Innovation technology strategy framework, 4C & 4E crafted to guide projects leaders’ approach to design and delivery of their organization’s technology strategy through projects.

4C - Context-Culture-Capability-Collaboration

4E - Embrace-Elevate-Enhance-Engage

Velimir Tasic, Ph.D., Consultant, next level consulting

    Innovative technologies, strategy, diversity, maturity, future skills, value and strategy delivery landscape as well as chess are a few important topics to start navigating with Next Practices. Once Best Practices were remarkably helpful in methodical scanning, assessing, piloting, and deploying new technologies. Today doing differently is a norm, industry edges have blurred, and novel technologies are emerging rapidly. Thus, with numerous solutions to choose from it is extremely hard to systematically utilize innovative technologies. In the following lines, I will share four points, which if you understand and set up correctly, might help in navigating through disruptive times with Next Practices approach.

    A lot of people think chess is for smart leaders and I like playing it a lot. I guess what you are thinking at the moment, but I would like to flip this thinking and share with you that playing chess actually makes leaders smarter. Therefore, start playing chess already today! I will comment here several topics that connect playing chess, diversity, maturity, strategy, project management and Next Practices.

    Diversity is one word of many meanings and even more opportunities to explore and develop our organizations thanks to its advantages. In most of cases, we talk about demographic, experiential and    cognitive diversity (https://hbr.org/2018/05/the-3-types-of-diversity-that-shape-our-identities). Of course, there is much more, but for me, the features of diversity relevant for project management, strategy and technology innovation are especially interesting. In details, I emphasise the importance of understanding and aligning project managers diversity from the perspective of their behaviours and competencies to projects that are also unique and connected to the organization’s strategy. For example, a lot has been written on the topic types of projects managers (https://hbr.org/2017/07/the-4-types-of-project-manager), for instance Gambler, Expert, Executor, Technical, Adventurous, Supportive, to name just a few.

     Maturity almost speaks for itself. Whatever it is a project manager or project management, maturity counts and benefits in both cases. Human capital maturity (https://hbr.org/2012/01/your-1-leadership-challenge-hu) has been defined as the most important leadership challenge in nowadays global business (HBR, 2012). Although age and maturity in the context of business does not always go together, we must acknowledge that these two phenomena play an important role and, in a number of cases, they are in sync. Anyway, a new generation of global managers is expected to achieve high performance worldwide, even though working productively in organizational settings means and looks very different between countries. Therefore, upskill continuously and embrace lifelong learning opportunities to be the global leader (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/least-once-lifetime-try-volunteer-explore-endless-learn-velimir-tasic/) that always accounts for the context wherever you go.

     One of the latest PMI initiatives, the Brightline (https://www.brightline.org/) is an innovation that bridges the gap between strategy design and delivery. Alongside with a number of leading global organizations, PMI has built this coalition dedicated to helping executives in mitigating the problem of the expensive and unproductive gap between strategy design and delivery. Some of the most important Brightline’s ideas are the 10 guiding principles (https://www.brightline.org/principles/) and a set of case studies (https://www.brightline.org/resources/) related to strategy, innovative technologies, change and projects management, which were crafted to help leaders in strategy design and delivery.

     In this light, I have developed a framework of 4C & 4E to guide projects leaders’ approach to design and delivery of their organization’s strategy through projects. In the framework, 4C stands for Context-Culture-Capability-Collaboration and 4E represents Embrace-Elevate-Enhance-Engage. On one side, 4C is the baseline to start with any change or transformation, and it helps understand an organization status in relation to disruptive times and technology innovation strategy. On the other side, 4E benefits projects development over a timeframe and assist projects leaders’ in moving towards delivering the technology innovation strategy. 4E also serves as a roadmap that facilitates the strategy design and delivery intensity as well as investment.

     Earlier this year, I have contributed to the topic of rethinking project management (https://nextlevelconsulting.com/en/resources/blog/rethinking-project-management-from-best-practices-to-next-practices/) and emphasised that Best Practices are about today or even yesterday, in most of cases, and they should simply be considered as a starting point to build upon. In contrast, Next Practices are about tomorrow, and they are already applied by innovators who continuously change the way they act, think, and work. Unfortunately, only 12% of the organizations are defined as innovators, according to the latest PMI research report, Pulse of the Profession (https://www.pmi.org/-/media/pmi/documents/public/pdf/learning/thought-leadership/pulse/maximize-benefits-disruptive-technologies-projects.pdf).

Strategy, diversity, and maturity are just a few topics among many others that connect chess, novel technologies, future skills, project management and Next Practices. Chess is one of the greatest board games, called the “game of kings” because for a long time it was only played by the nobility. Nowadays, gamification (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/breaking-wall-project-management-gamification-artificial-tasic) is widespread and it challenges many norms. Playing chess requires strategy and especially strategy for unknown next steps of the other player. Diversity has a special role in chess as it has 6 types of pieces, from Queen to Pawn, each with different purpose and opportunities. Maturity is connecting the dots of mastery. The more you learn and practice, the better you play, and again, the age does not matter. There are much more benefits that come from playing the game (e.g. big picture thinking, importance of the right set up, situational leadership, change management, identifying patterns), and, I am sure you will explore the idea in greater detail on your own. As to inspire you, several leaders have written excellent books about chess and business strategic partnership (https://www.ted.com/talks/garry_kasparov_don_t_fear_intelligent_machines_work_with_them). To further intrigue your curiosity, there are more possible chess moves that can be made during a game then there are atoms in the universe or seconds that have elapsed since the big bang. "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." is an excellent advice by Steve Jobs to all future Leaders.

Last month, with these remarks, I delivered my latest presentation at PMI Malaysia (https://pmi.org.my/) Symposium, Kuala Lumpur. In the past, I have enriched the thinking of hundreds business leaders worldwide and sharing about important shift in moving form Best Practices to Next Practices.

This is the first article that shares a few points related to Next Practices that might help in navigating through disruptive times. In the succeeding article, I will write more about future skills, innovative technologies, innovation opportunities, too many projects challenge and a solution for it, and a couple of other important topics.

If you are interested in learning more about main presentation takeaways and further discussing the Next Practices approach, do contact Dr. Velimir Tasic (https://www.linkedin.com/in/velimirtasic/). Also, if you valued this article, thank you in advance for sharing it via projectmanagement.com, LinkedIn, and any other platform. Thanks for sharing and reading!