Crafting Engineering Strategy

Chapter 8. Refining

In the book Great by Choice (Random House Business, 2011), Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen develop a concept they call “Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs”. Their premise is that you should test new ideas cheaply before fully committing to them. Your organization can only afford to fire a small number of cannonballs, but it can bankroll far more bullets. Why not use bullets to derisk your cannonballs’ trajectories?

This chapter introduces the practice of strategy refinement and presents a series of concrete techniques that I have personally used to refine strategies before they reach the cannonball stage. We’ll work through:

• Why strategy refinement is the highest-impact step of strategy creation

• How mixed incentives often lead people to skip the refinement stage, even though doing so leads to worse organizational outcomes

• How to build your personal strategy-refinement toolkit for refining strategy with techniques like strategy testing, systems modeling, and Wardley mapping

• How to avoid antipatterns that skip refinement or that manufacture consent to create the illusion of refinement without providing its benefits

Each of these refinement techniques is also covered in greater detail in its own chapter of this book.

What Is Strategy Refinement?

Most strategies succeed because they properly address narrow problems within a broader strategy. While fully implementing a strategy to validate it is possible, this approach is typically inefficient and slow. ...