From Idea to Infrastructure: Leading with Strategy for Lasting Success
From Idea to Infrastructure
New ideas drive strong businesses. Your favorite services all started with some innovation: a new technology, a customer insight, or a clever process.
Sometimes you hear about ideas that weren’t perfect from the start, like the lightbulb or the airplane. The narrative of these stories is usually the same. The creators saw early failures or were told their idea would never work, but they persevered. They gave their ideas a place to live and change, along with a clear vision of what they were meant to become.
These are the ideas that have grown into the fabric of our world.
However, new ideas in our own businesses often stall, stumble, or quietly disappear. Many fail completely, are thrown away, and cause businesses a great deal of pain along the way. Not always because the idea was bad, but often because leaders haven’t provisioned the decision infrastructure an organization needs to succeed through change.
In understanding the pain that comes with change, we can see how leadership and strategy create environments where change doesn’t cause so much strife. Places where new ideas, and the services they become, are set up for lasting success.
Why Change Is Painful
When a new idea introduces change, people immediately feel the disruption. Sales wonders what they can promise. Operations worries about delivery. Marketing searches for language. Worst of all, customers begin to wonder whether your business will still provide what they want.
You have likely been part of a software transition gone wrong, seen promises a team could not meet, or lived through process changes that frustrated customers. The people involved shout, “This system sucks!”, “We are being set up to fail!”, or “The old way was much better!”
What they really want is to go back in time. Back to when the moving parts of the business worked in relative harmony to deliver its services. When new ideas fail, the people involved aren’t truly concerned with the quality of the idea itself. They are reacting to the chaos created when the pieces and parts of their world no longer fit together. The discord introduced into their daily life as they try to get things done.
Discord in the system of a business is the true source of pain when new services aren’t working out as hoped. We need to change; or we risk falling behind. But if we introduce too much change too quickly, the resulting discord can bring the entire system to a halt. Some amount of failure is also likely along the way, requiring still more change to move past it.To succeed with a new idea is to pursue change without allowing the discord it introduces to take down the system as a whole.
I believe that stewardship of a system that navigates change and cultivates success, a business kept in harmony with an evolving and uncertain world, is what leadership truly is.
Strategically Leading Through Change
When I led technology services teams, we were constantly challenged to get our organization selling and delivering the next IT innovation. We used one phrase to describe the new ideas that could reliably scale across the organization: those that could be “built into our muscles and into our bones.”
Imagine setting out to win an Olympic gold medal in skiing. What would happen if you just showed up to qualifiers, having never skied a day in your life? The result would be a great deal of discord. You would likely injure yourself and might be banned from competing again.
In reality, the strategic competitors do something very different. They train their muscles and strengthen their bones. They practice, hire coaches, and invest in equipment. They approach change deliberately, preparing the infrastructure (including their own bodies) needed to compete when the moment arrives. Can they be certain these decisions will win them the gold? No. But their strategy moves them toward that goal.
In business, new ideas are likely to fail when leaders do not have a sound strategy for how the organization will use its muscles to succeed. Even when a strategy exists, if it does not account for (or worse, avoids) key areas of the business, failures tend to surface later in surprising and painful ways.
Leaders without strategy are not thinking about the decision infrastructure that drives success or how to train that infrastructure into the organization. They are sending new ideas straight to the Olympics without infrastructure sufficient to compete.
Good Leaders Embrace Uncertainty to Build Strategy
Some leaders avoid strategy because it is seen as complicated or difficult. It is treated as the mystical ability chess grandmasters tap into as they force checkmate. It is the genius military generals have wielded to decide the fate of nations. Or it is the expensive 100-page report you pay large consulting firms for as they analyze your company’s market position.
While some of these examples are impressive, the reality is that strategy itself is not complicated or difficult. It just requires a healthy respect for uncertainty.
Strategy is simply choice, an idea popularized by Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley in Playing to Win. It is the set of decisions we make to succeed in uncertainty, those times when we cannot know in advance which choices are best. A strategy might be five key decisions scribbled on a whiteboard, or a formal 100-page document.
Making decisions in uncertainty is what really gives pause to the leaders who should be building strategy, yet somehow neglect it. Not because the choices are complicated, but because most people find it difficult to truly choose.
Think about the last time you ordered at a restaurant or shopped for new clothes. Who is to say which option will impress your date or create the best experience? Now, imagine the success of an entire business being driven by a similar choice. What wine to order with dinner is one thing. Making a decision for the success of an organization, standing by it, and taking ownership of an unknown outcome… is psychologically difficult. This becomes even harder in a culture where a toxic fear of failure has taken hold.
When leaders become more comfortable embracing uncertainty, they can build strategy simply by making decisions intended to position a new idea for success. Yet, you’ve likely seen a ‘bad’ strategy play out in your organization. So what makes a strategy better or worse?
What Makes a Good Strategy?
The best strategy is the set of decisions that actually achieve your goals. This sounds obvious. But like pursuing an Olympic gold medal, the challenge is that strategic decisions are made precisely when we cannot know in advance what will succeed or fail. Strategy exists for situations where leaders do not know whether they are making the “correct” decision until after the fact.
We can seek experience, research, and information to improve decision-making, but it is difficult to make strategy better by trying to make only “the most correct” decisions. When it comes to strategy, we have to work without that certainty. There are, however, levers leaders can use to make strategy stronger. They can focus their energy on making it:
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Less Complicated
The value of a strategy diminishes as its audience understands it less. A few clear bullet points can be an initial strategy. Leadership decisions do not go far if they fall on deaf ears, so keep the strategy as simple as possible. -
More Holistic
Decisions are strongest when they consider how key areas of the business work together as a system. A leader who focuses all their energy on pricing but avoids decisions about how an idea will be promoted is likely to see low engagement. A strategy that treats the business as a connected, moving system is stronger than one that focuses narrowly on a single piece. -
More Aligned
Decisions gain power when leaders do the work to earn agreement or support from key stakeholders. If stakeholders do not support the strategy when you are in front of them, they won’t support it when you are not in the room. -
More Visible
If no one knows the strategy exists, then those decisions aren’t guiding any behavior in the organization. Leadership decisions need to be visible as a north star driving change. Otherwise, little value will result from having made decisions at all.
Acorn Adaptive’s Offering Model: From Idea to Infrastructure
To help leaders shape ideas into good strategies, Acorn Adaptive teaches Offering Modeling: a structured approach to building strategy for new or changing services.
When an organization wants to move forward with an idea, it is modeled as a consumer-focused offering: the product or service the organization presents to the market. The resulting Offering Model keeps strategy less complicated by capturing a number of simple, connected decisions. Instead of trying to control every possible outcome, these documented decisions keep the service operable in the real world.
Within an Offering Model, we coach leaders to think holistically across eight connected decision areas: Placement, Pitch, Provision, Price, Promotion, Proof Point, Procedure, and Practice. This checklist reduces the risk of a strategy being strong in one area while quietly failing in another.
As Offering Models are built, the right stakeholders are included to make and own the decisions. Teams across the business stay more aligned in moving toward a shared goal. The resulting Offering Model is documented and made visible as a shared strategy the organization can implement, then review, evolve, and reuse as conditions change.
Learn more about Offering Modeling on our about-us page.
Leadership Is About Provisioning the Infrastructure for Success
To me, the difference between an individual on a team and one leading a team is the difference between a provider and a provisioner.
The provider meets needs as they come up. The provisioner prepares the capabilities, the resources, and the environment so those needs can be met when they arise. When new needs and new ideas arrive, the provisioner adapts to the change and prepares that same environment to keep moving toward success.
Strategy is the primary tool leaders use to provision for success. It is the decision infrastructure that helps an organization grow, adapt, and sustain an identity in its muscles and in its bones.
When leaders can transform new ideas into infrastructure, change stops being so painful. Failure stops being purely negative. It becomes productive, sustainable, and even energizing. Ideas no longer fight the system. They become part of it.
Leaders seeking provision, who are willing to build strategy, are what shape new ideas into lasting success.