Value creation for me is a way of thinking, where focused on growth, and growth is created not by strategy, data, technology, or business processes. Growth is driven by people committed to create what is needed, to improve what is present and do this with less resources and more output. People deliver sustainable economic & societal value for all stakeholders, by inspiring those around them to achieve more than was initially imaginable.
And over the years shaping I have learned that a value creation requires a trust, commitment and stable environment.
Strategic Alignment
Every change begins with a dreamer, change starts from the top. Over the past years too often
senior leadership didn’t see their business endeavours as connected and coherent value chains. Their primary focus was organization charts where the dialogue evolved around who should what. Alignment thinking requires all decision makers to view their business endeavours as a value chain, not merely a set of more or less valuable boxes and wires on an easy-to-forget, ever-changing static chart.
What are the typical alignment debates in your enterprise?
How often do you have them, and with whom?
What is the quality of those dialogues?
Linking Strategy to Organizational Capabilities.
Multiple individuals, groups or departments are responsible for different elements of the business endeavor value chains, and usually they are not very well joined up as they should be. All too often individual managers seek to protect and optimize their own domains, rather than align and improve across the business endeavor value chains.
Who is responsible for organising what capabilities? The answer cannot be “nobody” or “I don’t know.” Neither can the answer be the CEO, the COO or the executive board. Modern business endeavor are too complex for their design and management of their value chains to be left to chance or to rely solely on the wisdom of one individual.
A value architect can help you to link up your strategic desires to your operating model, shaping the journey to your business goals and objectives in a cost-effective manner. A value architect provides a clear understanding of how different components of the business fit together and support the strategic direction. This alignment is essential and crucial ensuring that your resources are allocated effectively, and initiatives are prioritized based on their contribution to the overall strategy.
Who is in charge of your operating model?
What is your value creating operating model?
Complexity makes enterprise alignment that much harder.
Achieving and sustaining high enterprise alignment is hard, especially in a rapidly changing operating environment. Complexity usually arises as the result of four primary factors: number of employees, variety of business lines, variety and expectations of differing customer groups, and geographical dispersal. Large, diversified, and geographically dispersed enterprises, in whichever sectors they compete, require the greatest amount of strategic effort by their leadership to be aligned.
Value architecture enables you to analyze and optimize your business processes. How? By documenting and visualizing the end-to-end flow of activities, it becomes easier to identify inefficiencies, redundancies, and bottlenecks. This insight allows businesses to streamline processes, improve operational efficiency, and reduce costs.
Can you change what you can’t see?
How complex is your business endeavour?
How well-equipped is your leadership team to beat the alignment challenge?
Activity is mistaken for progress.
Value Architecture: In a rapidly evolving business environment, organizations need to adapt and respond to changes effectively. Value architecture provides a framework for managing change by mapping out the current state of the business and defining the desired future state. It helps identify the impact of changes on different business components, allowing for better planning, communication, and coordination during the implementation of changes.
Collaboration and Communication: Business architecture serves as a common language and a shared understanding of the organization's structure, processes, and capabilities. It facilitates collaboration and communication among different business units, departments, and stakeholders. With a clear and standardized view of the business, decision-making becomes more efficient, and it becomes easier to communicate complex ideas and concepts across the organization.
IT Alignment: Business architecture provides a bridge between business and technology. It helps align business requirements with IT capabilities and investments. By understanding the business processes and information flows, organizations can make informed decisions about technology solutions and investments that best support their strategic objectives. It also helps in identifying gaps and overlaps in IT systems, leading to a more coherent and efficient technology landscape.
The above requires sound judgment, courage, time, and energy to answer. The frantic activity of business as usual can get in the way of the in-depth discussions and tough choices that need to take place regularly to lead a strategically aligned enterprise (and maintain it). Ensuring that the whole of the enterprise is as aligned as possible should be business as usual for enterprise leaders. Without an idealized vision and understanding of their best selves, many enterprises lack the direction, scale of ambition, or impetus required to fulfill their potential.
Overall, Value architecture provides a holistic view of the enterprise, enabling organizations to drive innovation, improve operational efficiency, manage change, and align business and technology effectively. It plays a crucial role in shaping the organization's future and ensuring its long-term success.
Change is an essential process to be mastered if you want to get shit done.
Value creation requires change, and change is an essential process to be understood for any modern manager… and the more you practice, the better we become.
Is your current business endeavor experiencing difficulties organizing change in search of value creation? It is well possible that change hasn’t been skillfully practiced enough. To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often. Do reach out if you are interested in practicing how to get ‘shit done’ and exploring how change could be organized with less energy, more team spirit and more fun now.