How To Lead A Quest

Summary

Part V

• Quest-Augmented Strategy allows decision-making to be enriched with a range of viable alternative options. Without such options, strategic decision-making is limited to default thinking and premature hunches.
• The context in which strategic decisions are made is important. Ideally, strategic immersions are an ongoing ritual in which ample time is dedicated to thorough thinking (both in the learning leading up to the immersion, and in the space and time available at the immersion). Strategic decision-making is not served by tight timeframes and a packed agenda.
• Where possible, decision fatigue should be minimised. This means doing work beforehand to limit the focus and discussions to reassessing future contexts, incoherencies and viable alternative options. Any reference material needs to be streamlined.
• In addition to decision fatigue, we are all beset by myriad cognitive biases. This is inescapable — although with time, thorough thinking, diversity, good questioning and acuity for potentially flawed reasoning, we can limit or mitigate the effects of such biases.
• Once options are mapped out, strategy can be as simple as deciding what activities to stop, what to start, and what to ‘savvy-up' or improve. Experimentation means that many viable alternative options are less risky — we are not starting from scratch, and so to ‘start' to integrate these into the main enterprise strategy simply means scaling up experiments.
• Before leaving any strategic immersion, people ...