IgaveapubliclectureforUkrainebytheDTEK Academy,thelearninganddevelopmentarmofone ofthecountry’sleadingenergyproviders.Aswe bring2022toaclose,IthoughtIwouldsharesomeof thecontentsofthattalk.
re truly terrible at dealing with forecasts are almost always wrong, major, expensive projects. The Big Dig alifornia bullet train to nowhere. The We’re overly optimistic. Sometimes y motivated to push misleading d sometimes we just take action rushed and want to “do something.”
A discovery driven plan connects the current and future path a project is on in a very disciplined way. It also pushes you to demonstrate how you are converting raw assumptions into knowledge as you go. This applies to not-for-profit and social ventures, as well.
Rita McGrath
Thought Sparks
Bent Flyvjberg, Emeritus Professor at Oxford, uses the example of the Madrid Metro to illustrate these points. The systems’ planners used three rules to guide their decisionmaking: 1. 2. 3.
It means, as Flyvjberg points out, spending a lot of upfront time thinking, before taking action. As he argues in his forthcoming book How Big Things Get Done, “Think Slow, Act Fast” should be our mantra. That means spending the “slow” thinking time to really understand the systems being created and how they interconnect. Better to spend the time on that than rush into infrastructure rebuilding willy nilly only to discover problems later on. It’s cheap to fix problems on the drawing board. It’s expensive to fix them in real life.
Thought Sparks
If so, drop me a note! We’ve been working on several practices, tools, guides and diagnostics that we believe will be game-changing for those companies that adopt them.
Rita McGrath
Thought Sparks
