these patterns occurring in. And you need lots of cases to be able to see what I'm talking about. So the second level is that you not just see the patterns, and of course all the patterns that we have are going to be different because we're all different. We see the same case, we see different patterns. That's the nature of the beast. That's the nature of the implicit knowledge that I'm encouraging you to develop, the expert knowledge. Second level is to recall the pattern. So you could say, oh yeah, this is like how, just like how Wang Labs missed the PC revolution. I just watched that case, watched about 3 videos on that case last week. Fascinating story. And to have the conversation with real people in the heat of the moment, you need to come up with the examples. You can't just say, oh, you know, we need to do more than just focus on our founder because if we do that, then we'll have problems. When you quote the examples like Wang Labs and say we need to be less like Wang Labs because they got into trouble because of their CEO and you describe the whole process, But you need lots of cases to have them at your fingertips to be effective, to communicate to others, to ultimately be able to explain to others because you don't want to just drop the example. You want to say, well, here's why. Wang Labs, and you tell the whole story because if you're like me, you've seen it 3 times and you want the team or your colleagues through all your clients, through the cases and the lessons that come from the cases. Sometimes you don't even need to articulate the lesson, you just tell the story. So I told a couple stories today, and I don't need to tell you why I'm telling you the story. The stories kind of give you another data point to use, not because it proves a point— remember, that's what novices do— but because it adds to the conversation by giving you another point of reference. That's what experts do. So when you explain the pattern, if you're a consultant, this is, this is where you value. But most people stop here. They don't go to the next level, so they don't teach patterns, they don't transfer. Now transferring is a whole nother level than just explaining. So you need to be able to communicate You need practice, sharing patterns, sharing cases. You need a wide number of cases, as I keep saying, and that's how you multiply capacity across teams. So this is what essentially what Carla needs to do in the weeks leading up to— I hope she has enough time— up to her retreat. She needs to be engaging her team in pattern noticing, however that's done, or she could do that. The fifth level is to operationalize the pattern. In other words, to make it systematic, so it's not about the individual at that point, it's about the organization and embedding it in the way the organization does its thinking, its work, its reporting. So the balanced scorecard, for example, is a way that a pattern has been operationalized if the company has chosen to use that tool. So those are the 5 levels. Now let's take some questions because there's got to be. I have been going through this like a house on fire, but tell me questions about these 5 levels. And the way they build your credibility. Yes, so what it means to be strategic is to get to level 4 and 5. What it means to pick up on patterns and the connection between learning patterns and your downtime. I'm about to take over your whole Christmas season, your whole holiday season. Whatever you had planned, I'm going to suggest that you spend it to fix something that you didn't plan on. Questions? Comments? Giovanna says, I've never heard of a 15 to 30 year plan. Yeah, that's a standard for the work that we do. Some go further, some go fewer. There are companies that I have not worked with, but in the Far East, which have 200 and 300 year plans. You can imagine the kind of thinking you can do if you have a 300-year plan. Come on, guys, questions, questions, questions, comments, comments, comments. Looking at the time, I'm going to jump ahead to the next level because the next level is all about these patterns of which I speak. They have everything to do with this implicit knowledge that I said these experts have and that they have to use because the kind of domain that we're in. All right, so I'm not seeing questions. Oh, hold on. You know what? I need to scroll up and down because there's all kinds of things happening in the chat. If I don't scroll, I don't see them. Okay, excellent presentation. Thank you, Kathy. How to fish rather than giving fish, uh, Ronald, we rarely get asked to teach people to fish. We know how to do it, just not a popular question. Don't know why, but it's the truth. Okay, Craig. Recognizing the limitations of a particular pattern and the antithesis of that pattern. I would say that's in the— between the first and second level, because as you recall a pattern and then start to share it, you're faced with the limitations. That's been my experience. One thing to see something and say, oh, that's cute. But now to bring it up in a meeting is another story. In the heat of the moment, when they're making a big decision to, you know, spend $5,000— $5 million, sorry— on some new investment, bet the company future, and I have examples and I have case studies that I'm going to pull from, at that moment I need to be aware of the limitations and the antithesis of any given pattern. Because I'm in the hot seat, so I would say it's about third level. Yes, thank you, Celeste. Companies have been using frameworks without incorporating pattern recognition optimization. Yes, because more long, long story short, the way we teach in school is to teach concepts and then give a few examples. This is a complete opposite. We're saying you cannot learn this domain unless you have lots of examples. And no, you don't draw concepts from those examples. No, you use them as data. You draw patterns. Patterns are a different animal. Ronald, yes, I do believe in teaching people to fish rather than giving them fish. Absolutely. I wish more people asked for that. Derek, government should be using an experience with this. So Derek, I did a little bit of work with the organization that houses Jamaica's 21-year plan. It's called Vision 2030 Jamaica, and I have an article coming out in newspapers on Sunday calling for Vision 2050 as the successor to Vision 2030. So I know in Trinidad— Derek is from Trinidad— this turned into political football, didn't work. But all right, so let's move on to the next. How do you scale your pattern matching without needing more frameworks? I keep throwing it under the bus, I probably shouldn't. So pattern matching techniques. All right, so here's an example. Anybody heard of Julius? Julius Yego or Yego couldn't find a coach. Well, it doesn't say, but he's Kenyan. He was Kenyan, so he wanted to throw javelin. So guess what he did for a decade? He watched YouTube. He picked up the implicit knowledge of javelin throwing. By watching YouTube, particularly of the Olympic champion, a Norwegian, can't pronounce that name. And by the way, Diego went on to win gold in the World Championships, silver at the Olympics, and he holds the record for third longest javelin throw. Hmm. Makes my excuses look. So, to repeat what I said before, in ill-structured domains, experts do not reason from abstract principles, concepts, or first principles. The variability in the real world makes this too hard. So, heart attacks. But Cedric also gives the example of falling in love, relationship, as an ill-structured domain that you don't go from abstract concepts or first principles as you're dating and trying to find a mate and trying to find someone to marry. The variability is just way too high. So folks, again, I'm a bit of the messenger here. I did not come up with these concepts. They do resonate with me. There are fancy names for these things. The theoretical root of what I'm talking about is cognitive flexibility theory, and you can read all about how the U.S. Army has used it. For example, one way they used it was to train soldiers to be able to see the presence of— the likely presence of IEDs, improvised explosive devices, the ones that blow up. And in Iraq and Afghanistan, they noticed that some soldiers were able to somehow like a spidey sense, like an intuition, pick up on moments when it was highly likely that there could be an IED nearby. And they would tell their sergeant, lieutenant, whoever, listen, we take a different route, take a different route because there might be an IED there. I can just feel it. So what they did was they took this feeling and translated it into cases. And they trained, I think it was all soldiers before they went into active duty, Afghanistan and Iraq, in how to pick up, how to develop a spidey sense. In other words, how to develop implicit knowledge of picking up IEDs. So the game that they used to train these soldiers was based on case comparison, fragments, stories. Or what Cedric says is perceptual discriminations. There's a lot, there's a lot of theory behind this and I am no expert, but it matches my experience. So when you're matching patterns, what you're doing is you're looking from case to case. It's not just watching plenty of them, you're comparing. You're saying this didn't work here, this didn't work here, this isn't true here, this doesn't work there, this didn't work. You're taking fragments, schema, you're using them on the fly, mixing and matching that diagram that I showed before so that in the heat of the moment, which is where great strategy gets created, which is where we strategists need to perform, we don't go to the whiteboard and start to sketch out some framework that we got from our MBA program. Instead, we pull together a multi-case story and we use lots of analogy the way Charlie Munger, colleague of Warren Buffett, uses. Almost to the end here. So here are some of the patterns I watch for. I know that I've watched a whole bunch of videos. Hedge fund takeovers. Boy, I don't know if there's anybody who is a hedge fund investor here listening in to me, but I'm going off a little bit over, and I'm going to have questions after, but I have a couple more slides left. So having watched patterns of companies ruined by hedge funds Hedge fund takeovers, new pattern. 5-year planning cycles, I talked about before, and disruption-driven panic. In other words, short-termism, the tendency to become myopic. And that's what's happening, as you can imagine, in many companies in Jamaica right now. So Melissa was about a month, 5 weeks ago, and many companies are driven into short-termism. So when it comes to you personally, your transition from Season 1 to Season 2, I don't recommend that you do this in a hurry and that you do it unconsciously. Because if you feel guilty that you're here watching all these videos, somebody tells you you're wasting time, your spouse or your partner said, what the hell? No, I can't take you away from watching YouTube. What the heck are you watching? They think you're watching music videos or, you know, women twerking or God knows what else, right? They think you're like on TikTok and you're wasting all your potential. So if you feel a sense of guilt, don't be in a rush to go pick up personal hard learning. Instead, this is about allowing your curiosity to be the fuel for a transition to season 2. So for example, you might ask, you know, what did Kodak try? What was their, what was their strategy? Because they tried something, failed. They tried it. What did they not pay attention to? What did they ignore? What did they not see? And to answer questions like that, you've got to watch quite a few videos because none of the videos give you the— nobody can give you the complete story. There is no complete story. These patterns are really a function of— it's going to sound weird, but it's a function of your curiosity. And when you think that you understand something, you watch another video, you realize you didn't understand it because your curiosity can help you to keep your mind open to patterns and deepening them and expanding them. How about Blockbuster? What patterns were there? If you had taken someone from Kodak and put them in Blockbuster, an executive, would they have said, oh, You ask these kinds of questions from your curiosity. And thank God we have tools, LLMs like Perplexity, because the search, searching on YouTube is hell, but searching on Perplexity or ChatGPT is a lot better. Searching for books on Amazon, heavier, but these are the ways you can use to organically go from deep curiosity to hard learning. You find yourself watching the same video 4 or 5 times, chances are it's time for you to transition into hard learning. But don't do it out of guilt or obligation. Okay, so in summary, there is a new way I'm describing to grow as a strategist. And yes, I am totally selfish because Here it is. I've now created Strat Cinema as a place to go find these videos in one place without the pain of YouTube, a place to satisfy your curiosity. Watching these videos can— is a foundational element. It feeds and allows you to dwell in Season 1 and not go to 2 or 3 before the time is right. I'm interested in you growing your level to become more strategic and always gain that fluency that allows you to quickly and effortlessly and expertly demonstrate your tacit knowledge by bouncing between patterns as they show up in different cases. And I'm keen on you using pattern matching, matching techniques. So my call to action today: come visit us at stratcinema.org. 100+ cases. Register. If you register and subscribe, you'll be helping us shape the platform during the beta. And you'll get regular recommendations as I put new videos on. But let me drop— let me just drop a line for you to consider. The strategists who stay relevant aren't the ones who memorize the most frameworks. They're the ones who never stopped exposing themselves to new cases, new patterns, new story. And that's what builds strategic fluency, and that's what separates knowing from doing. So I have opened up a NotebookLM with many of the sources for today. I'll upload the transcript from today, the video. If you're not a NotebookLM user, you don't know what I'm talking about, check it out. It's one of those tools that you have to use. So let's get some final questions. This is my last slide. If you need to go, I understand. I once again want to be responsible that I'm 4 minutes over my allotted time with you. But let me take questions and comments, and I'll stay around for a while. And questions and comments. Craig says, happy to see you using examples from the US Army. You know, the Army is— the military is interesting. He said— Craig says, one of the foremost learning organizations in the world because the stakes are high. If you get this IED training business wrong, you are allowing people to die. It's just so simple as that. So I like, I like reading military stories because it's one thing to sell a lot of toilet paper and make a profit and make your shareholders richer. It's another thing to serve your country. We often don't draw that comparison, you know, in the world. We tend to collapse the two, but they're very different, right? When the stakes are high, then the thinking becomes more crisp. Okay, other questions. Let's see, I'm scrolling up and down so that I don't skip any like I did before. Wendell. Hey, Wendell. We're in a world where things shifting, so we have to keep on learning and adapting. Yes. And my answer to that is don't go looking for more frameworks, folks. They won't help you to become a better strategist given the world that we're in and the domain that we're studying. Go find cases and patterns. All right, who else do we have? I just, it just threw in a whole bunch of, a bunch of comments. Hold on, folks. It's very, it's very twitchy. Awesome, says Ronald. Thanks, Ronald. Celeste, it's great information. Each person, every knowledge to build pattern recognition skills to be more effective. We need this tacit knowledge. Okay, I don't see a lot more questions. So when you leave this webinar, it will take you to a landing page, which is kind of like a place to connect to the Notebook LM. I'll download that video as soon as I can. I've already uploaded the slides. But if you want— I've mentioned a whole bunch of names, I've mentioned theories. If you want to see if what I'm really talking about has any legs to it, please, and let me know what you find. As I said, I'm not an expert in NDM or CFT, but when it comes to being a better strategist, boy, it's become a real passion of mine. But it's been a lifelong pursuit. And finally I have a way to be able to consume, thanks to my bicycle, consume lots of cases without feeling like, like it's a burden. So thank you everybody. If you have feedback for me or questions, you can contact me via my website. You'll see a link there, stratcinema.org. You can reach out to me on LinkedIn. I probably should have put my LinkedIn link, but I think that's it. So thank you very much, everyone. Craig, you're welcome. Pete says, I feel better watching YouTube cases of strategic planning and case studies. Yep, that's that. So YouTube will interrupt that with all kinds of— especially the political stuff, it loves to figure out which side you're on and throw you videos, uh, let's get you all riled up. Good Lord. Shakira, thanks for coming. Zaydoun, thank you for being here. Giovanna, great to have you. Okay, I think that's it. All right, folks, thank you so much. Thanks for the interactivity. I'm going to stop the sharing, figure out where, how to do that. Stop sharing and wish you all the best. Take care. See you on Strat Cinema. Bye.