Low-Flying

The devil is in the details. These details/devils often cause strategies or solutions to fail.

What looks good on the surface only reveals the ugly details upon closer inspection: data points are missing, (human) resources are not available, skills exist only on paper but not in practice, tools do not work together; legal restrictions hinder implementation, and so on and so forth.

I remember several projects where data from two systems could not be linked because a single piece of data was missing. For example, the UTUM parameter to link web tracking with sales figures.

That’s why one of my facilitator tactics is to reduce the flight altitude until it gets bumpy. Only then have you reached the right level of abstraction—or, rather, the right level of concretization.

As long as the workshop participants don’t say, “We don’t know that,” “We don’t have that,” “We can’t do that,” etc., you’re flying too high.

The goal of a design thinking workshop, whether for a data & AI strategy (see also the book “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy“) or a data & AI product, is to identify the open questions, critical assumptions, and relevant problems that are killing your darlings. And then to answer these questions, test these assumptions, and solve these problems.

That’s hard work. That’s progress.

“Fail early to succeed sooner” means not postponing the big questions and problems and hoping that they will somehow resolve themselves. Instead, start with them and either “win or learn.”