Sun Tzu, Boyd and Wardley: The Art of Strategy with Erik Schön | Ep 20

Erik Schön is an executive and strategist who has successfully developed and deployed strategy for over 20 years in small, medium and large organizations. From hacker, software researcher and system engineer to leader, executive and strategizer, Erik is leading global organisations in complex product and service development. He is the author of The Art of Strategy - Steps Towards Business Agility and The Art of Leadership - Purpose and Integrity for Sustainable Success in Turbulent Times, both published by Yokoso Press.

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The Art of Strategy: Steps Toward Business Agility
The Art of Leadership: Purpose and Integrity for Sustainable Success

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Transcript

Transcripts are machine generated and are NOT edited for grammar or spelling.

00;00;04;13 - 00;00;29;12
Mark McGrath
We want to go through your book, which is phenomenal, which fuzes three things that we all hold dearly and love dearly and that we're teaching and sharing with others. And those are the the works of Sun Tzu, John Boyd and Simon Wardley. And your book is something of a phenomenal, accessible textbook. I see. Mine's very worn and weathered.

00;00;29;21 - 00;00;56;04
Mark McGrath
Sun Tzu. Boyd Wardley. The Art of Strategy Step towards business agility and to kick us off. Let's just go right from your introduction. You asked three questions What is strategy? Why do you need it and how do you do it? And then you go through a beautiful series of phrases that have this this sort of layout, this sort of map of move beyond strategy as blank, move towards strategy as blank.

00;00;56;04 - 00;01;05;15
Mark McGrath
And we could fill in some of those things as we as we talk. But walk us through, you know, what? What inspired you to write this and the connections that you saw between the three?

00;01;06;18 - 00;01;09;08
Erik Schön
Yeah. That. Wow.

00;01;09;27 - 00;01;37;15
Erik Schön
These are great figures right there. Practitioners, they know their stuff. Sun Tzu from, you know, 2500 years ago. Boyd, you know, late 20th century and Simon Wardley still very much alive and kicking. And I saw the connections. I mean, they're really related and sincerely is sort of the grandfather or the founder of strategic thinking in the world. I would say.

00;01;37;28 - 00;02;04;08
Erik Schön
And John Boyd sort of conveyed that message to to the Western world and to the United States, primarily. And what I think Simon Wardley has done is sort of visualize this with his maps so that you can easily work together and see your strategy and see your strategic choices. And with that, with the book was was what I was trying to do.

00;02;04;08 - 00;02;33;10
Erik Schön
I realized after a while was to sort of condense all this with wisdom into less than 200 pages or, let's say, 13 chapters on medium or your favorite blog, blog post tool with five, 10 minutes reads so that you don't need to to dove directly into the 400 page slide deck of John Boyd or the 17 or 18 translations of Sun Tzu or or the six 700 pages of Simon Wardley.

00;02;33;19 - 00;02;53;05
Erik Schön
So it started out as an exercise for myself to distill the essence out of this. And, you know, some someone asked me if I could make a PDF out of those blog posts, and then I thought, if I'm going to make a PDF, I might as well do a book. So that's sort of the short story of how it happened.

00;02;53;16 - 00;03;26;25
Mark McGrath
So. So you go right at it and you have this laid out, as we said, you know, move beyond strategy as blank, move towards strategy as blank, and start off with the first one. Because I think this is critical move beyond strategy as wars, battles and combat for power towards strategy as individuals, teams or organizations fulfilling their purpose in situations outside their direct control, sometimes engaging with others desiring the same thing.

00;03;27;13 - 00;03;27;27
Erik Schön
Yeah.

00;03;28;24 - 00;03;34;23
Erik Schön
Did I write that? That's pretty good, actually. It's. No. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's.

00;03;35;21 - 00;04;07;10
Erik Schön
It's so easy to get get bogged down into sort of the military origins of strategy where it all started. But it's really about collaboration and conflict and how to handle that. And it's also a lot about purpose, and you can call that you can use different names for that. I mean, some people talk about missions and missions and and yeah, all kinds of words, but that's where it all starts.

00;04;07;17 - 00;04;47;28
Erik Schön
And you need to sort of define that or agree and collaborate and co-create that purpose and sometimes some people are so eager to get going that they sort of forget that phrase and just jump right into it and yeah, to find the, the application of, of strategy in the sense of working together and making decisions together and then letting, letting people based on purpose act rather autonomously and fulfill that purpose.

00;04;48;18 - 00;04;51;16
Erik Schön
So I think that's that's an important first step.

00;04;51;24 - 00;04;52;17
Mark McGrath
More on the moral.

00;04;55;10 - 00;04;57;21
Erik Schön
Say again, please.

00;04;57;23 - 00;05;05;17
Mark McGrath
Oh, so it seems like what you're saying is that there's more of an emphasis on the moral aspects versus the physical aspects.

00;05;06;16 - 00;05;33;15
Erik Schön
Yeah, that's a good, good point. Definitely. You need to know where you're coming from and where you're going and and of course, knowing that and having talked about that with with your team or your organization, that makes it easier to move into physical stuff and capabilities that you need in order to to fulfill that.

00;05;33;15 - 00;05;53;11
Mark McGrath
Getting away from things like one of the ones that you have is move beyond strategy deployment as execution, checking metrics and chasing targets towards strategy, deployment initiatives, decisions, actions in a harmonized direction by everyone everywhere in the organization based on high situational awareness.

00;05;54;16 - 00;06;25;07
Erik Schön
Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's the situational awareness is so important. And how do you visualize where you are? And that's where where the maps which we we use and the physical world to orient ourselves. And how do you do that in business or in technology? Well, there's this wonderful thing called Wardley Maps, which sort of visualizes your how technology and how business is developing.

00;06;26;07 - 00;06;54;28
Erik Schön
And then you can sort of use that for your team of your organization to sort of co-create that that map, and then make sure that you're singing from the same hymn sheet and having that is also making it easier for everyone in all parts of your organization to make those decisions and take those actions and initiatives because they know this is that this is our orientation, this is our our situation.

00;06;56;11 - 00;07;41;04
Erik Schön
And then you can let go of all these control mechanisms with with metrics and and whatnot and, you know, unleash people with their creativity to do things in a good way. Because then you get speed, you get engagement, and you get even creativity. Because if you just add a lot of a lot of reporting lines and and, you know, you need to check these metrics and you add one, one layer after another and you're basically in a straitjacket that that's not good for speed and it's not good for creativity and it's definitely not good for for for engagements.

00;07;42;04 - 00;07;59;19
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So, Erik, I'm the CEO of a Fortune 50 company right now. I'm listening to this podcast and I'm thinking to myself, these guys can't teach me anything new because I'm already doing this. I have McKinsey BCG over a century. I have all these awesome capabilities. They're mapping things out for me. I got 80 pages of PowerPoints. I have people executing on things.

00;07;59;19 - 00;08;25;23
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
I get metrics all the time. I don't need to listen to this podcast, right? I already got this. So that's current condition right now in a lot of organizations. Is this, you know, this direction towards mapping, which we'll talk about, I'm sure, a little bit more in a moment, given the current condition in a lot of organizations right now to what you know about mapping, what we know about mapping, give us your view on what's wrong with the current condition.

00;08;25;26 - 00;08;30;15
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
When I kind of outlines from a perspective of Fortune 50 or 100 CEO.

00;08;31;21 - 00;08;56;11
Erik Schön
Yeah, I think that you're not really fully leveraging the people you have in the organization. That's what I would say. You could probably get somewhere between two X and ten X by letting people use their their creativity. And if you give them the what and the why and the situational understanding, you know, the direction. This is where we're heading as a company.

00;08;56;17 - 00;09;36;00
Erik Schön
That could be the task of the CEO and the C-suite to work together as a team to define that and then clearly explain that and to communicate that to the organization. And we've seen some phenomenal examples of that in Europe. You know, the Volvo, the trucking company and Scania, the truck company, they use parts of this to get people to to to basically come up with with new ideas on how to run things and do things faster.

00;09;36;00 - 00;09;54;26
Erik Schön
You don't need to go up and down the chain of command because you trust people to do the right thing. I mean, I love Steve Jobs, a great inspiration. And, you know, you hire people to tell tell you what to do, not to tell them what to do, because, you know, people are smart and it's a lot about trust.

00;09;54;26 - 00;10;00;03
Erik Schön
And I think that's that's something that you you would hear or you you hear from Boyd as well.

00;10;00;20 - 00;10;22;25
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Okay. So from the from the executives perspective, I have 100 scrum teams. I know that because I'm told that I have metrics that they're producing, you know, so many story points a week. I'm getting all these awesome metrics. I am happy. I'm fat, dumb. I'm thrilled we're making money. I don't need what you're selling me or what you're showing me, right, Eric?

00;10;22;25 - 00;10;48;16
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
You I'm kicking ass right now. So why? And this is this is something that is something we find challenging is what are the whys behind you know, a map and who's involved with it? And how does that connect to not just Sun Tzu or the Sun Tzu, but to John Boyd? And how does that connect to me, talking about autonomy and as I connect to my people, talking about psychological safety and how does that connect to us?

00;10;48;25 - 00;11;03;18
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Getting information back from the the environment, our customers and MVP's and all these other things. I have all this language around me right now as a CEO, so how does this fit into my world? And these are questions that we need to answer for executives as they listen to this right?

00;11;03;18 - 00;11;10;11
Erik Schön
Yeah, definitely. And and there's an element of of how do you trigger their curiosity.

00;11;11;27 - 00;11;12;12
Erik Schön
And.

00;11;13;09 - 00;11;39;04
Erik Schön
What I've been trying is, of course, would you would you like to see a2x or of five X or ten X better? And maybe you don't need that in your industry. Maybe it's okay to just be a little bit better than than your competitors. But if, if you don't and if you want to make sure that you don't miss out on the next wave because the world is changing.

00;11;39;04 - 00;12;08;04
Erik Schön
Right? I mean, we all know that the volatility, the the uncertainty and the complexity and the ambiguity. Right. And in order to handle that, it's not enough to have just the brainpower at the top in the C-suite. You need to leverage all the people in the organization, and then you need to sort of help the organization to to see things in reasonably same way based on where you're heading, based on your purpose.

00;12;08;04 - 00;12;40;19
Erik Schön
Have you defined that? Have you communicated that? Are people harmonized or aligned or coherent with that? Then you don't need to have all these control mechanisms and you will do things. FOSTER I mean, what we saw in the Ericsson in large scale, Lean on transformation, we had a number of targets, you know, ten X quality, half the lead time, 75% or more of the people in the organization being motivated and engaged.

00;12;40;19 - 00;13;00;09
Erik Schön
So those were things that we set out and we didn't say, look, we would do that in the next quarter. We said, hey, let's do this in five years. And then we tracked this every quarter and we show it to ourselves to get energy. We show it to the rest of the world inside the organization that we make progress because that's important.

00;13;00;09 - 00;13;20;27
Erik Schön
And sometimes in the Agile movement, people are afraid to measure things. I'm not saying we should stop measure, but we should measure the right things and we should have a suitable set of measurements. That's that sort of so you don't sub optimize and only focus on lead time or only focus on quality. But it needs to start from from from where you're at as a company.

00;13;20;27 - 00;13;41;10
Erik Schön
And in the case of Ericsson, we were in deep shit pardon my French because there were meetings every Friday night with with the CEO of a very big American telco called the AT&T. And they were not happy with with with our quality. And they were right. So that's why we started with this ten x quality that was our biggest problem.

00;13;41;10 - 00;14;07;20
Erik Schön
But we didn't want to optimize on that. We still wanted to have the, the delivery speed and getting getting stuff out to to to our customers. And we didn't want to get our people to, to be demotivated. So so we set up these, these long term KPIs to balance, balance each other in a good way.

00;14;07;20 - 00;14;17;12
Speaker 5
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00;14;17;12 - 00;14;22;21
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And you built all of this off of understanding the landscape, right? Understanding the external environment, is that correct?

00;14;22;24 - 00;14;53;29
Erik Schön
Yeah, that's true. And of course, at that time, we we didn't use map because this was back in 2012, 2009, but we had the the language of of of of flow and the autonomy and the alignment. So we were using that. So we were coming to towards that, not, not really from a lead and agile perspective, but more from, from the strategic perspective of alignment and autonomy.

00;14;53;29 - 00;15;16;07
Erik Schön
Because we had started to do our strategic homework and normally in Ericsson at that time, we did it once a year, but we moved slowly into to having quarterly strategy, prospectives and retrospect. I don't know if prospective is a word even, but, you know, the retros that you would normally do in the in our job, we were doing strategy retrospectives, but not only retro.

00;15;16;07 - 00;15;46;29
Erik Schön
I'm being flexible and agile and adaptable, but we wanted to, to to be proactive and shape our future as well. So so we sort of changed that, that cadence or that that cycle time also for the strategy work and we tried to involve the whole organization in that's not only I mean initially it was the sort of leadership team, but over time we wanted to engage the whole organization in that and get the focus on what was most important for the coming quarter.

00;15;47;08 - 00;16;12;05
Erik Schön
Not having those endless laundry list of of targets that you sometimes end up with because everyone wants their favorite target on the right on the balance scorecard. So I've been there and done that. And in the end you don't see the forest for the trees and you get bogged down in all kinds of measurement details and excel sheets, and then you're losing out on your situational awareness.

00;16;12;20 - 00;16;35;28
Erik Schön
So we tried to to sort of turn that around and have like one thing to focus on and that which was the most important thing for our organization. And to give you a concrete example, we wanted to to deliver every sprint to a live network with something new and not degrade the quality. And initially, we did that in in the Nevada desert.

00;16;36;11 - 00;17;04;01
Erik Schön
But after a while, the CEO or the CTO or the CEO of that operator, they said, well, you're doing well, so let's let's go into the strip. And so you get some more, more traffic and you can test your system better. But then that was the way to engage the whole organization in really making this this happen. So just just to give you some concrete examples on that.

00;17;04;18 - 00;17;14;19
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
All right. So walk us through how you came to be aware of Simon Wardley and his mapping.

00;17;14;19 - 00;17;14;29
Erik Schön
Yeah.

00;17;15;29 - 00;17;42;17
Erik Schön
It was somehow through the lead and agile communities and I think it must have been in 2015 or 2016. So it had been around for quite some time. But immediately for me this stood out because if you think about SAMHSA and you think about John Boyd, I mean, they're brilliant. I mean, they're practitioners, they're strategists, and they know their stuff, but they're primarily verbal in the way they they communicate.

00;17;43;10 - 00;18;14;04
Erik Schön
Whereas I don't know if maps were even invented back in China when since he was active. Boyd for sure understood maps and he has them in and his and the slide but he comes across as a verbal and given that he would have lived on for a few more years, I'm sure that he would have come up with something similar to what Simon Wardley came up with, because it's so obvious when you see it.

00;18;14;04 - 00;18;52;28
Erik Schön
I mean, you'd need something to visualize how your your your business landscape is evolving and how your technology landscape is evolving. Take telecom, for instance, where mobile telephony was a total novelty back in the seventies and eighties, and now 2023. It's a commodity. It's like, you know, plug in the wall or your tap water. So how do you visualize that and how will that help you to make your strategic decisions in the same way as a map or geographical map will will help you in getting from point A to B or doing a military campaign in Ukraine or whatnot.

00;18;53;12 - 00;19;18;05
Erik Schön
So I think that's that's it struck me as, wow, this is it. This is this is what I've been looking for. Because having worked with strategy in various positions in different companies since the late nineties, I always felt felt that this visualization component was what's missing. And Simon Wardley just hit it out of the park.

00;19;20;08 - 00;19;43;21
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And it was shocking about it. Simon doesn't have a military background. And if you look at the three of us here, Mark and myself, we do Mark and I use charts and maps, you know, in the Navy and Marine Corps, in fighter aviation, we use Bullseye, which is an anchor points, a common reference point. That's that way. We don't shoot each other down and we understand what's going on tactically from a large perspective.

00;19;43;21 - 00;20;02;14
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So an operational perspective and a tactical perspective. Yet when we move over to organizations, there are no maps and we think that's absolutely fine. And in fact, most veterans don't know about Wardley maps, and they assume that a SWOT analysis works out well, or just throwing sticky notes on the wall is a great thing. We know different now, right?

00;20;02;15 - 00;20;31;06
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
That's not true. We understand that we have an anchor points and everybody talks about customer first value delivery or anything like that, but they don't really know how to identify their customers. Correct. And the next thing is, what do they need from their perspective? These things are not at they're very challenging to do. Right. So by giving leaders a practice or method, I'm not sure what we want to call Simon Wardley maps their method or to me it does really matter.

00;20;31;06 - 00;20;53;18
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
It's something tangible that they can use. What I've seen is they struggle with just the fundamental who is your customer or customers or stakeholders or, you know, who can influence this and what do they need? And if you can't if you can't answer that, what are you doing right? And if you don't know, it's okay. If you don't know because you can go figure that out.

00;20;53;18 - 00;21;09;03
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
That should be step one or two of your of your strategy to figure out what they need, who are they, what they need. Yet we find most organizations can't do that. They go right into Scrum, they go right into these, you know, battles about combining safe and Scrum at scale and, you know, less and all these other things.

00;21;09;03 - 00;21;24;23
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
You're like, okay, that's great, but what are you trying to do? And they can't answer that. So is this is this kind of what you've seen with the use of Simon or these mapping techniques is to kind of give people treat that situational awareness around those common things?

00;21;25;00 - 00;21;25;27
Erik Schön
Yeah, definitely.

00;21;25;27 - 00;21;27;03
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Assessment needs.

00;21;27;03 - 00;22;02;24
Erik Schön
Definitely. That's part of the beauty because I was thrilled in there because I'm from from the the mid-nineties, we always started with requirements and needs and because it was a disease in the company at the time that everyone was jumping into solutions and features and functions. So that felt very natural to me. And also we had something else which was basically something called a system anatomy, which was basically a Wardley map for a product, not so much with with the needs and the stakeholders explicit.

00;22;03;03 - 00;22;27;06
Erik Schön
But let's say you're going to build a telecom system. You would start with, you know, a person calling another person and they need to make a call. And then you can just visualize what capabilities you need to make that into all the nitty gritty details all the way down to you need to turn on the power. So that's something we used in Ericsson from like the early nineties to build radio base stations and radio networks.

00;22;27;25 - 00;22;51;08
Erik Schön
And so I immediately saw the similarity with that that we had been using in our to build our products and to visualize that to all the development teams so that they can see, okay, what, how am I contributing to this this hugely complex product? And how are we doing? Are we are we red or are we green or are we yellow and are we on track?

00;22;52;14 - 00;23;19;15
Erik Schön
So that kind of visualization option was used pretty commonly in Ericsson for complex product development and here. So that made it easy to talk to, to, to middle managers and senior managers because they had all been working with this in sort of product space. And we just took it into the organizational space. And then the added emphasis on needs and stakeholders is of course a really important addition.

00;23;19;15 - 00;23;48;05
Erik Schön
So so that made it in a sense easier for, for people to see. But of course, also the addition of the evolution axis where you plot things and if it's in Genesis or if it's in a commodity that was not in place in this system, anatomy, but it was system thinking, right. Or applied systems thinking. And that is important because some people don't want to talk about systems thinking and they don't think their systems think if they're action oriented.

00;23;48;24 - 00;24;14;29
Erik Schön
But if you have worked with with a visualization like a world map and you've seen it working, or if you've worked with one of those system anatomies and you've seen that you could deliver this hugely complex range of base station on time, then, then, you know, the tool works, right? And then it's easier to, to, to sort of spread the word and get others to, to, to work and try it out because it's been a success and everyone wants to use successful stuff.

00;24;14;29 - 00;24;36;07
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Quite right. And I think the connection to anthropology is kind of nice here where we, you know, art precedes language and language precedes, I think writing I think you've got those correct in that order. So humans are predisposed, I believe it is, to use art or maps to to to navigate. Right. And that's what Simon Wardley talks about.

00;24;36;07 - 00;24;42;04
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And I think that's what we can pull from Sun Tzu as well when we try to understand the landscape.

00;24;42;04 - 00;25;04;11
Mark McGrath
Yet they talk about this whole I think the real value of this thing that leaders would have to understand is that you're talking about something that's human centric. Yes. That when they're getting together and they're coordinating action together, they're building their own self-awareness and the self-awareness of their team, the self-awareness of the greater organization and the beauty of these things that you're talking about.

00;25;04;11 - 00;25;25;01
Mark McGrath
Eric They're all fractal. They go at any level. And then once we have that moving and going now, we can start connecting the observations that we see because it makes sense within, you know, as you say at the very beginning, you know, towards the purpose of filling the purpose of the people that are engaging us for the value that we're trying to create with them and that kind of thing.

00;25;26;01 - 00;25;56;19
Erik Schön
Yeah, exactly. And I think another beautiful thing with with the maps is that you you sort of since that's an object, you would challenge the map rather than getting into these fights about you know, me versus you my my idea versus you. Your idea, which is pretty common, is if you reach middle management and upper management, they're so used to, you know, those rhetorical battles or PowerPoint battles, the versus you.

00;25;56;19 - 00;26;20;01
Erik Schön
And my idea is going to win. And if you get into a map and you start challenging the map instead, it's another psychological dimension. And you can build on things, build on on people's ideas, and you can get different perspectives into the map in a more natural way. And people will say, Yeah, but should that object be on that in that location?

00;26;20;21 - 00;26;35;22
Erik Schön
Well, that's something you can discuss and debate. But it's not me versus you. It's about improving the map to get a better understanding. And then we're back to situational awareness and orientation and everyone learns and everyone gets. It's gets a better understanding.

00;26;36;17 - 00;26;37;18
Mark McGrath
Promoting harmony.

00;26;38;06 - 00;26;38;11
Erik Schön
Yeah.

00;26;38;21 - 00;26;44;18
Erik Schön
Yeah, exactly. I mean, getting everyone on the team to sing from the same hymns. If you will.

00;26;44;18 - 00;27;03;03
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
I want to build on that. Mark and Eric Harmony versus alignment. Eric, I want to get your thoughts on that. You know, yeah. Let me give you some context. So, yeah, you know, we work with Dave Stone quite a bit and you know, we've learned that alignments not necessarily a great thing because when you're lines, I mean you're blind to the things that yeah, yeah.

00;27;03;15 - 00;27;12;05
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Right. Okay. Harmony's a better concept than we get that from Sun Tzu. We also get that from John Boyd. But what are your thoughts on on.

00;27;13;14 - 00;27;14;29
Erik Schön
Yeah, harmony versus alignment.

00;27;15;04 - 00;27;47;03
Erik Schön
Yeah, this is important. And some people say, oh, well, it's just words, but I think words matter more than we think. And you can talk about harmony, you can talk about alignment, you can talk about coherence. To me, they're pretty soon synonymous, whereas alignment, of course, in one specific interpretation, that means that you're you're sort of too aligned and you're you're running off a cliff because no one dares to speak his or her mind and say, hey, this is not the right direction.

00;27;47;03 - 00;27;54;24
Erik Schön
But that could happen if you call it harmony or you could call it coherence, or if you call it if you call it alignment attunement.

00;27;55;27 - 00;27;56;15
Erik Schön
Yeah. I mean.

00;27;56;27 - 00;28;25;07
Erik Schön
We can think of different words and your your your native speakers and I'm not so, so as long as we are aware that we want to have this this descent, we want to have the the diversity and the different perspectives in the group. And we want to have it sort of in roughly the same direction. We want we don't want to have, you know, 180 degrees off or maybe we do in certain cases because then we can break out of those successful patches.

00;28;25;07 - 00;28;47;10
Erik Schön
And that's that's also something which which which I think John Boyd really highlights in a very good way. That's okay. You need to to not take this as a dogma. You need to to be ready to to to break out of your your your your track in order to be sustainably successful. And you need to be able to do that before it's too late.

00;28;47;16 - 00;29;12;13
Erik Schön
And then you need to have these mavericks and those those crazy people that that dare to say, hey, this is not going to work forever and you need to listen to them. And maybe with a map they can help you to to understand that quicker, because you will, you will be drawing it and you can see it. Clip More clearly when doing such an exercise on a whiteboard, preferably.

00;29;14;07 - 00;29;32;08
Mark McGrath
It seems like you're creating a chance for people to of the of all, say, various learning styles or whatever. But people can sense it better. They can see it, they can visualize it, they can weigh it out better, they can talk about it. And, you know, you pointed out earlier to how it's done in a way where we're addressing the issue.

00;29;32;11 - 00;29;51;25
Mark McGrath
We're not putting personal things into it. Well, it's my idea. I'm in charge. Like this is something that, as you even point out in the book, you know, leadership is not just for managers and not just for the people in command. Leadership is for everybody. It's a service that everybody provides. It's a quality that everybody has to continue to develop and learn and get better at.

00;29;52;03 - 00;30;10;19
Mark McGrath
And the sorts of things that you're talking about in in a harmonized effort that's all involved, that's up and down, and that's where you're applying more perspectives to things to get better harmonization not only internally, but also externally with our markets, with our clients, with our customers.

00;30;12;00 - 00;30;20;09
Erik Schön
Exactly. Great, great points. And this this is so important. And it goes back to purpose again. That that.

00;30;22;08 - 00;30;22;17
Erik Schön
I mean.

00;30;22;29 - 00;30;45;22
Erik Schön
Have you really understood understood your purpose as an organization or as a team? And coming back to what you said earlier about this being fractal, it works on the individual level, it works on team level, it works on on an organizational level. And that's that's the beauty of it. Yeah, for sure.

00;30;45;22 - 00;31;05;06
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
It's I want to make a connection here. So there's a, you know, John Boyd's you we get the we call the Trinity Guru Heisenberg in the second law of thermodynamics. I'm not going to pull out exactly what he points out, but basically any inward oriented and continued effort to improve the match up of a concept with observed reality will will only increase the degree of mismatch.

00;31;05;06 - 00;31;22;01
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Meaning we can't, you know, we're part of the external environment, too. Anytime we observe it, we change it, right? The thing is, we can't be inward focused. We can't be looking at our SWOT analysis and how we see things and all that. We actually have to look at the external environment and I think the sun too looks at it as a way of being right.

00;31;22;09 - 00;31;41;20
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
If you understand you, you put a blanket around yourself, mark a blanket, a boundary or your team, you understand how you operate and you look externally to see what's going on. The environment that's important. You need to understand what that external environment is and how you can look at it, observe it, and actually take action upon it and change it and get that feedback from it.

00;31;41;29 - 00;32;03;03
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And that's exactly what Wal-Mart are doing for us, too, is forcing us a team, individual, group, organization, whatever, to look at the external environment from the perspective of our potential customers. And that allows us to see things from their perspective, not ours. Because again, going back to Boyd's Trinity, if we do that inward focused approach, we're going to fail.

00;32;03;03 - 00;32;25;05
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
We're going to collapse. Right? And I think that's what's most ingenious about Simon Raleigh's approach of bringing these together and saying, hey, we need to visualize this and give us the practice to do it is phenomenal. Are you seeing the same I mean, how do you communicate to leaders exactly why they need to use these maps? And we kind of hit on that before.

00;32;25;05 - 00;32;27;20
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
But can you pull or go a little deeper with us on that?

00;32;28;19 - 00;33;11;24
Erik Schön
Yeah, sure. First, the comment, I think, of course, your absolutely right to have like an open system. And by that I mean a system that is open to, as you say, the external environment and again, applied systems thinking. Don't have those those boundaries that are sort of locked. You need to have influences coming in and also be curious what's what's going on on the outside companies that don't do that, they are in trouble right when it comes to to how to sort of get people to start mapping or using maps.

00;33;11;24 - 00;33;43;26
Erik Schön
I think it's the first question is really how to get people to think about what is what is strategy? And strategy for me is making decisions and that's not obvious to everyone. But you need to sort of decide we're going to do this and we're not going to do that. And because if you don't get that, then you may think that it's enough to do your SWOT analysis and do your, your, your OKRs.

00;33;43;26 - 00;33;44;05
Erik Schön
But.

00;33;44;17 - 00;34;04;21
Erik Schön
But, you know, you need to know, you need to make those decisions. And that's where I think that the Wardley maps will help you because they will help you to see where you are as a company, let's say, or as an organization. And you can plot that into the map, but you can also plot your competitors what aren't they doing?

00;34;05;17 - 00;34;32;28
Erik Schön
And you can see, as you said, I mean, coming back going back to to to your customers, what are their needs? Do we really understand that, that we have a common common view of that? Because it's so easy to get bogged down into all the capabilities you need to build whatever. And you may be able to totally, totally the wrong thing because you haven't started from from the basic, which is customer and and how are we going to delight them?

00;34;34;20 - 00;34;39;07
Erik Schön
And that's also where Sun Tzu helps out because.

00;34;40;17 - 00;34;40;24
Erik Schön
That.

00;34;41;21 - 00;35;07;14
Erik Schön
And the maps because it can help you to focus. So you're not spreading yourself all over the place which which which sometimes happens in big companies. It's hard to get focus. And the successful companies like Apple, they managed to do that. So it for me, it helps to keep the focus to focus on things by having the map right.

00;35;07;24 - 00;35;31;11
Mark McGrath
It avoids the disjointed ness, you know, which so many things can be scattered and dispersed, right? Where everybody's going in a different direction, but they don't. I guess Boyd might use the German SharePoint like there's no focus and direction that and you know as you say it's everybody's business leaderships up and down. We're all focused, we're all acting towards that.

00;35;31;26 - 00;36;09;09
Erik Schön
And exactly. So the map that's everywhere after you have done it, it can help you to to guide decisions, actions, initiatives. And while doing that, I mean, that would be the strategy developments. Developing your strategy then you can, you know, iterate on that and challenge the map and, you know, get different perspectives so, so that you really prepare and I think that's sometimes looked a bit down upon an agile, some in some corners of the community.

00;36;09;09 - 00;36;31;23
Erik Schön
I mean, this, this preparation part because well, let's just start experimenting in this race from there. And of course, you can do that. But with that, maybe you lose some, some time there. And if you just do a little bit of preparation and you look together to define where you're heading and what choices you make that will make you go faster.

00;36;31;23 - 00;36;44;16
Erik Schön
And that's not a surprise to you guys with your background, but that's to people who haven't seen that. It could be a bit of a conundrum.

00;36;44;16 - 00;37;05;27
Mark McGrath
Yeah. I mean, I guess you could you have a better chance of breaking people away from the status quo and inertia and entropy when they're all involved and they're all working together and they're coordinating. And even though they might be in different sections or different units or different commodities within an organization, there's still all focus and directed towards the same the same purpose.

00;37;06;24 - 00;37;27;23
Erik Schön
Exactly. And and have that manifested in the map with with with more details like I mean, what are the capabilities we need or what are the components here in order to, you know, given our purpose, given our direction, a given given the are our users or our customers and their needs, how are we going to pull this together?

00;37;29;07 - 00;37;53;27
Mark McGrath
Well, I keep going back to this because, you know, Punch used the word anthropology and you just said knowing the needs of customers, again, this is all human centric. It's not numbers centric. These are humans who observe, orient, decide, act. You know, you use in the book the Boyd definition of strategy. It's a mental tapestry of my you know, of changing intentions that I have.

00;37;53;27 - 00;38;30;21
Mark McGrath
We have, you know, that's all that's all human based. Whereas if I Google, you know, strategy and I type in, you know, pick your leading business or whatever, it goes right to capabilities, it goes right to functions, it goes right to physical things. I mean, it's very Western where I think that we've talked about it before on our show, the infusion of Eastern thinking into Boyd's, into Boyd's research is a massive differentiator and company at any scale, whether it's Fortune one or anything behind it or small local business or whatever, they have to understand that.

00;38;31;04 - 00;38;42;29
Mark McGrath
They have to understand the human centered aspect of of of business. It's humans that decide to buy something. It's humans that decide to use a product. It's humans that or make up a company.

00;38;44;08 - 00;39;09;25
Erik Schön
And it's very contextual, right? So it's so easy to think that you can abstract away a lot of the human thoughts and feelings and stuff, and you can just measure if you just come up with the right KPIs to measure, you can, you can you can run your business that way. And I don't think it's that simple. You're missing out on a number of fundamental things.

00;39;10;09 - 00;39;19;26
Erik Schön
By doing that, of course, you should measure and you should have data that's important and you need a few other things, which is the human dimension.

00;39;21;04 - 00;39;49;03
Mark McGrath
Connected to purpose. You know, I know in your research you read core book about Boyd and how he talked about how when he first started talking to Marines about strategy, they kept thinking in terms of terrain, like, how do we take this beach? And Boyd's comment was, you know, that beachhead just keeps getting bigger and bigger. You know, fight the enemy, you know, compete with the competitors that, stop fighting over physical spaces is no different and it's no different in business.

00;39;49;03 - 00;40;04;29
Mark McGrath
There's more of a physical focus on what do we need this week? What do we need this month? What do we need this quarter versus the the moral aspect of business? And it made me think all a side of that. I don't know if it was JFK or somebody was touring NASA and they asked the janitor, What do you do here?

00;40;05;11 - 00;40;16;03
Mark McGrath
And he says, I'm working to put men on the moon. I'm not cleaning floors. I'm not scrubbing toilets, though. I'm working here to put men on on the moon. You know, the purpose is there.

00;40;16;03 - 00;40;41;27
Erik Schön
Yeah, I think that's beautiful. And that's like, how do I and how do we contribute to the purpose? Because sometimes it's it's very much top down and yeah, we have this target and we're going to fulfill that target. But you can you can turn the question around. And if you have a powerful, beautiful purpose, you can ask each and every one, okay, how will you contribute to make this happen?

00;40;41;27 - 00;41;11;12
Erik Schön
It's it's very easy to to flip it, but it's hard to do because we're not used to putting the questions that way. How will you contribute? Use your creativity? I mean, it was it was a person who said, you know, don't tell me how to do things, tell me what to do, and I'll figure it out. And, you know, from people to figure things out, people are smart.

00;41;11;12 - 00;41;31;08
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So, Eric, I want to change some context here. If if I'm a new facilitator, you know, I've been doing well, I've been doing more than that for five years. And I'm not I'm still learning, right? I think we all are. But I'm new to this. I'm now facing a Harvard grad with an MBA who knows everything about strategy.

00;41;32;21 - 00;41;54;13
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And now I have to go in and help them do mapping. And, you know, maybe I have a bachelor's degree in four years of agile coaching experience. What kind of advice would you give to them? A person like that who has to go work with an executive who has a Harvard MBA on strategy and have them explain worthy maps because it happens all the time, right?

00;41;54;25 - 00;42;24;19
Erik Schön
Yeah. Yeah. I think that in that case, it would be great if you could do a one on one with this person, presumably a very smart I've seen a lot of things. And if you could work together on a whiteboard, not talking so much about wall mapping, this is the tool. This is the that just start drawing. Let's let's let's draw draw the strategy.

00;42;24;19 - 00;42;34;15
Erik Schön
Let's try to visualize the strategies that you don't talk so much about the tool or or components. You just start drawing together and then ask a lot of questions, okay.

00;42;34;25 - 00;42;35;22
Erik Schön
Who are who?

00;42;35;22 - 00;42;57;13
Erik Schön
Who are our customers? Okay, we put them here. What do they need? Okay, let's put it here. So it's like a joint effort with this key person who's a super smart guy or girl from with with a degree from a prestigious university, and you build it together. Then that person could feel like, okay, we did this object together, this thing on the whiteboard.

00;42;57;13 - 00;43;01;26
Erik Schön
This is pretty cool. This, this this is good. What's this?

00;43;01;26 - 00;43;03;14
Erik Schön
How do we do that? If you could.

00;43;03;14 - 00;43;25;22
Erik Schön
Create that feeling? I think that's that's a starting point, at least if you have the the opportunity because it's psychology. Again, you have you have it's like IKEA furniture, right? Because you have built it yourself. You get them an emotional attachment to it. And the same thing, if you draw something on a whiteboard, you know, this is this is my little thing.

00;43;25;22 - 00;43;30;07
Erik Schön
I can be a bit proud of it. And you did it together.

00;43;30;07 - 00;43;53;22
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah. And the challenge of mapping is actually doing the work right? As a facilitator, sometimes we may not know the context as well as the subject matter experts in that field and therefore we can't really advise them and we shouldn't be advising them on what's more important as far as their needs or capabilities yet. But one of the things that I struggle with or I find challenging is the people just don't like doing the work.

00;43;53;28 - 00;44;10;24
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
They just don't want to put the 2 hours, 3 hours, 4 hours into it. They rather spend nine much or 12 months chasing nonsense than putting four or 5 hours of work into this. I want to get your your feelings on that. Are you seeing something similar or how are you dealing with the resistance?

00;44;11;04 - 00;44;15;24
Erik Schön
The yeah, people are.

00;44;15;26 - 00;44;42;00
Erik Schön
We're habitual creatures. So we we do things and we've done things that we have habits and the world map or doing that exercise is something new. And by getting the key people on board by, by doing this, this little homework thing we're the few of them. Maybe you can tease that some of the stuff out of their brains and they don't need to prepare so much.

00;44;42;00 - 00;45;08;00
Erik Schön
I mean, you're doing the drawing. They're doing the they have it all in their heads. And then when you take it to the larger group, it will be easier because then, you know, you have sort of made one map with one person or two or three maps and probably not more than that. But then you have those perspectives and it will be easier for you as a facilitator, and it would be easier for these people because they've done it a bit, so they feel not so threatened.

00;45;08;00 - 00;45;34;11
Erik Schön
But I think also that you cannot really cram this in in a one day workshop or in the two day workshop back to back. You need to do it over, over time. That's what I've seen. And that's that's what we've been doing. Maybe you do it once a week or twice a week. You let people digest it and sleep on it, and maybe you try to give them homework not to, but not too late.

00;45;34;17 - 00;45;54;07
Erik Schön
Maybe also give them time and space to do that homework. Well, we can work on this together, or you can work in pairs or in three years or whatever, during the week or during this timeslot. We put it in your calendar because, you know, busy executive right. And I'm not saying it's easy. It isn't.

00;45;55;06 - 00;45;55;24
Erik Schön
Not easy.

00;45;56;08 - 00;46;15;06
Erik Schön
And you really need to be mindful of it and but those are some of the things that we have tried and also, of course, listening to, to to the feedback and be ready to tune and tweak as you go along the way you do things.

00;46;15;06 - 00;46;31;02
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah. And some, you know, some additional feedback we get and here often are, hey, you're using big words here, situational awareness. I don't know what that is right. You know, and we can hand them a paper from Mike and and say, read this paper on the three levels. Situational awareness. Now connect to sense making and all this. They're like, I don't have time for this.

00;46;31;20 - 00;46;49;01
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So the language is new and if I understand things correctly, if you want to change something, you have to change the language to, right? And so are those things that you're experiencing as well with, you know, Simon Worley uses situation awareness in his briefs, in the way he presents things. What challenges are you seeing there with that new language now?

00;46;49;09 - 00;47;04;06
Erik Schön
That's a very good point. Maybe we again, coming back to this thing, stop drawing. Don't talk about those fancy words. Just do it. You know the fancy words, you know the theory. But don't talk so much about it. Just just do it.

00;47;04;06 - 00;47;08;09
Erik Schön
Destroyed by.

00;47;08;09 - 00;47;18;05
Erik Schön
And hopefully people will see the value of it. That's that's what I've seen working really well and maybe you don't become a self.

00;47;19;06 - 00;47;19;13
Mark McGrath
Yeah.

00;47;19;13 - 00;47;50;25
Erik Schön
Sort of situational awareness pick a synonym that that is more commonplace orientation is that it's more easily digestible. What resonates in that organization? Maybe there's another word that they already use in their strategy work pick that and say, hey, we're going to do this. This is what you call it, and you don't even need to say that. It's some people call it orientation, some people call it situational awareness, but rather okay, what's the term used in in that company or in that scene?

00;47;51;28 - 00;48;11;28
Erik Schön
And if they don't have one, come up with something that that resonates with them. Are they sports? Do they have a sports background pick something, a sports metaphor? If they have a military background pick, pick something with the military metaphor. So it's a that's some of the things I've seen working over the years.

00;48;12;23 - 00;48;18;16
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So it's the immersion piece, moreover, is more important than the academic piece. The theory piece is members.

00;48;18;18 - 00;48;38;10
Erik Schön
So but again, in certain audiences you get credibility by, okay, this is solid academic stuff grounded in the research. Whereas in other context you'll be thrown out for, for talking about they're much more action oriented just doesn't just do it right. So, so so.

00;48;38;24 - 00;48;50;04
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
These are worthy maps. Yeah. You could, you can almost map out your own context where you go to. Yeah, yeah. To figure out what you need. Yeah. So it changes. It's not, there is no one size fits all approach. The mapping. That's what I'm hearing right.

00;48;50;11 - 00;48;51;06
Erik Schön
Yeah. Definitely.

00;48;52;09 - 00;49;12;21
Mark McGrath
Isn't that, isn't that the that it shows the complexity of humans as complex adaptive systems. I think perfectly and I think. Do you think that also too sometimes people fear that like they're looking for linear formulas, they're looking for they're looking for recipes. And the world doesn't work like that. The universe doesn't work like that. People don't work like that.

00;49;13;14 - 00;49;14;26
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
There's no way out.

00;49;14;26 - 00;49;15;09
Mark McGrath
There's no way.

00;49;15;12 - 00;49;19;20
Erik Schön
Think that's how? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No silver bullets, no way out.

00;49;20;03 - 00;49;22;04
Erik Schön
You need to put in the effort.

00;49;23;27 - 00;49;24;13
Erik Schön
And I think.

00;49;24;29 - 00;49;43;03
Erik Schön
Deep inside, people know that. But of course everyone likes shortcuts, right? I mean, path of least resistance. That's, that's, that's also part of human nature because that saves energy as an individual, as a team and as an organization. So. But how do you convey the.

00;49;44;19 - 00;49;44;22
Erik Schön
The.

00;49;45;05 - 00;49;56;14
Erik Schön
Feeling that that doing this visualizations regularly this will lead to the path of least resistance because who will not have a lot of problems down the road, so to speak? Yeah.

00;49;56;29 - 00;50;17;04
Mark McGrath
I mean, we had we had Don Vander Griffen talking about it's better sometimes, not in all cases, but it's better sometimes to start with application and experiential learning versus the theory. They can learn. They can learn theory. Whereas some people want to know the theory and the application. You know, mechanics not nearly as important, I guess, as you say.

00;50;17;10 - 00;50;22;02
Mark McGrath
I guess the context of your audience or the empathy that you have in understanding their unique situation.

00;50;22;02 - 00;50;49;14
Erik Schön
And sometimes you have both people with both preferences in the group or in the team or at someone. Some wants to have a theory, some some do not. And yeah, maybe then you need to get get that understanding and maybe have separate sessions. If there's just one outlier or one person who wants the theory and the academics, then you have a separate session with that person and the rest are action oriented.

00;50;49;15 - 00;50;54;27
Erik Schön
Then you just go, go, go do it with them.

00;50;55;14 - 00;51;06;26
Mark McGrath
So that's I had a thought on the edge of my of my thinking, and.

00;51;06;28 - 00;51;07;01
Erik Schön
I.

00;51;07;27 - 00;51;13;24
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Saw Eric while he's thinking any, any new books you're working on, anything like that. And what's what's next for you?

00;51;14;10 - 00;51;15;11
Erik Schön
Yeah, good question.

00;51;15;28 - 00;51;55;13
Erik Schön
I have this this arc of leadership with another old Chinese gentleman, Lao Tzu, famous for for the you know, we did it ourselves. I mean, very self-organized, very, very modern leadership. Also, 2500 years back. And I was very inspired by Richard to do the keynotes in 2015 in Munich, where he connected Boyd Samsa and also Lao Tzu. And that's what you what I want as a leader, that the people that I'm sort of leading, that they feel that they've done it, they've done it themselves.

00;51;55;13 - 00;52;07;20
Erik Schön
And I've given some some some guidance and some direction. But if if people if we all did it ourselves, that's a great feeling. And that's that's leadership. In my book, if everyone's a leader.

00;52;08;00 - 00;52;30;13
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Then we we have James, Jimmy and Kevin on the show here soon. It's kind of cool here. It's a leadership he has a note on here that's it's about affecting how human energy flows through a community or a group. Right. And I think that's where you just it's pretty sweet, pretty nice way to think about that and connect back to the book.

00;52;30;13 - 00;52;31;28
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Five rings, lead like a gardener and all.

00;52;31;28 - 00;53;00;04
Erik Schön
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I love is very much. There's this kind of gardener metaphor. And again, it's applied systems thinking. You need to think bigger than than just what's what's close to you. And you need to think about alliances and not the next little conflict. And how do you sort of create such a set up that that's that's sort of just things work automatically.

00;53;00;04 - 00;53;01;11
Erik Schön
So so how do you.

00;53;01;22 - 00;53;03;29
Erik Schön
How do you design such a garden, if you will?

00;53;05;22 - 00;53;32;22
Mark McGrath
So SARPANCH moved me to remember what I was going to say. So thank you, Ponch. But we think of we talked earlier kind of about this, but really, I think your book emphasizes and the three thinkers that you've fuzed together to show their their correlation. They emphasize that business competition, human interaction, there's a moral, mental and physical level.

00;53;33;05 - 00;53;43;26
Mark McGrath
And the edge that leaders and teams can get is if that that they understand the moral level, then the mental than the physical versus the physical, then the mental, then maybe the moral the.

00;53;45;00 - 00;54;25;20
Erik Schön
Yeah, yeah, very good point. And I think, boy, this is probably one of the people who understood Sun Tzu the best and he could sort of translate that into the Western language. And he could he could talk to, you know, politicians and senior executives and to senior military officers using their language. So translate this this ancient wisdom, which is very practical, very I mean, and still very relevant.

00;54;25;20 - 00;54;48;22
Erik Schön
And it all goes back to to knowing your purpose. And it's it's not about that. I mean, pick your fights. Pick your alliances. I think that's that's also something important. And I think that's expected and surprise. It's also something I like which which is something that you can use in the military conflicts, obviously, and you can use in a business context.

00;54;48;27 - 00;55;09;24
Erik Schön
I mean, the classic example being the iPhone where you had a lot of things that were expected, no phone could talk, there was a browser, there was a lot of things. But the expected thing was it was all in one device that was like the surprise and that was to the light. And that created a fantastic loyalty for that product.

00;55;09;24 - 00;55;30;19
Erik Schön
And we use that in Ericsson with our software releases. We had our software releases and we had a lot of features in there, but we always wanted to have something positively surprising to our customers. This is the wow thing. And then you had the table stakes. So that's another sort of ancient thing that is still very relevant in business today.

00;55;31;01 - 00;55;41;28
Erik Schön
And you just need to sometimes think of it and find those well, those applications in business today.

00;55;43;15 - 00;56;02;24
Mark McGrath
It is interesting, though, that because we are human and we are part of the you know, system and the way the way the universe works, a lot of these things, when, as Punch said, you have to do the work. But when I do the work and I think about it and I reflect on it, most of the stuff not all becomes self-evident.

00;56;04;00 - 00;56;27;25
Mark McGrath
It just it just becomes a priori versus story. Or like, I don't have to sit there and create formulas to try to figure out what's going to happen. I know that in certain cases that yeah, that's how that's how it works. That's how people work, that's how teams work. And then once I have a better context of that, then I'm able to differentiate in my own conduct with others and my own conduct with customers, that kind of thing.

00;56;27;25 - 00;56;29;14
Erik Schön
Yeah, the human dimension just so.

00;56;29;16 - 00;56;35;02
Mark McGrath
Just goes back to the human, the human centric nature of it. I mean, that's again, that's the yeah.

00;56;35;23 - 00;57;01;06
Erik Schön
You know, we haven't changed much as human beings for, I don't know, 10,000 years, 100,000 years. And, and with maps and visualizations, I mean, those drawings made in various caves all around the world, those were visualizations, right? What people were doing and so so the visual part is also part of human nature from the very beginning.

00;57;01;25 - 00;57;14;28
Mark McGrath
Talk to us about the competitive aspects. Where have you seen when I have command of these subjects, you know, give me some ideas of the competitive edge that one gains and how you've seen that unfold.

00;57;14;28 - 00;57;18;14
Erik Schön
MM Yeah. I think.

00;57;20;26 - 00;58;02;10
Erik Schön
I've seen, I mentioned that briefly. The Swedish trucking companies, truck companies, Volvo and Scania have always quite well known Scania and also well-known, but they use things like they call it, it's gonna use something called real time management, which is basically sort of an old ALU where, where you, you do things in 24 hour cycles. So so you, you have basically ups, if you will, in agile terminology with, with the development team 50 minutes and the next 50 minutes slots you you sort of take things that the team cannot resolve.

00;58;02;27 - 00;58;40;16
Erik Schön
You push that to the next level where it's the management team or leadership team and can they resolve it? Yes. Then everything's fine. If not, they pop it to the next level. And after four such sessions it's gone out. You're up at the CTO, so this is a pretty cool thing. So you have the stand ups on the different levels in a hierarchical organization and and you can resolve things while they're small and the teams will resolve like 90% or 95% of everything and then a few things or one thing or one thing every week that comes to the next level.

00;58;40;28 - 00;59;10;12
Erik Schön
And, you know, big organization, R&D of three, 5000 people, there will be things coming up. But the cool thing is that if you cannot solve it in the meeting, then you get 24 hours to have some kind of plan for how to resolve it. So that gives a very cool cadence. It's almost like real time, but, you know, on a daily cadence and things can go all the way up to the CTO.

00;59;10;12 - 00;59;34;20
Erik Schön
And it's really servant leadership in the sense that the people who have the right power in the organization can, can chip in and resolve things. And this helps an hour to fix things while they're small. You know, in other companies it could take several weeks to get the right people in the room to find the spot where they can talk about these things.

00;59;34;20 - 01;00;15;23
Erik Schön
The people who have a stake in it and who could have the authority and the power and the money or whatnot to fix it. And they do. It's just a daily cadence, 24 hour cadence, real time management. And the idea that that they got this from was was, of course, the factory floor where you have even shorter cycles, maybe it's hourly cycles there because Sydney to fix things otherwise your factory stops but they took that to their R&D organization and I mean this guy our company, I mean I think they are in in as a case in one of the lean books, I forgot which one we can look it up.

01;00;16;18 - 01;00;51;07
Erik Schön
I think in the Third Ward and sobek. But anyway, they, they gain a substantial competitive advantage and they're all applied systems thinkers. The managers are trained to become applied systems thinkers, and they're running circles around a lot of the other truck companies in Europe and and their former C CEO was headhunted to Volvo because he was doing such an amazing job with it, with the stock price and the shareholders and everyone was super happy.

01;00;51;07 - 01;01;19;21
Erik Schön
So he was headhunted and that's like you you don't do that. You don't pick your worst competitors CEO to run your company. But they did. And right now they had the reverse profit warning in Volvo because he introduced this Applied Systems Thinking as the CEO of that company, a Volvo based on what he had learned over 25 years, you know, from from being a trainee to becoming the CEO of Scania.

01;01;20;01 - 01;01;51;27
Erik Schön
So that's one story that comes to mind about leave time management, applied systems thinking and building capabilities, not just focusing on, on, on the next quarter. And the the the the bottom line, which is, of course, important. And the the profit will come as a result. But if you focus purely on profit, you might sub optimize and forget about a lot of the capabilities you need to build in order to have a long term sustainable company.

01;01;51;27 - 01;02;06;29
Erik Schön
And both old ones gone out, they're like, well, more than 100 year old company, something. They're doing a few things right, because Sweden is a small country and we don't have a lot of natural resources and we've got a lot of people. So we we have to do things differently.

01;02;08;16 - 01;02;26;12
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
There are. Can you talk a little bit about how you use maps to manage risk? And this is coming up from actually it's something that's kind of personal to our company. A lot of our clients are asking that right now is how do we use these maps to manage the risk inherent in our environment?

01;02;26;12 - 01;02;56;03
Erik Schön
So that's a big question. I think what you could do is, of course, well, what I would do facing that question, I would try to look at the value chain of the company. Do you know your your value chains? You know, your your the subcontractors you work with? How how do you how do you see and visualize your value chain?

01;02;56;03 - 01;03;34;20
Erik Schön
Maybe you draw it as a map so so that you see how everything is interconnected and that then you can identify potential weaknesses there or potential areas that you don't really know about. And the classic example where that I'm thinking of is like 15, 20 years ago when, when Ericsson and Nokia were fighting for being the number one mobile phone vendor in the world, and there was there was a fire in one of the the AC components manufacturing plants in the US.

01;03;35;08 - 01;04;00;22
Erik Schön
And Nokia was very quick on the ball and because they know their value chain, they were aware and they were not aware only every quarter but almost on this daily cadence. So they can go in and fix and fix things and do things very, very quickly. Whereas Ericsson in that case was was late to the party and, you know, they didn't get those components.

01;04;00;22 - 01;04;33;21
Erik Schön
And guess what? They were profit warnings further down the line. So visualizing your your complete value chain and looking for weak spots or unknown spots there that could help you with with your your your risk. And that's also something that that's various a research group with Simon Ward have been doing for the past year. And one of the big insights in those research groups, one was for telecom, one was for agriculture, there was one for space and so on and so forth.

01;04;33;28 - 01;04;54;29
Erik Schön
Was was the awareness of of of your supply chains, maybe supply chain is a better word, is very, very weak in most companies, you know, one up and one down and, you know, yourself. But that's not good enough anymore, especially and in a time of crisis and and war and whatnot that you really need to know your supply chain.

01;04;54;29 - 01;04;59;02
Erik Schön
And yeah.

01;04;59;02 - 01;05;35;01
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah. Because the world is changing so rapidly, you know, every day with new technology empty. I Yeah. What, what's, what we're seeing now is that going back to the value chains for supply chains disruption, we know that Apple's moving out of China, moving more towards India. I mean, there's we've got manufacturing coming back to the U.S. We have an inverted pyramid of workforces, I think globally, not just in China or the U.S., but if you take out pyramid inverted and, you know, 60% population 40, maybe 40% of the population, I may be wrong on this number is going to be above the age 60 here in the next few years.

01;05;35;10 - 01;05;59;19
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So that's I mean, these are conditions that we're looking at on the external environment. And this is why we believe mapping is so important because, one, the map is not the terrain. We know that right? But this map is far better than anything else you have at the moment. And you can adapt to that changing environment and updating your mental model, your map, creating a situational awareness by looking around you and seeing what's actually happening.

01;05;59;26 - 01;06;17;28
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And I think a lot of folks struggle with that concept, right? They think the world is kind of static on the five year plan. They're on the old Soviet Union approach to planning. Right. Build out a multiyear plan and try to execute against that. And we have that same problem here in the U.S. Many companies are still following their plan from two years ago.

01;06;17;28 - 01;06;27;22
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And, you know, it's not working right because everything's changing so rapidly. Any other thoughts on that? You want to challenge me on that? Please? Well, what am I getting wrong?

01;06;27;22 - 01;07;08;06
Erik Schön
But I think you're spot on. On the other hand, companies should have learned over the past couple of years with with pandemics, that was totally unexpected by most people and having a war that was totally unexpected for most people. So there will be unexpected things. And but it's so easy to be biased because, you know, your own industry, you know, we know our stuff and it's so easy to to sort of have this closed system then and not be open to to to those mavericks and challenges because there will be those people in the organization.

01;07;08;06 - 01;07;39;11
Erik Schön
And sometimes those are called negatives and they're not team players and they're not collaborative. And how do you leverage their their dissent? That's where I think people like the Snowden. I mean, realizing this and making it part of your ways of working. Okay, we need to get those perspectives in because otherwise we will be surprised. And then they could bring you the risks and they could be your red team members and help you out there.

01;07;40;21 - 01;07;41;20
Erik Schön
So so yeah.

01;07;41;26 - 01;08;02;17
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah. We call that the human sensor network. Right. You still want to engage that? Make sure your human sensors are telling you what's going on. And if we suppress that information through cancelation or or any type of activity through reducing psychological safety, you increase the likelihood you're not going to hear from the people that see things differently. And I think a lot of that has come out of the past three or four years of COVID.

01;08;02;17 - 01;08;29;22
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And where we are, a lot of people are not speaking up today, mapping, in my opinion, and red teaming in my opinion. And you know, we signal to turn detection. All these things allow us to hear those weak signals and see them on a map. And then as a CEO or an executive of an organization, you can see the unintended consequences of somebody executing or executing a strategy that you may or may not want.

01;08;29;22 - 01;08;45;14
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Right. And that's that ownership and accountability pieces that you do as a leader own the failures of your team members and they own their successes. And that's what we want to create there with us is how do you get people to create those successes at scale?

01;08;46;16 - 01;09;13;04
Erik Schön
Yeah. And then it's about leaders and leadership and how do you access the CEO or how do you act as a senior leader. And that's, of course, contextual and situational. But one of the best leaders I ever worked with, he was so curious. He was always asking questions wherever was around the company, he he tried to ask open questions, totally unbiased, just get a better orientation.

01;09;13;04 - 01;09;32;18
Erik Schön
And imagine if you have a CEO, go go to another company like that. That will spread. People will be curious. People will ask questions. So it's okay to ask questions if even the CEO ask questions. He doesn't have all the answers. Of course he could, you know, give the direction. But that was a pretty new approach to me at the time, too.

01;09;32;19 - 01;09;36;03
Erik Schön
To see you later as a CEO work like that.

01;09;36;18 - 01;09;52;05
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah. Yeah. We had, you know, Captain Jack Cummings on the show and you talked about that, you know, being the commanding officer of the US, Ford, that's how he did business. Go on, announce and sit down with the crew, figure out what's going on that's going to the Gemba right? Yeah.

01;09;52;05 - 01;09;57;25
Erik Schön
Figuring out together with harmonized.

01;09;58;12 - 01;09;59;17
Erik Schön
Yeah. Yeah.

01;09;59;25 - 01;10;03;24
Erik Schön
Formalized understanding.

01;10;03;24 - 01;10;23;06
Mark McGrath
We could go on for hours and we definitely want to have you back on the show as we continue to help people define strategy, why they need it and how to do it. And we will continue to recommend your work. And as Ponch has seen it out in the field and I've given it to people, we want to continue to see people do that.

01;10;24;08 - 01;10;29;09
Mark McGrath
Where else should we be sending people to learn more about your work and what you're up to?

01;10;30;22 - 01;10;36;18
Erik Schön
Yeah, so I am always happy to help. Great.

01;10;36;18 - 01;10;39;29
Mark McGrath
Is there any place you want us to? Any websites or anything you want us?

01;10;40;00 - 01;10;48;15
Erik Schön
Okay, we like that. Oh, oh, oh, yeah, yeah. I'm getting tired. It's. It's, it's it's getting glacier and sparkles. It's later. Yeah, we.

01;10;48;20 - 01;10;51;10
Mark McGrath
Have noticed the window get darker.

01;10;51;12 - 01;10;53;07
Erik Schön
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's totally dark.

01;10;53;07 - 01;10;54;10
Erik Schön
It's pitch black here.

01;10;54;25 - 01;10;58;07
Erik Schön
No, but I, I.

01;10;58;07 - 01;11;36;21
Erik Schön
Started this, this whole project with, with medium articles and there's a lot of stuff on medium of course, and then I have a publisher home page Yoko so press dot com and there you can find all the links to both the art of strategy and the Art of leadership. There's, there's various recordings and there's links to the, the free, free version on medium and links to it, to the books, you know, in different formats and different stores, you know, the song and the Kindle version of some and and Google Play, if you prefer that or lean pop if you prefer.

01;11;36;21 - 01;11;44;14
Erik Schön
That's it. So so Yoko so press dot SC is the place to go. There's a lot of stuff there right?

01;11;44;14 - 01;12;03;27
Mark McGrath
Make sure we'll make sure we send people that way. So until next time. Eric, thanks for joining Patch and I continue conversation of advancing John Boyd's ideas and for sharing the thoughts on your contributions to that effort. And it's good to be here. It's good to be working with you on that.

01;12;03;27 - 01;12;04;16
Erik Schön
Yeah. Thank you.

01;12;04;16 - 01;12;06;00
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So much. I really appreciate it. Yeah.

01;12;06;01 - 01;12;10;20
Erik Schön
Thank you so much for having me. It's been a true pleasure and happy to join any time you know that.