 Yeah, welcome everyone to the strategy maps a visualization practice to connect your roadmap by Craig Coburn. Craig Coburn is a freelance enterprise agile coach and his main top topics mostly would be critical thinking visualizing strategy visualizing talks and remote working. He's currently working on his next initiative called unbiased agile.com so we can also have a look at it. So without any further delay I'm just handing over to Craig Coburn welcome Craig. Thanks for the intro and and thanks to everybody's joins with 33 people so thank you everybody for your time and joining my talk. So this is visualizing the why by a movement strategy and roadmap in context. So this is about a strategy in a complex landscape and a new practice that I call strategy maps. So there's a, my contact details are there. Obviously I'll be available after the talk at the desk for mingling and chat. My two main URLs are Craig Coburn.com and a menu one which has just been mentioned and biased agile.com, which is about avoiding frameworks and looking more to practices to get better collaboration. On Twitter, there's a, there's a hashtag as well. And I am, in fact, a distantly related to agile Alistair, one of the co authors of the address manifesto. The key audience for this talk I see is, is basically everybody. And one of the things I address here is that often strategies reserved for senior readers, board directors, all these sorts of things. But I say that everybody should have an interest in strategy, just like everybody should have an interest in customers or quality. The more people that are involved, the more insights you get. So really, this is trying to be much more inclusive, open and transparent and in line with many of the practices in agile about making stuff visible to get feedback and alignment. And it matters to all of us because we're seeing later in this talk, what happens when strategy goes wrong. So this is the kind of outline of this talk, the format and flavor of it, or introduce some concepts and terms or explain why it matters, or work through a really, really complex example that the practice works in very complex situations. And then I take you through a simple example, the template, some supporting practices with some key takeaways and then it's time for questions at the end. Okay, this is how I do my talks. This is roughly the format of the talk, and I will fill this in as I go, so that you can see where you're at in the talk, what we've covered and it gives you a chance to consolidate your knowledge as we go. This is my alternative format, which is like a mind map, but you'll see that unfold as it goes to prompt you over what we've covered, what we've learned and the key topics. So that's all in one go, appreciating the conference is a lot of content, and I'm trying to assist you here by making it easier to remember. So first of all, the story of where this came from is, I was looking at Simon Wardley's mapping techniques which are linked to strategy, which are very good. I was listening to Roman Pishlar and I hosted him for a talk on roadmaps and he mentioned strategy. That was very good. But rather than just talking about the concept, I couldn't quite see for the team I was working with at the time, how we could actually get strategic thinking to actually take a Simon Wardley map and make it re-offer us so that we know what to do first and next, or how do we get beyond just talking about strategy to actually get implementable steps. So what this talk does is it tries to kind of take both of those things and add to them. So I'm not detracting from those talks at all, it builds on them, but connects them up. To me this solved the problem of me being able to talk to my team in a way that made sense to them, so that became actionable strategy. Now I explained a bit about why maps matter, because that's one theme of the talk and why making things visible matters. There was an ancient battle about two and a half thousand years ago, and if you look in the right, the traditional project management approach of strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats, versus an actual map, a map that shows what's going on when. And this was block the sea, which then causes the army to fight on the land. There is a narrow point on the land. Therefore that diminishes the strategic advantage. Or their, their advantage of numbers is then reduced. So you can see what's going on, when it's happening, and why, whereas on the right hand side strengths weaknesses opportunities threat. So, where do you start. It's just a list, right. So, and you think about corporate strategy, but let's be the leading army or let's win three battles this year or this this is like, it's a list. Let's get away from lists to actionable plans. And this is what Simon Wadley uses in his talk to explain why maps matter and visualizations. Now just because I'm from Scotland I've got a Scottish example, which is particularly relevant because in the battle of the 18th century, the Scottish army defeated an English army that was more than double their size. And they did so, using an effective strategy that strategies and six points there. But it's like, that's what they did. That's why they did it. And that's the order that they did it in, and it was incorporated the land the battle landscape and situational tactics. Now, this battle was only two days long, and was a decisive victory. So let's get away from just thinking the strategies just for big multi year things. A strategy can be just for two days, be decisive and have effects that ripple down centuries later, years or decades, the actual manifesto was written in two days, you know, and it's affected the whole world right so strategies not as for big things strategies for anything that that you want to really make a meaningful difference and you need to think carefully about how you approach the problem. So this is me covered the intro and that's some key topics in the intro. This is me and how to talk and raise it. And this is some things that I've discovered. So you get this develop as we go through the talk. So first of all, why strategy a problem. You just use the same words to mean the same things, organizational jargon at jargon organization just invent their own meanings for things, and it means different things to different people. So in this talk, these are key words I use. And this is what they mean, and hopefully that's not too different from what you think they mean. Because I see disagreements and what's an outcome, whatever so that that's my definition. The strategy is a context specific plan to deliver outcomes, and the delivery of outcomes supports you in realizing the vision the direction you're aiming towards. And you can have different ways of realizing that through tactics. But if you have a vision, you know, where you should head towards therefore what outcomes then support that. Now traditional other definitions you might hear, I won't use them so much here, but in the broader agile world, you know, we sometimes talk about key results and whatever else like that. So in terms here for definition, of course you get the slides afterwards. So if you feel a bit over burdened by content, don't worry. The slides are relatively standalone available questions afterwards, but I tried to make it so that a lot of info in the slides so you don't get stuck with jargon. Now, Peter Drucker. Well, this is a quote isn't it, culturally strategy for breakfast. Let's start with debunking a few common myths. First of all, he didn't say that. There is no evidence at all. Peter Drucker said that, but he's often attributed at it, because we're guilty of just cutting paste. I heard it on a chat I saw on LinkedIn. I heard it talk about that for it must be true right and often we're just guilty of just reciting what other people say without going back to the source. So there's the data, check the links. Peter Drucker did not say it, but actually more importantly, what I think is that actually they're not competing, they're complimentary, have both. The culture helps your strategy. You mean if you don't have a good culture your strategy will be difficult to implement. But if you have a great culture in the strategy, well where are you going to go. Right, so, so think about both. And this is what I say is like, just copying what other people do without context, implementing a framework, it's never not the right framework you need to understand the situation and the problem that you are trying to solve. And seeing this picture there's a bridge that looks like it's in the sea. Well, actually that's a very useful bridge even though it looks rather ridiculous, because this picture was taken at high tide. Now when it's not high tide, there's a beach on the other side, there's a car park on this side, and there is a river flows underneath that bridge. So the bridge helps you to get from the car park to the lovely beach, a high tide of course everything's underwater so the beach is unavailable, and the bridge looks out of context, but in context that bridge is very useful. And this is the wrong context for it because it's high tide. But this is an example of when we use the wrong, what looks useful in the wrong context can turn out to be useless. And here we'll have something that looks useless, but actually turns out to be useful. So this is why we need to think carefully about things. Is this the right thing for this situation, and not just a big template we're trying to copy. Strategic failures, a few classic examples here, I'm sure the list is really long, I just picked four. But these four, you know, are important because we still have cameras, but Kodak's not really around anymore. We still watch films, but Bloch Worcesters not really around anymore. We still buy phones, Nokia is still around, it's still a pretty big company, but it's a fraction of what it used to be. So these are four companies that have effectively gone bust or significantly reduced or being disrupted, even though the business they operate in is still a big thing. So it's not like we're talking about the manufacturers as a fax machines. That's not really being a thing. We're talking about multi-million pound markets where people got disrupted out of them because they had poor strategies. And I just saw the comment in the COVID era that Nokia used to make respirators, and you know, that's an example of a business that has pivoted massively over the amount of time it's been around. But still, you know, they got caught out in the focus really much on mobile phones and didn't really see what was coming. Now I'll also talk about Brexit. For those of you who don't know what that is, it was a thing in 2016 and was the process for Britain leaving the EU. Now that had never happened before, nobody had ever left. And it was a complex mess. And nobody really knew what was happening next. The public voted for something that wasn't specified. It was legal challenges left, right and center effectively rewrote part of the British unwritten constitution. It was a total mess. So I will use this example of that mess to show even in a mess, you can actually make sense of it. Now some data, you can refer to these sites to look it up, but you know, 97% of 10,000 executives said strategy was the most critical thing. And yet the reality says otherwise right so this is from the Azure Business Agility Report in 2018. And what it says is that it's the biggest challenge. Now, you're a unclear and changing vision which I touched on earlier, and leadership. So key themes here now that was four years ago let's just went through to three years ago. Oh, it's, it's, it's exactly the same right. In a year, same coat, same problems 2020, well three phrase it, still the same problems. And we're seeing this all over the place that a lack of good strategy and leadership is one of the key reasons that address transformations don't really work very well. A leader sets the tone for the entire organization and talk about certain leadership, but actually being the leader acting like the leader being like David Marquis, all these people like that. And leadership is really critical, right. And the styles and behaviors are more consistent with legacy culture. I did write this up as a fuller article where you can look at other data that have gathered like from the state of Agile report and others, but really is bringing out the theme of a lot of it is about poor strategy or lack of leadership. So that's me looking at the problem and some corporate failures and see what's going on in the past and points strategy really matters. Now strategy in Agile. Oh, this is the PI planning board that I did a few years ago and look at the number of tickets. It's like, where'd he start. It's just complex, right. Now talk about scale dodge a framework briefly, and I mentioned it because as a framework and look at all the documentation and look at all the courses and look at the fact in particular, that safe really aims itself as being a top to bottom organizational thing, you know, right from executives, multi layers and multi levels of the organization. Yet, safe quotes this and states the same problem I've just done is that executives talk across purposes. There's like, there's not really good alignment, but say even safe that deals with this whole organizational transformation strategy. It's, it's wording on it is quite light. So even safe doesn't go into this in much detail. It just says, yeah, we want to be able to change quickly. Well, isn't that just agile right instantly strategy. That's just what I was talking about. And so I'll say it talks about alignment transparency so I'm kind of building on those themes as well. So agility is the ability to change the strategy means that feels like a recursive definition. But nonetheless, here's a diagram, and I'm sure that's got all the answers. That's what safe says. Look, we've kind of bent the journey a little bit, but that's not really helping. It's just a picture doesn't tell you what to do or how to do it. And you can check out the links yourself. So just bringing in as mentioned earlier talking about room picture and he talked about strategy. This is what he talks about and this starts to connect things up. So I mentioned about vision earlier, where you're trying to get to your ultimate end state, the product strategy supports that therefore with that strategy, you can then understand then what goes into your roadmap that then supports the strategy. And therefore with our roadmap, which is your near term goals, maybe like six to nine months key key things that you're delivering, you then develop the product backlog in support of the near term things in the roadmap. So there's a sense of lining things up here. Yeah, so then you get a connected organization. That's great. But still missing the detail. So now just dip over to Simon Ward if you're about to introduce into that. And he talks about the strategy cycle. Now, this cycle starts here at the game, which is why bother at all. You know, so this is like if you want to play chess, right to think about chess, why play chess, you know you might enjoy it, you might be competitive, you might need friends and why bother at all. Why are we doing this thing at all. When you've decided it is a valuable thing to do, then you get into the why of movement and what is an optimal move in chess depends on the board that is before you at that time. So therefore it must be context sensitive. So this is looking at the landscape, the climate, and then using doctrine and then leadership. So landscape is generally things that don't change much. You just have to accept them. Climate is things that do change or go give you some examples in a minute and doctrine is good practices that you can then layer on top of what's going on to then use leadership to decide and be visible in what you're doing. So this is a word because the strategy cycle is closely related to Sun Zou, the art of war, Chinese manual, and also John Boyd, Uda Leap, Observe Orient Decide Act. John Boyd was a US Air Force pilot and just after the Second World War and wrote about strategy and said, basically the people that can come work through the cycle the quickest in an aerial battle are then going to be in a better position and then you'll be able to attack their enemy and likely to be more successful. There are supporting practices as a big list here that can help you to align that to what you should be doing at particular times. So that's there for your reference. It's reasonable to add trial staff about user needs and context and map. That's largely there for your reference after the talk to show how this map can relate to actual activities. There's a lot more in Simon Wardley's site. But what's what is often missing is to tell the story and to bring the people on the journey. So they are committed, and they are involved, and they are interested, and they see the bigger picture. What's missing in strategies that I've seen a lot of big organizations, the strategies just become to do lists. We're doing this, we're doing this, we're doing this. We hold these values, whatever it is, just to do this and when I use this talk and make it longer and ask people in polls, do you have a strategy, how often is it updated, and does it really matter that the results are pretty mixed to be honest. When a chief executive comes in, built a new strategy, it doesn't change for months or years, and it's just a bit of a to do list and people don't know what's going on when. But the important thing is, as I mentioned in those businesses earlier that went bust, they went bust because of what their competitors did and having a strategy without saying what your competitors will do means that that doesn't get talked about enough. By making your competitive strategy visible, you will then see what you need to do to undermine your opponent. It's like playing chess, right, you can see where the board's pieces all are and your opponent's pieces, so that you know what to do to undermine your opponent. Just having to do this, it's like, well so what, are we talking about our competitors enough, and are we seeing what they would do when, so we need to know the need to act soon. Like I said before, cut and tragedy, not mutually exclusive, and also half of the agile manifested values, despite it being a manifest for software, half of the values are about people, individuals and interactions is the first one, and customer collaboration is the third one. So let's just bring the focus back to people, rather than process. And let's also make sure that we update in line with feedback and changing circumstances, because as I've seen recently, we've had Brexit, we've had COVID, you know, with a Donald Trump Boris Johnson, I mean there's been so much going on recently, we need to update things. Not only when we anticipate things will change, but also when things change around us. So let's not have it as a fossilized slide deck that sits there for five years and becomes increasingly redundant. That's a little bit of psychology here. This is from me and McLaren Morris who won an award for excellence in business psychology. And in order to get that leadership in acting, the leaders need to process the knowledge. It's changing all around us, things are becoming new, they're unfamiliar, you know, they are unknown. So to acquire that knowledge to become familiar and to acquire that knowledge so it becomes known. And then to process that emergent knowledge. So we then know what to do with it. It's like learning a language, you need to get good enough at processing and assimilating the knowledge to order to know, then to act. So, you know, we have to accept that humans are like this we have to be able to incorporate and synthesize lots of different evolving bits of knowledge. And this is the landscape that we're working. So in order to act, we need to have access to enough information or to include enough complexity and to accept the people that people are different stages and they're learning journeys in order to know what to do in a complex landscape. So, now let's work through Brexit and see what happened. Now, this is, we went back to the strategy cycle. This is like saying, well, perhaps people have motives for why Brexit, or why they weren't supporting Brexit, let's understand a bit of the context. Yeah, that's some suggested context there. But then the landscape there was, you know, there was competing groups that were always going to be competing or fractured groups that was always going to be fractured. There was no clean majority in parliament. These are just things that just have to work with. So this is like the courage to accept the things that you cannot change and the wisdom to accept the things you can. So this is, don't try changing the things you can't change. But some people were able to say, well, what can we change? Right, so what was going on is the clock was running down, we're running at legislative time. The government expelled people from the party and lost its majority. There was court action from the Supreme Court which changed what the government could do. These are dynamic. These are the things that could change and also propaganda misinformation were on the go. So this was affecting what could then happen next. Now somebody tried to draw this out as a bit of a flow chart. But this is what led me to be inspired that this actually works. Now I'm not going to bore you with the tedious political political detail here. There's just too much but you can see from the plate spaghetti before you. There's just a lot going on. But importantly, the key things here, top, the, the red, yellow green indicates kind of where the it's going in line with different types of outcome. And at the bottom, the processing tells you the relative likelihoods. So one person put it together using feedback, publishing it, getting feedback and built this and it proved to be amazingly accurate. So here is a map going from April to autumn. There's only like three or four months right because things are changing so quickly things are changing on a daily basis or a weekly basis. And then massively and nobody knew what was happening. And everybody was just wanting their thing without saying why, or how, or is that realistic or is it just a fringe opinion. This brought it to life to say, this is what's going to happen next, and why, and this is what your opponents will do next, and why, and through that, it proved to be a reliable source of information. So what I just did is turn that map on its side to become a timeline, and then I looked at the outcomes. And then I started to score those outcomes in terms of, well, if you wanted this one, what would that mean that you would need to do. And then say, well, let's now start with that work backwards. So what now are the preceding steps, or the preceding steps for your opponents. What do they do next, what do you need to block, or make less likely, or where do you need to change, or what do you need to do to make your pathway more likely to succeed. So let's talk about red team thinking, there's practices underlining that. There's practices such as pre Mortem by Dr Gary Klein, which is to consider failure, then to work backwards to say, how far along that path are we really start talking about that early, before it became too late, like it was too late, Nokia, it was too late. The earlier we see what the opponent will do, the earlier we can act. So now you can devise a context specific flexible strategy or show it in the next one. But this to me is what agility is really about is not just about reacting to stuff like safe talks about, it's about being proactive, and what could happen. Where do we need multiple pathways? Should we have two or three or even more like when you're developing a COVID vaccine, they developed multiple and parallel. That's a strategy, not one at a time. Some, you know, it's about how do you approach the problem and what could go wrong and discussing that earlier. That's proactive, it's not happened yet, but you're preparing for it, and you're developing an approach that meets the situation. So by turning this diagram inside, I then did this. Now, the colours on the right are the outcomes that are referenced here. So imagine the two green ones at the top. There's one green one there, which is actually works its way through the diagram in a funny way. There's another green one up here that then works through there. So you can then work out the preceding steps. You can also see what your opponents may do. And from this, I then took the green outcomes and worked backwards to say, what does that tell me should happen? And one should says get an extension to the time scale, buy some time and involve a people's vote and secure that and win it. That's one, but there's also another one that was more risky because the diagram says so. And therefore, this strategy fits into this diagram to meet these outcomes. And you can see what your opponents will do. So you can sense and measure that as well. And this is for a complex, messy situation changing daily or weekly. Now, likely a good in business is that you're not dealing with that level of change. But this was highly complex, highly movable, breaking new legislative ground. And yet this worked. Because you're seeing a later the evidence right so really the points in this diagram start going towards the outcomes. You look what you're doing. You see what your opponents are doing. You see, roughly, is that likely or not and what you do to shift the odds. Of course, you must update this. It is not a fixed event. You must update it when something has changed, or you reach a point where, you know, we need to reflect and adapt because we're now at a different point. So, you know, this is about constant sensing and adapting and making it visual. So everybody can then contribute feedback, be involved at their wisdom, and you get collected by and, and also the wisdom of everybody in the room, rather than just the select few with a select opinion, given their select opinions and a very narrow focus right which is often what happens with strategy. There are people in their fifties, you know, but we'll take the background commit strategy rather than encompassing the wisdom of the whole organization. This worked. So these are published in real time on Twitter, you can go back and see them and series to said there would be a delay. That actually happened seriously for so general action. That actually happened in series four show the deal we'll get. And that's what actually happened and you can see the data. So despite your tuning the news and you just get loads and loads of people with conflicting opinions, wanting this wanting that and not articulating anything. This did the analysis. And through this analysis you can work out what was likely to happen. Therefore, if that wasn't what you wanted, you could then do something different. And in the present you can just ignore this largely, but it was massively covered by the foreign media, and it demonstrates the value of critical analysis, and it working in a complex decision making, and basing our decision making as much as possible in facts, rather than opinions. Yeah, yeah, don't uncovering convenient truths. But this is what matters. This is the real world is not just about what people want. It's about the realism of achieving it based on competing aims. So that's the recap of this particular section showing the inspiration for strategy maps and then I took that to make a template from it. You can use yourselves. So take that on and treat this in a minute. So applying this approach. That's the template I think you might want to know if you're using this yourself you take away a lot of this text here. It just there's a placeholder show you. But how this works is a drew on that previous flow chart where it's time to the left to the right. And it was about what you're trying to achieve. So there's the outcomes you're trying to achieve. You've made them visible. There's the vision you're trying to get to, you've made it visible. But this is the situational context, you make that visible too. Now, the key thing here is you're also making what your competitors vision is, and what they are trying to achieve. So you make that visible as well. Now, if you think of this a little bit like a football field. Neutro is just playing in the middle of the pitch. Playing in your opponent's half is good. It's useful. And if you watch sport and TV, you'll see them doing the analysis of who's got possession, where it is, whether it's tennis, whether it's golf or anything else. It's like, yeah, there's this team doing well. Are they holding on? Have they got possession? That's a tactical advantage, because you're unlikely to score from your own half. There's an early sign of success, but the embedded gains are only when you actually score an actual goal. That's what gets you the win, and you must score more goals than your competition. But the embedded gains are different. They're not tactical advantages. They're actual advantages. And in the world of strategy, I see these as two different things. Now, you can align this to save. This is about an enabler, and this is about a feature. So this is internal capability, which you need to support you. And this is external gains, real customers, real money in the bank. They're different, but you need both. You can ship 10 million iPhones unless you have a factory, but the factory is your internal capability. So both matter, but if you're jumping straight to there, which is often what happens, you go, well, there's no realism in this plan. It's missing. Now, so this is the different strategies non-linear, but you need both the internal work and you need the external work. But the problem is, although the external work, like the delivery of an iPhone or the scoring of a goal or the launch of a product, great. There's money in the bank. There's customers. There's feedback. You've established the market. You're maybe the market leader. But guess what? As soon as you put that out of the door, everybody then starts to copy you. So there's disadvantages. It's a different landscape you're working in. You've just changed it by having a product. So this will happen. Apple launched the iPhone and then Android copied it because it was public. Then this is why strategy is non-linear. There's internal stuff that you need, and there's external stuff which is valuable, but then it's prone to being copied. And again, this is true for your competitors too. So if they want something, you can copy them. And how this works is usually you start in the bottom left-hand corner in the now, in a position of disadvantage, which you've made clear, to work, to embedded outcomes up here in the future that support your favourable outcomes and vision. Generally, the trend in this diagram is from bottom left to top right, but it's non-linear. So I'll show you a quick example from real life. I was in an organisation. They wanted to be agile. They had some old job roles like project manager and stuff and whatever else, you know, all of the old stuff that they had with waterfall. So they wanted to develop new roles, particularly what those roles were for, align people to those roles, and then with product owners and scrum masters and release train engineers, all that stuff would be transformed. That was their roadmap concept. And, you know, that's a typical way we lay out a roadmap. It's just linear. There's no failure scenario there. It's just one after another after another after another. So what could go wrong here? Well, I mapped that roadmap onto a strategy map and that's what it looks like. So there's a position of disadvantage with the old job roles, the legacy roles. There's an internal capability. You've now rolled out and looked at your transform. That's what that would look like on a diagram like this. However, the reality was like that. And of course that didn't appear in the original diagram. That's like failure's not an option. Well, it's hard to say, but actually failure is always an option. I don't like to talk about it, but what happens is the road of the roles, then people worried about their jobs. Do I have a position in this? Are they going to get rid of people? I don't like this new agile stuff. I might be without a job. I'm quite happy and secure. I've been here a long time. I'm not bought into this fear and distrust set in. And of course then the problem is that if the more you plow on with this without getting people's buying, you then get entrenched resistance, which then may well need to failure because it's just had too long to bed in. And that's a real problem. So this is a bit more like the reality. Let's pilot the ropes. Let's get a group pilot. Let's see how that goes. Let's expand it. Or if it doesn't work, we'll change the report so you can see divergent pathways here. You can see what's going to happen. You can check this plan for excessive optimism. Wait a minute. That's excessive optimism. It's too big a leap in one goal. Right. So experiments are valuable because you get excessive optimism. So this is more like the reality. And again, I'm making failure obvious, but this is the roadmap. That's your additional roadmap. But you're still making other options visible and having them ready just in case you need them because there's a plan B just in case you need it. You might need to prepare that plan B early. If like Brexit, there's maybe like a low probability of success at the first attempt. When you get to plan B, or if you get a plan B is dependent on the riskiness of the situation you're dealing with. So this is the strategy, the roadmap and the plan B all in one place. Now obviously you can have a bigger diagram. You can have smaller things on the diagram. This is a really simple example to show you how it works. But it's like it makes everything visible. I've got the trying to do as a transformation on the left where you're at, you know, what the outcomes are, are you constantly in line with that? Are you constantly supporting this? And you know, let's talk about failure. If you fail, your great people might leave and work for your competition. You clearly don't want that to happen. So what are you doing to stop it? Right. So you don't worry competitors to benefit from your failure, make it visible, get everybody's buying, get alignment. There's lots of supporting practices that will help you and I've listed them here. There's lots of other references to go to, you know, I can't cover all of them in a talk of this length, but there are many ways that you could develop this approach. I've just listed a few of them here. But really a good understanding of the present problem really matters, because unless you know where you're at, the solutions that you say might not be relevant. If I was going to go to India, it would matter if I was starting from Edinburgh, or if I was starting from India, right? And Kenefan, you know, talking this briefly about managing complex iterations. So here, this is the land of the more complex it is, the more parallelism you are likely to need, because Scrum just tends to work in this green space up here, the more complicated complex, more complex it is, the more parallelism is valid, and the more quicker sensor networks you need. But if it's complicated, it's more predictable. If it's clear, it's very predictable. So it's not like saying agile is always complex. The whole address space incorporates a whole load of different work. The nature of each type of situation you encounter that defines how you approach and plan for it. Highly complex may need different options, complicated may need fewer options and some experts. And clear might just be, well, we don't need any options because we know what we're doing. When you indicate on the map, your understanding of how complex you think that part of the map is, which then guides whether you've got enough optionality in the map diagram. If you Google started out, you might come across an earlier talk, this is by the professor at Harvard, and it's been a theme thing for a while. This was done about 20 years ago before agile and it's quite oriented towards the thinking then. There's a lot of strategy about balance scorecard and stuff, but this has been a thing for a while. This isn't just in case you come across it and that's the reference from Harvard Business Review. So it's been important for a long time, and a lot of people have worked on this and I'm trying to use agile thinking, transparency and openness to get better collaboration, rather than just telling people what to do. I'm starting thinking a little bit. This is a set of practices originally from the military. There's now been increasingly used in business. There's a mention of it here in Mike Cohen's blog from two years ago. And what they do is I think string of pearls and let's bring out assumptions challenging them and looking at second or third order dependencies so that we do this. What might then arise. What might then evolve, because particularly military if you make a mistake is very difficult to take back. So they have practices for critical thinking to try and assess like chess, if we were to do this, what could then unfold. So where could it go wrong. Again, you can look at that. It's all, it's all in the open, just because it's a military site. It's really available. And you can meet more there. So what I say is, well, let's have effective road maps. First of all, this is from comic agile. Well, I hope in our agile release train that we don't have to actually change direction because we can't. That's not a thing that trains are very good at generally. And so let's not do that. And also this is a really good viral tweets that came about a couple of years ago to say, look, it's picking up and what I'd said there is that misleading road maps are just one step after another. This road map to more like forecasting a hurricane like Dan Vicanti says, it shows uncertainty. It shows that things become increasingly unpredictable, the further ahead you go. It shows about planning to a realistic horizon, like a hurricane. There's people forecasting hurricanes, they've got PhDs and doctorates and professorships, but they still only have forecast hurricanes a few days or a week in advance, because further doesn't add value. It's too uncertain. So planning to an appropriate horizon, and then have a strategic roadmap, like my diagram. This came after my talk. And he just says there's options. What I do is rank the options so you can see are you improving or not. So we're talking about similar things here. Dave is talking 2019. He's better at graphics and I so his social media reaches is a bit bigger because it's a bit country. But we're saying the same thing. This is a more realistic view of the world. This isn't this is dishonest right. And, you know, 6000 likes and that was a couple of years ago it's broken up since then. This is what I've done about showing his proposal. And now to do a bit of a recap because I realized I taught you quite a lot and covered quite a lot of ground. I'm just bringing in road the maps again because I mentioned that start to say if you have a board the map, what they do is visualize movement, often in relation to value stream, and often in relation to technical maturity patterns like new projects, and it becomes a commodity and utility and so on. So the product life cycle, they visualize that and that's very useful to understand what to do. So then if you know what to do you can then put it on to one of my maps is then say in what order, and why, and what might the competitors do. So this is a very complimentary practice toward the maps, and it works well and takes them further. I'm talking about technicality and products, and I'm talking more general sense about organizations. As you see this is the visualization practice like a Kanban board like an impact map, simply visualization practice to bring out the right conversations. And as this diagram, I sort of see that the three parts agile is the leadership part don't often talk about enough. There's the actual agility, which is thinking ahead, and responding. And there's lean, which is just about improving some stuff. That's just about eliminating waste. There's three aspects here to agile. And we often just talk about the bottom two can neglect leadership, because we see from state of Azure surveys that it's continuing problem, but also visualizes circle as being, it's all underpinned by people. There's other people on the journey. You don't involve the customer. If you don't involve your employees, they become disenchanted, and they leave. So let's not just talk about the process agility or lean. Let's talk about the people and involve them to your invite by invite them in, rather than force them involve them, rather than tell them, all these things matter so it's kind of like a four way, a four way thing to be effective. So the supporting steps to do here. I mean, this isn't the slide to take that away. But again, key things as there's probably more to it than this but this is just some of that picture about visibility openness, avoiding to do lists and so on, and constant reflection. But just to kick some up and help you with some takeaways to kind of bring together the benefits of the supports over to do lists and PowerPoints and PDFs and static lists. There's 12 things that I noted that are visible in my map that are probably not visible in the strategies you've currently got. Why are you doing it? What program are you trying to solve? Are you on track? Or are you going off track? You know, okay, I was going to help with that too. What are the tactics are we're getting there and why? The use of multiple routes, which roadmaps often don't show. Avoiding pitfalls, which most people don't talk about the state of complexity there for what part of Knephin is most relevant for you, what your opponents might do. I mean, it's just like long list here. I just see that maybe not all 12 are relevant to you, but even if one's relevant, I've helped you and that's the main thing. That's kind of e-hack there. I mentioned here briefly crossing over our feelings too and that's the time we've already talked about this incremental crossing by assessing where you're going, evaluating, then deciding the next step rather than all being predictable. Hopefully I've covered all of this. So now just kind of the last stages. I've got a couple of books to suggest, a couple of links to follow. I've written and blogged about this a little bit more. I've done, I've talked a few times now, I've bought a bit of a blog on it. There's other things to read that are in the space like Knephin. And Declaration of Independence is biased to Coburn, Heart of Agile is biased to Coburn. They're not frameworks and what I'm trying to do is move people away from frameworks because frameworks often constrain your thinking. So basically that's time up and thank you and any questions and any feedback and while I do the questions and feedback, there's the talk. So all you have to do is look at this to prompt you as to what you would like to ask me about. Thanks Greg. I think it was a nice session. I think I'll hope all the participants now know how to do effectively. There's one question I just see somebody said, do we need strategy team program portfolio level and I'd say, yes everybody should be thinking about strategy, but whatever you're doing should all just line up. Like OKRs kind of line up to form a coherent purpose here in the same thing. But what you do is relevant to you. Think about a sprint plan. That's a strategy for the successful execution of a sprint. Think about it as your two week strategy for successfully delivering the sprint goal. Right, so of course you need different strategies, but it needs to be coherent. You need to not conflict with one another and then to be aligned to the bigger picture and the vision. Thanks once again Greg. Thanks all the participants.