How we arrived at focusing on outcomes

At SEEK Asia, with the situation we faced, it was obvious we must focus on the outcome to succeed. Here's what happened.

Photo by Jason Cooper on Unsplash

Working as CTO/CIO for Seek Asia was a unique challenge. It involved two brands who had competed head to head for two decades, coming together as one. It involved that new business adjusting to its larger footprint across 8 countries and a relationship as part of a larger global conglomerate. Some of the practices we adopted there inspire what I write in this publication.

For which practices and approaches we adopted it was influenced by a mix of what myself and the leadership brought with us in terms of prior experience and also what the situation called for. We experimented with and applied a variety of practices as part of the transformation effort that was needed to adjust our business to its new context and help us remain competitive.

We approached the challenges that our organisation faced with a mix of conventional solutions where the approach to solving was well established and some novel approaches where conditions meant an approach forward was not obvious.

Where solutions to challenges were less obvious we experimented with ideas that aligned with the following principles and assumptions :

• Product fit problems are complex and require adaptive approaches.

• Complex problems are still best addressed by people and therefore approaches to solutions needed to be people-centric. Getting to a state where an organisation can do that well means a lot of change and the approach to change needs to be cognizant to address the human needs of the organisation.

• People are inspired by the purpose of things and make better decisions when they understand the ‘why’ deeply. That means they need to be able to understand the value of what they are delivering and how what they do affects the intended audience of their product. Understanding the value and how to improve it means thinking in terms of outcomes.

• Modern products have very high expectations as consumer sophistication increases suggesting agility, while critical, won’t address all needs.

Our approach was also informed by the failure modes that are prevalent in most organisations:

• Context is key; one-size-fits-all solutions are doomed for failure because they are blind to situational conditions of an organisation and rarely adaptive. Apply even with ideas shared by this publication. Solutions should address problems within your own context. Each context is different so what worked in one organisation may not work in another because the context is different.

• Conventional wisdom commonly resulted in the selection of practices that were a poor fit for the nature of the problem. For instance, inappropriately applying approaches to managing the work of many teams by applying the approach one may have used for managing their personal task list.

There were a few things we learned along the way about what contributes to these failure modes. One is there are human aspects, i.e. biases, which reinforce the use of activity-oriented approaches. You can read more about that here:

The role of bias in the mediocrity cycle

I write about the evolving set of practices that help organisations unite in making their customers and themselves more successful. Methods that support an aligned understanding of an organisation’s vision, strategy and priorities such that the maximum amount of effort can be applied in a common direction. Share your own experiences and perspectives in the comments.