In 2012 I attended the Business Innovation Factory's BIF-8 conference in Providece with two other managers from InsureMyTrip. Dave Gray was one that year's storytellers and spoke about ideas from his book The Connected Company, including his concept of pods, which are self-directed "organizations" within an organization.
At that time, InsureMyTrip worked as a single, large unit, with one list of projects. Each project competed against all the others for priority, attention, and resources. Strategic discussions lacked focus.
After the conference, the other managers and I spoke about we could do to better manage the project portfolio and work more efficiently. We took Dave Gray's pods concept, discussed the benefits and the challenges, created our own solution, put together a presentation, and sold senior management on the idea of programs. Programs had objectives and managed their own project portfolios. Senior management focused more on strategy and objectives, and less on prioritization and execution.
Every quarter, the management team got together and program managers reported on their programs. About a year after we started programs, I presented some ideas for improving the programs program, using the slide deck below. Some of the sketches are a little hard to follow, so I've added some transcriptions and notes.
This project demostrates my strategic and lateral thinking, along with how I optimize processes.
Note: I've reviewed this slide deck carefully before posting it here. It does not contain any proprietary information or specific information about the company's strategy. It is high-level and abstract.
The company was struggling with a challenge that was costing us a significant amount of money. It was important to show how programs could be adjusted to tackle our biggest problems.
"We're going to prevent this (at much less than 500,000)." If you're going to shake things up, start with a big swing.
"[The] 500,000 problem comes (partly) from Complexity, so we need Focus, which creates Engagement." If we were more focused as a company, we wouldn't have as many of the big problems that result from complexity. If we were focused, our employees would be more engaged.
The complexity our organization brewed bordered on chaos. My thinking about complexity was influenced by an article about Peter Drucker.
Our employees weren't engaged. Tumbleweeds blew through the doors as the employees rushed out at 4:55.
We could grow the organization through scalable learning and institutional innovation; we could mature out of our chaos.
The gist of the HBR article "Get Your Budget Ready for the Upturn" is a variation of Gretsky's famous quote, "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it's been." In our budgeting and elsewhere in the organization, we needed to incorporate future-thinking into our planning processes.
Future thinking is about, among other things, growth. How were our people contributing to our growth? What did they need to begin to think that way? It had to start with engagement.
Enough pontificating; time for action. To move us forward, we needed to make the following changes in our programs:
We needed new programs: People, Partnerships, Labs, and Quality. We were already good at some of those things, but we need to give them focus by elevating them to program status, so we could get them to great. We needed to swing (as in, "swing for the fences") for the upturn.
This slide was a big swing: What if we thought of our travel insurance sales company as something completely different, say, like an IDEO? The drawing above shows "IDEO" overlaid on "IMT".
We could be at the top of our space, in the way that IDEO is at the top of the design thinking space, if we made change, thought through the future, and swung hard.
Here's the whole page. The whole idea and pitch.
