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[archidomain]

What is Strategy?

Beyond goal creation and a production of timelines, strategy is a high-level approach which consolidates and directs all the smaller moves toward a big picture. It is a combination of asking the right questions, making them known to all members, and taking actions to allow for smooth transitions into the next steps. Strategy also includes meta-level approaches having to do with team members’ perspectives as well as stakeholder integration to create win-win scenarios. 

While in the problem space, contextual research will shape an understanding of market trends and industry reactions. This initial information will guide the thinker toward figuring out where to compete and with what unique proposition. As much as business strategy is about taking risks, the risks are often backed up by the research that may push the product/service/business in certain directions. It would be unwise to take a risk without some form of data or at least an inkling, which I might argue is often based on existing forms of data, perhaps invisible. 

Part of the strategy-building process includes knowing who to ask for what and how to ask for favors; we create a database of potential resources and capabilities through the teams and subsequent networks we create. I feel strongly that all team members should have a voice or stake in the decision making process (regardless of experience), otherwise they may feel undervalued and may not fully participate or offer their all.

Lastly, flexibility and the ability to pivot while maintaining a confident morale is essential for business strategies. Although it helps to have multiple plans for maintaining the integrity of business strategies in the big picture mode, it is largely important to do expect the unexpected and allow them to strengthen the propositions by narrowing the constraints. Because navigating  constraints often produces the most creative solutions.

[archidomain]

The Organization Design Lens

Choose a company & examine their organizational design through the McKinsey 7S framework. Comment (1-2 sentences) on each element of the framework as it applies to the chosen enterprise. 

Chosen Enterprise: Mint Mobile

Shared Values Mint mobile has a sense of purpose, a core ability to communicate (to customers), and to offer an affordable alternative to big tech. 

The desire is quick, and the hope is that the customer always gets the benefit; they often use Reddit for creating product enhancements based on consumer feedback. 

(Hard Elements) Strategy CMO Aron North’s humility to say “I have a capability and capacity issue” led to a change in their organizational structure within the marketing teams because employees had faith in the broader mission. That trust laid a foundation for the long-term vision.

Mint mobile also has the ability to create long-term value and loyalty with its customers with its structure, systems and style. 

Structure They built an organization that could execute and react quickly to direct consumer complaints. 

Structural system of having two brands:  1. Mint mobile and  2. Ryan Reynolds, the owner of Mint mobile. 

It was important to keep them separate. 

Systems

Upon collective agreement among CMO Aron North, CEO David Glickman, and Owner Ryan Reynolds, they notify four core group systems/teams: care, product, business intelligence, and engineering. Then they are able to ideate and create solutions i.e. upon 53 minutes of becoming aware of an issue during the Texas Freeze, they were able to offer a solution. Their organizational structure in both hard and soft skills allowed for this nimble response.

(Soft Elements) Skills Skills-gap organization: Bring in the know-how’s in house instead of hoarding power. They had an organization of a direct-to-consumer team with three parts: the media, which was the trigger, the e-commerce which was the conversion, and the retention which completed the full life of the customer. 

Staff CMO Aron talks about trusting individuals on the team / putting faith in the creative team, and not nuancing their work.

In terms of staffing, they had a team of 40 +/- and had to double in growth over the next year. The onboarding was difficult as the dynamic/vibes of this privately held company was important. They collect amazing talent and prioritize the vibe of the family. Also make sure that the current employees are not afraid of the shift with new members. 

Style Mint mobile is factual and fun which gives a genuine vibe. Ryan’s personality was a natural fit for Mint’s brand, and he repeats a joking headline “we don’t hate you.” Mint mobile tries to save the customer some money with transparent communications. “Ryan’s listening, he’s very active, and wants to do good marketing work.” 

Marketing wise, Mint mobile is selective in its social engagement, but nothing is off limits, to allow for creative opportunities. When growing their company to double its size, they have to be disciplined and ask “what do we say no to?”

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Describe a time you were forced to deal with different corporate functions, layers of management, and conflicting subcultures—all at the same time. How did you navigate the situation, and what did you learn from it?

A few years ago, I was working on a community architecture project which was fully funded by a Design Build Contractor. Our project was funded as long as it fulfilled certain requirements committing to “outreach in the community” and the development of design-build designers.

The funder did not agree with certain procedures by our Lead Architect, and decided to withhold the funds for our project. The three other junior designers and I were devastated, as up until this point, we had been pouring in our own money with the knowledge that it would be reimbursed by the Contractor. (There were five other designers on the team who did not outwardly care for the project). Our Lead was apologetic for this situation as he had been promising to us the funds, which were two months late at that point, and he felt it was his fault the funds were withheld. We did not fully understand the relationship between our Lead and the Contractor at that point.

The three junior designers and I drafted a letter to the Contractor, expressing the importance of the project for the community and how we had been putting in time and effort to develop relationships with community members to make this happen. Along with the letter, we each wrote a personal note on our development as design-build professionals and how thankful we were to have the opportunity to work on this project. 

Through our honesty, the Contractor was apologetic, realizing how much this project and community meant to us, and stopped withholding funds. 

In my professional work up until this point, I was often hesitant to show my real feelings and express my thoughts to authority figures. I have overcome that fear over time, and found that expressing honesty even/especially in professional endeavors will help others have understanding and extend empathy.

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Let's assume you're the CEO of a fast-growing startup with 100s of employees. You recently received complaints about a 'poor collaborative culture' and 'hostile working environment' in a recent employee survey. What changes could you make quickly to help diagnose and fix the issues?

  I would address the issues by speaking with the source to determine the people or systems that ultimately created the poor collaborative culture and hostile working environment, and find out what these individuals hope to see instead. I would then find out if this was a shared sentiment among individuals throughout the company, which would confirm the breadth and gravity of the issue. Since this is a fast-growing startup, the early changes and responses to problems that have arisen are very important. It may set an expectation that employees’ concerns would be heard, and would also affect the public opinion of the company. The poor collaborative culture speaks to working in siloed conditions, and hostile working environment potentially has to do with passive aggression or disrespect among coworkers. If the breadth of the situation was great, all employees would be made aware of the situation. The actual solutions / changes to the systems would differ depending on survey input, but generally: 1. The systems for change would be clearly communicated 2. Any individuals who were complained of would have punishments equal to their trespass, with some grace, in order to avoid future situations

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Think back to your most recent job. Did your individual projects and goals align with the company’s corporate priorities? Was it easy or difficult to tie your day-to-day activities to a "higher corporate purpose"?

Most of the projects and goals I was a part of were aligned with the company’s corporate priorities. In the few cases that the project felt like it was prioritizing things besides the company's priorities, I felt less interested/inclined to work as hard. I think this is not a common case because my personal goals are mostly adjacent to the company’s values. Because of this, it was easy to tie my day-to-day activities with the higher corporate purpose. I still feel strongly about working specifically toward my own values, goals, and ultimately purpose; at this point, it still feels like a 9-5.

[archidomain]

Four Lenses of Business

Rank the four lenses of business (organizational design, strategy, culture, innovation) from first to last based on their importance within an organization. Explain the rationale behind your ranking by explaining why you chose this particular order.

I will rank the four lenses of business on my current workplace, a not-for-profit research studio of 2+ years, which I am most familiar with.

1. Innovation

2. Strategy

3. Culture

4. Organizational Design

I ranked innovation as the highest importance. Our studio exists to innovate new physical technologies in the architectural sector that tackle creative explorations having to do with sustainability, and access to equitable and healthy environments. The strategy comes hand in hand with innovation, although I ranked it second because our main priority is always our vision with innovation, and strategy explores the ways in which that innovation can happen. In other words, the innovation drives the strategy, which in turn, implements the innovation. 

Culture is third because we are a very small studio who care about the culture but it is never our main concern. Since so much of the time is input on innovation and strategy, the culture is only spoken about if there was an issue. Having a small collective of individuals (often 2-4 individuals) makes it easy to have a distinct culture without having to spend time expressing it or creating it; it occurs naturally. 

Lastly, organizational design, I would argue, is our weak point, since we have not spent time implementing helpful tools to quicken the workflow process. We are very analog-centric in this category, and only do the bare minimum to keep basic records. The individuals mold the workflows, and the main head makes most of the decisions instead utilizing a process. 

[archidomain]

Evaluation

It took a lot of effort to come up with ways to implement our solution tangibly, and it feels as if we would start the evaluation phase now. I feel conflicted with some things: on one hand, I do not regret that we broadened our scope in the beginning, and maybe bit off a bit too much than what we could handle in this short amount of time. On the other hand, since we knew the schedule of this creative solving process from the beginning of the semester, I wonder if we should have aimed for something smaller in order to come up with something more tangible at the end. I am conflicted about this because the creative process can be stumped but also elevated with certain time constraints; In the past, I have been guilty of choosing easier solutions to implement thoroughly and well, but for this instance, I was trusting in the ideas and process drive our thinking so we could freely pivot if/when the time came. 

Our late pivot (in the past two weeks) was difficult to work around as we may not have had enough time to evaluate with polls, more interviews, and other measurable tools. We will continue to come up with interviews and information to inform the smaller decisions we make into this last week. 

I do not blame our definition phase nor the ideation phase, because I feel our groups’ strength and intention in those previous processes allowed us to make the late pivot that still felt true to our intention. 

Nonetheless, I appreciate our active evaluation process on two levels: the produced content vs. the process; a positive feedback loop that clearly exemplifies the iterative, non-linear, design process. I hope to continue exploring the problem-solution, and come up with more concrete implementations after this evaluation phase.

[archidomain]

Process Journal: Implementation 2

Reflect on how you and your team spent the week iterating on your solution. What were some of the success, and failure points? Did you have to pivot your idea? How did you generate visual assets for your solution? How can you put these to use in your final presentation materials? Summarize those thoughts in a new post in your process journal.

The critique on Tuesday 7/13/2021 made it clear that our solution was too broad, and we were having trouble implementing in a practical manner. We had some discussions about choosing a target user in order to capitalize on that users’ needs and design specificity. Some target user groups we discussed were:  1. Gay people | Queer people 2. Immigrants 3. Disabled individuals 4. Veterans

I was personally interested in gay people as a target user as I’ve had conversations with some of my closest gay friends about a lack of mentorship and feeling alone to figure things out. So I reached out to a close friend, asking for their opinion on our project as a queer person. Their insight was helpful and revealed some practical issues we were running into: i.e. what was the incentive for young (and queer) people to join this program? Even if there was an incentive, would the queer community even consider trading time and money for the experience? My friend was excited that we tried to create connect generations and create community, but they also foresaw practical boundaries, specifically with incentive and the fiscal aspects. This made me rethink our potential target user as our main goal was to connect generations through meaningful connections, and we needed something that drove the incentive.  

On Thursday night, 7/15/2021, our group got together, shared our findings, and chose two target users to rethink our solution through: 1. Expecting fathers  ⇌  Older experienced fathers 2. Individuals looking to adopt  ⇌  Older adoptees

Our goal is still the same. We still hope to create a community for meaningful cross-generational exchange (of wisdom and knowledge). This was a pivot, but was almost a combination of two solutions we had come up with in our ideation phase, one which featured an anonymous “chat bot” algorithm, and another about surrogate grandparents.  We continued the implementation phase by... 1. Recreating the service blueprint 2. Rethinking the user journey with two individuals using the service 3. Thinking of ways to create a community base in existing spaces (i.e. reddit, facebook, nextdoor) 4. And lastly, thinking through ads for our two age groups. My sense is that there are several types/categories of people who seek some form of mentorship, or would otherwise benefit from having a best friend of older age. Hopefully it would naturally expand to be more inclusive, and connect individuals cross-generationally. Next we may focus on creating the advertisements and storyboards!

[archidomain]

Process Journal: Implementation 1

Reflect on the methods and techniques that your group plans to use to communicate the ways that your project should be implemented and summarize those thoughts in a new post in your process journal. How do you most effectively pitch your idea to various stakeholders? How do you visually communicate the objects, environments, systems, processes, and interactions involved in your project implementation? 

On our Tuesday (7/6/2021) discussion, we flushed out rough ideas of intent (not quite a statement of intent), for our goals of implementation of the week by aiming for user journeys which revealed the flow of processes, or skeleton of our project. On Friday night (7/9/2021) we came together with rough drafts of these user journeys with individual diagrams, which was interesting to see! The diagrams conveyed similar, or the same information, yet we each had unique ways of visualizing. Jacob’s diagram was almost an amalgamation of the processes occurring in James’, Garrett, and my diagrams, and it seemed to marry or glue our ideas together. Together, we created a service blueprint for our concept. In the upcoming week, now that we have a rough user journey/service blueprint, we may look toward a synthesized narrative as a format to pitch our idea, as well as digging into potential wireframes for the processes that are integral to our solution. Through our potential narratives and/or chosen screens/spaces, we hope to convey a sense of fostering meaningful inter-generational connections. We must become our own “advocates” to convey why it is important to us that something like this exists--besides the direct users, hopefully we can convey the viability we see for it as a business model that will not only pay for itself but also change our culture by connecting individuals who are, at this moment, culturally distant. We will do so through some light wireframe prototyping, some 3D model making/visualization for renderings, and taking a wholistic approach to graphics to convey information.

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Implementation Week 1

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P&P 2021 June 29 feat. Krislam’s pup Geoffrey

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Ideation

Our team met again on Friday 06.25.2021, feeling that it was too fast to jump into ideation. To make sure we were targeting the correct audience, we revisited our empathy maps and tried to empathize with two closely targeted demographics, to search for insights. We initially dubbed our target demographics as “perennials,” and “millennials,” (subject to change), but honing in on certain audiences who were in a mindset or stage of life leading them to search for meaning making. Jacob spent some time reimagining our original How Might We’s to make set up our idea-generation process. (See past post for final HMW).

We spent the weekend in both individual- and group-sessions to come up with as many ideas as possible, some more feasible than others, and converged on Monday night 06.28.2021. We found (a good thing) that many of our ideas were overlapping, related, or share elements while focusing on certain features over others.

Garrett, James, Jacob, and myself came up with several propositions and settled on this:

In order to: initiate a cross-generational exchange of knowledge and wisdom to cease the growing techno-cultural divide and unify these communities through empathetic social interactions,

we will design a fellowship program that gives young adults 18-30 tools and methods to meet their elders around the world, interview them, and turn those interviews into multimedia content for historical and journalistic readers.

I found it was helpful to spend time away from the group to come up with ideas, then come together to strengthen and combine our ideas. Even in the ideas that were not meant to be taken so seriously, there was value in the thought process because it revealed the ways we were thinking and connecting. 

In the past, I have found myself enjoying the converging process more than the diverging process, but I genuinely enjoyed the divergent process this time around! It was great to see what team members came up with when away, and how similarly we were thinking.

Jacob also led us through the Business Model Canvas exercise, which introduced some new terms to me (i.e. marketing channels, sales channels, and customer relations techniques, which I was already familiar with, but only as a customer!) that I will continue to learn about become fluent in. I feel that several of these business model canvas ideas are natural/inherent or make sense, but it is (at the moment) particularly difficult to verbalize what I am trying to convey. 

WIP

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Business Model Canvas 06.28.2021 - 06.29.2021

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Brainstorming Process  06.22.2021 - 06. 29.2021

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Process Journal: Definition

Reflect on the methods and techniques that your group used to define the problem and summarize those activities in a new post in your process journal. How did you come to a consensus on what characteristic of the problem needs to be addressed? Group 02 defined our problem twice. After class on Tuesday, we got together and wrote our initial definitions by ourselves. (talk it out/write it out). We had similar problem statements, but our problem felt too broad and unfocused. Our individual interests in the problem were still framing the way we phrased the problem. We spent a few hours in conversation on how we might boil down our interest and audience (what’s in it for the users?), and we established a few key points that kept returning in conversation: 1. Meaning-making as an important aspect of wellness 2. The intentional targeting of a Sub-Segment of Senior Population 3. Bridging information as a solution for cross-generational differences 4. Creating a Social Network as a means to bridge information 5. And initiating an Exchange of Wisdom as an incentive for usage These were key words we came up with as a group as the core elements of our problem and potential solution. This was a way of looking at our priorities and finding relationships among them. We veered away from our original biological perspective and decided to focus on meaning-making because mental health for elders is just as important as their physical health. 

We then spent some time to ruminate on these words (talk it out/write it out), and came together on Saturday to rewrite our definitions (of course, keeping our original definitions in mind). Our group-think was divergent at times, and convergent at other times. And finally, we synthesized our priorities into the following problem statement:

How might we initiate a cross-generational exchange of knowledge and wisdom to cease the growing techno-cultural divide and unify these communities through empathetic social interactions?

[archidomain]

Problem Definition [group]

Initial Definitions [OLD] 6/17/2021

Definition Garrett: The problem is that elderly folks are living longer and are needing to prolong their freedoms. However because of their age they need more help with keeping their freedoms and this only increases as they continue to age. Another element to the problem is the desire the adult children have for peace of mind in regards to their aging parents. Definition Jacob: Providing our (society's/community's) elders with the means to live a dignified, happy, productive, and peaceful life is an obligation and a privilege. But it's not an easy task. It's not easy because our cultural paradigms are changing faster than ever and many of our elders are having to adjust to a world that is not only increasingly defined by technology, but also somewhat alienated by it.If we, as citizens of nations, as stewards of an optimistic future, are to ethically and empathically design a world that includes space and opportunity for meaning-making for our elders, what are the tools and values that we need to keep with us? Knowing that: one day we ourselves will become older and new generations will ultimately define the culture that we are but passengers within, what can we do to ensure that the lives we make for our elders are the kinds of lives that we ourselves would be happy to live? These are the kinds of questions we must pose to ourselves as we grapple with a rapidly aging population across the globe. If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, it is that the great number of our elders has the capacity to impact our health care infrastructure, if we are not mindful of keeping each other well.

Definition James:

The elderly feel miserable and forced to live in retirement homes because they do not have the basic support they need on a daily basis. The elderly feel more helpless and detached from the digital era because they cannot adapt to the rapidly growing technologies around them. Definition Esther: The problem is a societal/cultural question: Humans are living longer, but due to “aging,” humans’ quality of life diminishes as they get older. The ethics and actions as [unintentional] decision makers we (adult children) make frames our thinking of...What exponential technology or network can we as adult children (assuming it is our burden/process) create/use in order to...alleviate the psychological/cultural and practical burdens that come with caring for our aging parents? While maintaining healthy relationships? How might adult children help aging parents while maintaining privacy via: Financial independence (practical) / Emotional independence (mental) Fueled by widespread cross-generational stereotypes through generational labeling, the youngsters tend toward a negative view of seniors, and have even less of an incentive to extract wisdom from those who chastise their beliefs and values. The seniors tend toward a negative view of youngsters, who seem to disrespect the elders’ values and act with a lack of patience as the seniors attempt or do not attempt to adapt to new technology.

Initial Definitions 6/17/2021 On 6/17/2021 After generating initial definitions, we discussed and pivoted our audience/goal to be more targeted which might have a greater existential purpose. We spent time having a conversation, which was essentially a mini double-diamond approach that allowed us to hone in our smaller potential audience.  6/19/2021 Problem Context:

As humans age, they generally become less integrated in the technological advancements and cultural fads of younger generations. At the same time, younger people generally grow up with new technological skills and develop drastically differing cultural values from the seniors’. 

This is the creation of a technological information gap (knowledge) and cultural values gap (wisdom) between the two groups.  “When so much of our ability to connect with each other or transform our efforts into value is predicated upon our ability to build meaning through the internet and its outlets, our elders run the risk of losing a path to a dignified [social] life” [Jacob]

6/19/2021 Problem Definition:

How might we initiate a cross-generational exchange of knowledge and wisdom to cease the growing techno-cultural divide and unify these communities through empathic social interactions?