Avoiding becoming a victim of their own success

Education, Talent and Learning, Private Sector

Context

When does success set you up for disaster? It’s strange to think of good fortune as a problem, but time and again we’ve seen organisations sow the seeds of long-term problems when they are at the most successful. How do execs avoid the trap?

We’ve recently been working with an organisation that’s been facing just this dilemma. It’s been supremely successful – it’s shaped and won a major partnership opportunity that will drive significant revenue growth, and enable it to improve the lives of many more customers up and down the country.

But the leadership knows that this success could be a curse as much as it’s a blessing. The partnership is so large that it will dwarf the rest of its business, and it’s time limited, meaning that in a few years they might be left unsustainable.

Solution

That’s why they asked Firehills to help them think about how they develop their strategy, to ensure the partnership is a springboard for longer-term success and not a weight that pulls them down.

This is a perfect scenario for taking a fresh approach using the RRR framework. This way of thinking strategically – the Rs stand for Risk, Reward and Resilience – has been developed by our partners at Dragonfly Thinking to expose and then manage the trade-offs that exist in any strategic planning process. In this case, the framework helped us explore the Risks that have been created by the new partnership, the Rewards that it could unlock, and then the Resilient capabilities the organisation would need to navigate between the two.

Using the Dragonfly think tech software, we were able to move quickly through the complexity of this situation – easily visualising the issues, and then exploring the relationships between the different strategic factors playing out for our clients, in a way that made complex interrelationships easy to understand.

This process, which would traditionally have taken weeks to do, took us less than a day to run through. That got the client leadership team to the really value-adding part of the process so much quicker – the discussion that’s helped them not only shape their future, but also build a shared sense of commitment around the path ahead.

There’s more to do – there always is! – but what this example showed us is the power of blending the latest AI-enabled technology with the human process of debate, discussion and alignment, creating a strategic way forward in a matter of days not months.

We’re now using the combination of Firehills consulting experience and Dragonfly think tech to develop the more detailed action plans for our clients’ future. It’s going to be an exciting journey for both of us.