EXPANDING THE PERSPECTIVE MEANS CHANGING THE CONVERSATION
Choosing to participate in an ecosystem means needing to make a multitude of new choices regarding roles, positioning, and timing. The wide-lens tools and frameworks developed in this book will be of help in structuring these decisions.
The wise manager, however, knows that management frameworks, in general, and strategy frameworks, in particular, should be approached with care. When confronted with a decision or an opportunity, we often start with an intuition about what the right course of action is. Judicious, unbiased application of a framework can change this intuition. But as anyone who has spent time in meetings will know, unbiased application is not always the rule.
In my opinion, the greatest value of strategy frameworks lies in clarifying the issues that arise when different managers with different starting intuitions disagree over the right course of action. In a group setting, frameworks are tools for communication and debate. Used correctly, a good framework shifts the interaction from a battle of guts—too often resolved on the basis of reputation, power, and eloquence—to an organized comparison of the assumptions being made about a given situation’s fundamental structure. Surfacing these differences in hidden assumptions is often the key to finding effective solutions.
My hope is that the tools and frameworks developed in this book, by providing a clear grammar for discussing the structure of interdependence and its implications for your success, will make your debates more productive and their resolutions more robust.
Put another way: while using these tools will be of value to the lone analyst, it will be of greater value to the project team, and of greatest value to a consortium of partners. This will also be the case in part 3, as we shift from choice to intervention. I will introduce new strategies for building and shaping ecosystems—how to reconfigure the structure of dependence and how to leverage advantage within and across ecosystems. I will show how the wide-lens toolbox can be credibly deployed to avoid needless failures and multiply your odds of success.