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Published on 2024-01-09 13:45:00 | words: 17617

Across".

And now, for each "section" of that picture, a short outline explaining each picture.

In the future, will add more material on the GitHub.

And, incidentally, the "conclusions" of this article will contain a small sample of how I plan to integrate (already did experiments) AI within business storytelling (of course, it might evolve).



Where are you ("here")





I am boring: again the "where are you" is not neutral.

You will never be able to have universal access to all the information, hence you have to select your focus so that you can assess where you start.

The key point is that there is no neutral "here", unless your aim is to collect a "perfect" picture of your current status.

Something which, as a "perfect contract" covering not just the expected, but also the potential cases, is quite an elusive (and expensive) target.

Therefore, usually I split the task in two parts: first, understanding where we are at an overall level, assumptions vs reality.

Then, when the first "distances" (or "cognitive dissonances") are identified, agree how to proceed.

Who should be involved? Depends on the context, organizational culture, aims, if you are within an organization or working for a pre- or post-M&A case, etc.

I am frankly skeptical of those "painting by numbers" approaches to change and projects that try to minimize the impact of context, and expand instead the repetition of what was already done elsewhere.

In my view, a conceptual "laundry list" of steps should be the following (again, adapt to your context, sponsors, aims, etc):
_ the first operational step is then to communicate the aims, roadmap, etc, preferably via a presentation that is really a brainstorming/Q&A
_ the first result of this session should be a "sampling schedule" to agree when to meet who when
_ the second result is a further feed-back discussed with the sponsor, to help if needed to further tune and highlight potential caveats
_ then, the series of meetings, each immediately followed by a summary, all done as fast as possible
_ then, a discussion of the preliminary results with the sponsor, to prepare a presentation to those involved- not to alter the messages and results, but to give a forewarning of what could potentially happen.

If and how the sponsor should join depends on the culture of the organization, but anyway the end of the further presentation now adopting more a brainstorming/joint analysis concept is to identify key elements, and also potential further area of investigation, maybe to apply the approach discussed during the meeting.

Once even these further sessions have been done, the concept is to discuss with the sponsor, agree on a presentation outline and structure, and then have a final session with the definitive report, including also, if relevant, a discussion of the next steps (if any).

If, as it happened to me first in the late 1980s to "audit" some ongoing activities (I was a domain expert, so my "audit" was really a reality check, not a formal compliance validation; in other cases, eventually instead had to cross-check activities and status vs. contracts and plans), your results highlight potential areas worth improving or that could generate unexpected impacts, the "how" to communicate is again a function of your agreement.

A caveat: whenever delivering management or key staff training to help build capabilities, routinely I had to use questionnaires that I designed to elicit a blend of "signals", not just the formal answer.

Routinely I was then asked to provide the source, and not just the aggregate results.

Do what you want, but my professional advice is: if you are delivering a series of cultural change activities, your credibility as facilitators or facilitating teams is also, as it was for me in political activities, then in the Army, then as a PMO or consultant...

... to be seen something you can also talk to "in camera caritatis".

If your assigned aim is to help improve, disclosing what you were told that is not relevant would simply make less feasible to help improve.

As, in my experience, how your present "where we are" is also a political act, that might generate support for change as well as additional resistance to change.

In Italy, sometimes this has been misunderstood- as when a competitor assumed that having avoided a "shaming" approach for a mistake they did implied I was trying to open a negotiation for a business opportunity.

Wrong: as I said recently, my approach is simply that, when doing an assessment, I agree with customers (and, if involved, partners) on the aims, budget, timeline- and also the communication approach.

But I do not consider my future interest as part of what should be affect the delivery: if you work with professionals, you have to expect them to have a degree of professional integrity; if they "bend" for potential opportunities, who does not ensure you that, in the future, they will "bend" again to extract further opportunities?

Hence, also when using in the past external consultants to complement my own network or competencies, I quickly dropped those who were competent but unreliable.

And this bring the concept on the next step that, also if not explicitly requests for a "where are you", is at least a footnote reference that, in the past, actually converted a few days of "where we are" into a potential (or actual) long-term business partnership: "where you should be".



Where you should be ("there")





Management consulting, but also technology consulting, is quite a market: you are called up for your competencies, expertise, or even just to transfer to you the role of delivering "inconvenient truths".

Anyway, I met often many who ended up believing so much about their own infallibility, forgetting that it is the customer who has to live with the consequences of accepting your advice at face value and without adapting before adopting, that they forced their ideas through.

A typical example is why I dislike having cohorts of junior consultants doing interviews about the organization: they are inclined to show how smart they are, and to repeat lessons that they were taught, and often end up acting more as promoter of their own organization, than collectors of information.

The less experienced "senior consultants" are, the more inclined they are to fall in love with their own proposals and ideas, instead of just doing the role that they were supposed to do.

While during an assessment phase this could generate some issues that can be then result in bad feeling but can be fixed in those closing sessions I discussed in the previous section, having consultants "filter" the emerging needs across the organization can result in what, as either account manager or PMO or "vendor coordinator" catched more than once.

Or: consultants using the identification of emerging needs from users to actually "plug their wares": how curious when I read reports that contain supposed requests from the bottom do do what the consultants have proposed for a long time.

If you selected the focus, you now that have collected information on where you are not as an absolute, but relatively to your focus, again relatively to those starting points you can assess the "scope" i.e. where you want to go and by when.

Then, these two parts will probably require some iteration to further tune focus, status, target, useful also to identify relevant method, KPIs, and potential alternatives/fall-back positions should something fail.

While defining where you are allows, in the end, also to identify potential scenarios, it is usually better to keep separate this development thread- also when in reality the "scoping" of the "where are we" was guided by the initial aims.

I had to work on many similar cases, both for new or potential initiatives, or to recover existing ones, and in each case the aim was to identify different levels of suggested course of action, each one with an associated roadmap.

Except when already informed and structured e.g. by a "here" activity, in reality this is a typical activity that, to be useful, should have freedom to activate further exploration and, in some cases, even subgroups reporting on explorations, to define a shared moving forward.

Hence, usually I suggest to integrate in such an activity from start somebody from the target organization that can act as an "organizational memory".

It depends on the context if such a person is part of the team "doing the rounds", or stays in the background for routine checkpoints and tuning.

Still, as a consultant, I always asked from day 1 to have somebody covering this part, to ensure organizational and cultural continuity, and avoid "spoon feeding solutions".

In some cases, this "background reality check" was done directly with a Cxx-level or other senior management, not directly involved in the "doing the rounds" to avoid influending answers.

If, instead, you have already set the "here", the focus generally shifts toward "how"- but confusing the two aims can generate what solves neither need, a bit akin to that case of what a space-bound vessel had one of the teams working on metric measures, the other on imperial- and discovered the misalignment only when in space.

Often, the activities under the "where you should be" in reality are a stepping stone toward that corporate mantra that usually comes along with any management shuffling- cutting costs.



Cutting costs ("right")





As you can see from the picture, I do not like to say "cutting" costs- I rather focus on "having the right costs".

In marketing and advertisement, everybody heard at least once the old joke about knowing that 50% of the budget is wasted, but not knowing which 50%.

Somebody cutting costs is approached as an "atomic" activity (i.e. a single unit): frankly, any cost cutting activity I ever did really started with a bit of the previous two steps within the picture, "here" and "there".

In some cases, cust cutting is a "whatever it takes", to release liquidity, hence also paying short-term penalties is acceptable for a recovery of flexibility and freedom.

In most cases, before "selling" the cuts, would advise having a look at constraints- as many cost cutting initiatives ignore "details" such as:
_ what to do with staff
_ cost of releasing/shuffling/retraining existing staff
_ even the need to add new specialists
_ lifecycle costs before and after cuts
_ impacts on resilience of cuts
_ etc etc.

A typical example of impacts on resilience of cuts is the concept of firing/retiring those more expensive, and then assume that there is no need to "transition them", i.e. to have a knowledge transfer to somebody younger, as the expectation is that the business is anyway changing, and also technology is changing, and anyway mindsets changed, and training new people on the old ways would be a waste of resources.

It might make theoretical sense- if you ignore the "systemic side" of your costs, and also the need to ensure continuity.

A classical example of this approach was the Y2K case (have a look at a recent documentary), i.e. the "crisis" generated in the 1990s by the approaching year 2000, at a time when most computers considered years only with two digits.

Actually, my first banking project in Italy, in 1987-1988, was a banking general ledger and, against all the expectations about Italy, being always the last minute fixer... that project included also expanding from YYMMDD to YYYYMMDD.

Anyway, in late 1990s I was already living in UK, and was curious to see how my colleagues in Italy coped with that, also because since the late 1980s I saw many companies shifting from mainframes to PCs, and "retiring" accordingly not just hardware, but also e.g. computer programmers and administrators used to work just on mainframes, who, being at the end of their career, where more expensive.

First, I saw what I had already seen in that first banking project in the late 1980s: back then, some critical software was still running but had been developed in the 1960s, and worked in... Assembler (as close as possible to the machine), and therefore both some managers (or even senior managers) and retirees were needed.

Then, also on PC-based software, saw something that looking like a circus.

Suddenly, there was in late 1990s in Italy demand for software programmers, all at the same time.

And some good programmers started... switching job on a monthly basis, each month getting an increase of one or more million Italian liras per year (or even a hiring bonus) with no strings attached from new employers, and then... jump ship the next month.

The "circus" side was that each one of the companies I talked with in Turin was proud of having snatched people from their competitors, assuming, for reasons unknown, that nobody else would do the same to them.

Only to tell me later the sad story of how they had just lost somebody to a competitor.

Another interesting concept of "cost cutting" was that, a decade later, many companies decided, even before cloud computing, that buying hardware (computers, printers, etc) was a burden for their balance sheet, and decided to convert CAPEX (investments) into OPEX (operational expenses), by sometimes selling hardware (or even transferring software and people) to suppliers, and then leasing it back.

Nice concept, but with a catch: unless you assume somebody really gullible on the other side, having contracts that prescribe a cut on the initial budget that is not one-off, but a further reduction each year, implies that somehow somewhere your new providers have to make money.

Yes, they could get cheaper and less experienced staff; yes, they could ensure the service but not the choice of hardware or its maintenance schedule.

Still, keeping that pace would not be enough.

At least, you would need to increase utilization, e.g. by having some equipment available but not local, and shared with others (I saw in the 1980s companies delivering timesharing services, and since the 1990s outsourcing connected via cable).

With a couple of issues:
_ if you had a peak demand, before cloud computing, you would not necessarily get that immediately, you had to "book"
_ if you wanted to switch supplier after the compulsory period, there would be some additional costs that many forgot.

So, if you have a computer or other equipment in house and want to replace it, you can "sell" or dispose of it, but if you actually got it as a loan from a supplier, you might have to still pay what in UK was called "standing fee": use it or not, you still have to pay as if you had the equipment for a fixed amount for a minimum number of billing periods.

Years ago I was asked to prepare a proposal for a cost-cutting project that then was assigned to somebody else.

The key point was to cut down the utilities costs across multiple sites, each one with its own contracts.

If you want to cut costs from suppliers that deliver something embedded in your organization's core products or services, buyers know that there are contractual conditions, constraints, etc.

Instead, for costs that are not related to your products or services, but are really "overhead", e.g. indirects and consumables, such a discipline often is a little bit more lax, and, due to lack of volume or perceived criticality, often standard contracts from suppliers are accepted.

Such contracts limit flexibility that the company, considering how it works with other suppliers, assumes to have.

The idea is that if you buy a commodity, you get the commodity treatment, i.e. all those involved focus on minimizing cost, as it is the main differentiating factor.

If you extend the model to other activities that you externalize, you are actually potentially converting activities where you would need to influence in terms of content, delivery, and even update, into "off-the-shelf" where you get the minimum quality that the vendor can get away with.

So, whenever I got asked how to approach a cost-cutting initiative, I obviously started with... checking if the "here" and "there" had already been done.

If the answer I received was just something on the line of "we need to cut costs by X%", as a consultant proposed a multi-step approach: first, to identify internal and external constraints and potential, then, to define a roadmap for implementation- even before starting the first negotiation.

If the customer instead wanted just a negotiator to strong-arm suppliers, I suggested to use those who were already doing that service across other areas, with a caveat: while the approach works on commodities or "commoditization" of services, in other areas you just risk getting what you negotiate for, while the best resources are progressively transferred elsewhere.

Which is, incidentally, what is currently suffering Italy: companies keep routinely stating how many jobs get unfulfilled, but then, when you compare salaries and working conditions, you understand why, instead of changing, many smaller companies keep proposing to have the State pick up the tab for training and shortening training times- generating a self-fulfilling prophecy for further lack of staff able to relearn/unlearn in the future.

Cost-cutting should be approached strategically, i.e. part of a redesign of supply chains (including talent supply chains), and even redesign of internal systems and processes: just leaving it to "bean counters" implies forgetting what is generating the differentiating value that justifies selecting your products or services vs. your competitors'.

Actually, the concept of "right" within the picture derives from a 1990s book published by Sun.

At a time when everybody was talking to shift from "capacity planning" on mainframes to "downsizing" (cutting down to PCs and LANs, externalizing/outsourcing, etc), Sun wasn't cheap- and their proposition was "right-sizing".

It was before the old (until 1980s) timesharing transitioned into the current cloud computing, but some concepts were interesting.

I could suggest a couple of books, but the concept was again to consider that information technology was not anymore an add-on to business activities, was already becoming a cornerstone, a differentiating element.

I remember how already in mid-1990s in the USA, when my friend had an issue with his Japanese car just before entering the desert, the licensed car repair shop had already access to a database that allowed to check the repair history of the car, and pinpoint to parts that had generated the issue and were not original (a current critical issue in many industrial equipment).

Some 30 years later, even the smallest city car comes equipped with sensors and computers, and cost cutting would require being able to integrate in your corporate information systems also feed-back on how equipment (cars, computers, equipment on the shopfloor, etc) is used, loaded, and maintained, to pre-empt more expensive events.

So, if in the 1990s the concept often discussed was to bring the CIO within the Board, nowadays the concept will probably evolve into having the CIO knowledge embedded in part within other senior managers' roles, and shifting CIOs toward a different role.

The point is that, now that technology (and not just information technology), thanks to our "automated assistance" (as AI can support more than AI, whenever there is structured knowledge) can be increasingly "disintermediated", we will probably need more people able to see "systemically" their own domain, i.e. in terms not just of a collection of components, but a collection of mutually affecting interactions.

To that, others would need to add the "system of systems" perspective, but on a dynamic, and not static, concept.



Shuffling options and priorities ("shuffle")





Currently many companies, notably larger ones, think in terms of "structures", "supply chains", etc- a static concept.

Instead, and this affects all the four areas of "here", "there", "right", "shuffle", living in a data-centric society implies, as I wrote in countless articles, it is not anymore a matter of receiving and transmitting, but also of distributed processing (integrating data from the environment into your own).

While some "skeleton structure" will keep being static (e.g. each company will still need to have some "functions"), if not in size in terms of key processes and activities or constraints, probably future organizations will have to structured more around "organizational domain antennas".

Or: sharing a purpose (the organization's purpose), focused on a specific domain, but flexible in terms of resources involved and processing of the signals from inside and from interactions with the "outside"- call it ecosystem, but should be an extensive concept of ecosystem.

Static organizations where the relevance (and relative power) of a structure is linked to its size will become a waste of resources, when you will have to tailor each product and service to each service/use point, and will have to process whatever signals it provides back, to further tune not just service/use, but also potentially evolutions.

Evolutions not just of future products, but also of the individual product or service, that will be increasingly defined by software and, therefore, by its interactions.

Currently it is considered "state of the art" to have OTA (over-the-air) software updates for devices, cars, and in the future all an assorted variety from self-driving vehicles, to traffic lights, to your own "white equipment" at home: imagine your fridge updating itself and its operation modes according to how you use it, how other learned how to use their own, and improvements identified this way.

Seems far fetched and futuristic, but actually it is within the realm of existing capabilities at least in smart cities: otherwise, what is the point of delivering universal Internet access, broadband, and sensors scattered everywhere?

Therefore, while in the 1990s and 2000s when I was called up for projects to identify options (e.g. alter organizational structures or product/service portfolio by business unit) it was part of shifting from a steady state to another steady state, now and in the near future would make more sense to expand on the concept of what has been our ongoing test at the EU level due to the COVID pandemic.

We got lost in a long list of projects, infrastructure, etc, but the concept with the NextGenerationEU and its ancillary activities, as well as its "operational arm" ("braccio secolare", would have been said centuries ago) Recovery and Resilience Facility was really:
_ to create a new adaptive rules framework that could be used also in the future
_ to pave the way for future generations that will receive and maintain its results
_ to ensure continuity for the existing, while building up capability to adapt.

Overall, it is really an extension of the approach adopted within the "preamble" of GDPR: pre-empt by defining a framework that will guide future choices, instead of micro-managing the future as a projection of the past.

It is a 27-countries ongoing experiment that will require some tuning, but due to its adjustments while keeping that short- and long-term views in sight, it could be useful to deliver some lessons in shuffling options and priorities.

Despite the almost joking title, this is probably the most difficult set of activities, both technically and politically.

In many organization, scrapping a project, even when irrelevant or simply not feasible, is akin to career suicide; hence, organizations keep going on projects also when everybody know that are hopeless and that expectation is to deliver in time, on budget, and with full specs.

In my view, adopting agile is not a matter of rituals, in my view, but of mindset; I started using it as "iterative" and "incremental" blending my experience in PROLOG and PASCAL with a four-pages methodological hint on how our corporate "waterfall" methodology could be adapted to projects whose requirements developed through the first delivery: do something, see how it goes, explore, refine, and either iterate or add an increment.

In the early 1990s, as part of my joining the mailing list of "Re-inventing the Government" in the USA, received a CD-ROM from the DoD containing a library on Business Process Re-engineering, plus documentation and studies on cost improvement, strategic initiatives, and some software tools that the USA Government had developed to allow each branch of the government leverage on the aggregate expertise and produce comparable documents with number crunching, the usual "vision", "mission", "targets", etc- long before the recent "mission-based" approach that became trendy few year ago.

The "package" included also a magazine, called "CrossTalk" (a summary of its history is here), which, despite being nominally focused on defense software, discussed methods, approaches, etc that, beside defense and software, could support other data-centric initiatives.

The interesting part of the key tool, TurboBPR, was that allowed adding the data collected, compare scenarios, and generate reports with charts, etc, easing the cognitive load involved in producing such reports.

Pity that worked only up to Windows 2000- anyway, was a useful "training ground", whose concepts actually inspired other applications I did for customers.

The key point is not that software, or that CD-ROM and its content: it was being open to collecting contributions as a way to influence change.

Hence, most complex projects could actually benefit from a blend of approaches- including monitoring continuously and shuffling options and priorities.

As an example, many years ago I was managing part-time a key account for a partner.

My first step was to review all the existing contracts, and identify some key changes:
_ redesign the contract as a budget with budget lines
_ have a single contract reference (myself and the CIO of the customer)
_ add an operational, onsite person of reference, a "resident" onsite
_ have monthly progress, not just billing, based on "signals" from the resident
_ discussing with the CIO potential reshuffling and prioritization
_ alter the way time and resources allocation was reported, so that we could pre-empt changes.

The key benefit for the customer was transparency and halting the practice of having budget consumed and then continuously asking for "top up".

Also, this retained flexibility but with accountability, and allowed us to obtain a series of benefits, both direct (e.g. improving governance and introducing "fast close" to accelerate billing, while reducing the number of discussions about budget, and becoming more proactive in proposing activities, highlighting potential needs and re-prioritization, etc).



Conclusions



Let's begin from the end: I think that, as I wrote above about my writing experience while in Brussels, you have to find your own voice.

My English language journey started almost by chance (20 hours with a native speaker in the first year of high school, as an experiment, voluntary choice), then formally had a second serving of the same (another 20 hours- which attended only partially, as I was already moving on my own journey using books).

In both cases, when I was 14 and 15, as, beside Italian, the only two languages I studied formally were French and Latin.

Curious how both in elementary, middle, and high-school ended up being in classes that were doing some experiments.

In elementary school, we had just one teacher plus a religion teacher, and the experiment was to "augment" maths with set theory.

In middle school, it wasn't really an experiment, but two opportunities: our art teacher was actually an artist, our music teacher was actually known to the piano teacher that I had eventually to study with as extracurricular activity, and our class was the last having Latin- actually, just for a couple of years, as then the subject was withdrawn, and we had to restart in high-school.

In high-school, as I wrote we had the option to add a second language, while in those late 1970s to early 1980s chaotic years we had also an experiment in self-management called "monte ore": we used the building in the afternoon to organize our own classes and subjects, and, more important, that same "colloborative spirit" was transferred to other subjects.

So, in part to keep me in class (I was always out there doing some political protest which in my case ended up with a long study day in a library on subjects I liked), I was assigned to deliver some class, and had to learn how to deliver (the initial complaints was that I was talking to my classmates as I was used to talk to my younger brother), and of course how to research in libraries (at the time, no computers: paper catalog index and then wait for paper-based books and magazine, maybe sending back what was not really relevant).

Beside what others too had to do (presentation about art history, literature, etc), I also went "solo" on two laws (one about security, one about alternative service to armed services, both new laws), and then was asked by my math and physics professor if I would be interested in delivering presentation on acoustics and music, as well as the physic of... missile engines.

I liked researching further both subjects (I had already a bit of knowledge), and pity that did not have to deliver a presentation on LASER.

All this to say: when I have a doubt, I look for reliable sources, also nowadays, i.e. published books or other material (including YouTube and Wikipedia, of course), looking at those with multiple sources and cross-referenced by other reputable sources.

Works? Well, apparently... better than for many politicians that supposedly have a staff that should shield them from the typical "Facebook-sourced" conspiracy theory, but instead end up delivering occasionally speeches that would be the joy of conspiracy theorists.

And I have no doubt that some of them, in a "circular self-referential mode" occasionally quoted Italian politicians repeating think such as chemical trails and mermaids uttered in recent years within the Italian Parliament as a confirmation of their theory... without realizing that actually, with few degrees of separation, they were the source.

If you are into "Kremlinologist mode", but risk often shifting into "Conspiracy theorist mode", I suggest that you read Bob Woodward's "Veil" (yes, the link is to a review of a discussion that the CIA itself posted on its own servers).

The concept? Also having two sources, if you do not follow the "lineage" of your sources, might still get you into "circular" confirmation mode.

To make a short (fictional- reality has more layers but the same end result): A says that Z did something; B says that A said that Z did something; C quotes as a source B stating that Z did something; D (you) states that both A and C, unrelated, confirm that Z did something.

Even funnier: a while later, E states that A and D both confirms that Z did something.

So, finding your own voice does not imply mixing fact and fiction, but if you are so inclined, you might actually turn facts and factoids into fiction, as many bored professionals did, some to resounding success (e.g. Grisham).

Personally, I am boring: started scribbling something for fun, then for school, then ghost writing at school after a classmate handed me some of his "customers" (I like researching and I like writing, and it was useful to learn how to write what were then to become "background papers"), then for political advocacy activities on European integration learned how to keep and inject some reference points while scribbling or discussing whatever was the "theme of the day".

In business, even before 2008, assessed the number of pages I wrote each year (considering various versions variants mix-and-match) to over 10,000 pages per year.

Anyway, if you keep writing on few subjects (mainly in English and Italian, but in the early and late 1990s also in French), you develop "patterns", i.e. also your grammar knowledge becomes "codified".

So, that 2008 choice to write for an unkwnown audience actually started in 2007 with few funny elements: I knew I had to learn Dutch if I wanted to settle and eventually work as close as possible, so... started by reading for the first time end-to-end few English language grammars (yes, business English allows to work by "patterns": read a lot, keep writing the same patterns, and grammar knowledge is second fiddle), in preparation of a refresh of my German language knowledge (used mainly passively and to read business documents, again self-taught), as a "gateway" to Dutch if and when needed.

It worked: when eventually saw that all those requests for "French and English" in Brussels for managerial roles really meant "Dutch, also French and English", and was told that I should at least show that I was willing to learn... passed the A2 in one month, and the same day, when I went to register to the Flemish-side employment office, at the end of the interview the interviewer told me that my Dutch undestanding was way above A, as he had talked B-level and more, but obviously when I spoke my German kept getting through.

So, went out an purchased dictionaries Dutch-, including... Latin

And then kept self-studying Dutch up to B2/C1, to be able to read documents and listen to movies, while I still until late 2011 considered feasible settling there (I also translated a Dutch grammar- you can read about that language journey here.

Curiously, it was years before, in 2015-2018, actually that "investment" turned out to be useful, as was able to read documents from Belgium, and support business on BPR activities on a process related to Supplier Quality by starting from... documentation in Flemish.

Yes, I still keep receiving job offers in Dutch: but, frankly, whenever I read (in Dutch) that fluent Dutch is required, I simply forward my latest CV or a link to its online version, and confirm that... my Dutch is firmly passive, for now, but would be willing to recover and expand if and when makes sense.

This digression is simply to share my approach: as 99.9% (at least) of what is on my CV did not derive from formal studies, I have no qualms in stating "I do not know but I can learn"- and, generally, working through word-of-mouth, my experience and key skills were the reason I was called up, as generally there were already business domain or technology experts available, and needed somebody connecting, facilitating, and helping to recover or complete, not yet another vertical expert that, whenever there is an issue, "goes vertical" and cocoons into a specific subset.

It is a matter of orchestration.

Hence, for most of what you read in this article, whenever I had to develop a "narrative" for others (about an initiative, project, product, service), I had first to understand the "available mix", and then understand who would do the orchestration after I left, or if there was any interest in developing "orchestration skills" across.

Despite all the brouhaha about New Ageish teamwork described almost as if it were a "collective" Star Trek style à la Borg, our current work environment in reality reminds often more Peter Gabriel's song on the the Milgram Experiments (I like the song, but probably it is more useful to watch the documentary "The Century of Self"- four hours well spent).

Or: yes, there is a collective thinking that shifts toward groupthinking, but actually the consensus is generated from above, not from below.

Therefore, widespread orchestration skills are really contradicting the real operational culture of many organizations, also if all currently talk of "emergence" as a consequence of our data centric society.

Meaning: remember always to think long-term and what are the "embedded" cultural patterns in some best practices, before introducing them.

Creative disruption is nice after it delivers, but while is ongoing can be... chaotic.

And governance of a complex system is feasible, but if try to turn in zero time a system from structured, vertical into a complex flexibly dynamic system based on self-organization and continuous "emergence" of new organizational postures, you do not need managers, or even facilitators, you need chaos surfers.

Somebody could say that I am an incrementalist: personally, I describe myself as a reformer, as I look not just at the final state, but also the starting state and a transition that is still able to deliver value while transitioning.

In business, my approach to cultural and organizational change (which, in my view, include also introducing processes and technologies that have "embedded" cultures) is built on having, as described above, a "here" and a "there", and then work on the transition, but after having discussed with those providing the mandate their real "here" and real potential for transition, i.e. how each one of the parts affected would be able to cope with demand while changing, and what would be needed to support that transition, and which risks and "indicators" of evolution should be monitored.

If you think that moving from "here" to "there" is a matter of resources and will, and no adjustment will be needed, in my experience you are actually either paving the way for a disaster, or preparing for significant cost and potential disruptions increases during the transition, and for a while after, and also for a significant "talent release by attrition".

Having talent in house implies also having probably a moderate, controllable level of chaos that allow that talent to express its value and self-realization (as generally talent does not work just on perks and money or medals).

If your system becomes too chaotic, most will lose their points of reference, and the risk is that you will keep only those who have no alternative and will just "coast along".

As discussed above, actually both the typical "cost cutting" (that I prefer to call "cost righting", linking to "righsizing" vs. "downsizing") and "organizational change" (which often is between shuffling what exists and restructuring your prioritization) should start with a "here" and "there", also if often those two elements are underestimated.

When the mandate is e.g. "cut overheads by 25%" (generally- costs that are not linked to how many widgets you sell, or services you deliver), you should also see the overall structural picture: in some organizations, the "overheads" actually are the result of a negotiation, where part of costs and structures that should be actually within the structural costs needed to deliver your products or services, are instead moved outside to improve the short-term accountability of the production or service side.

I discussed a bit of this element above, but the concept here is: do not get carried out with your own narrative, ignoring reality.

As I wrote above, in my "experiments" I am considering also integrating AI- would be silly not to, and this is also a reason why in 2022 added a string of courses on the management side of AI projects/products and, generally, physical-digital engineering, both with and without resources constraints.

Those who attended one of my presentations (including virtual ones) know that I like integrating materials.

Let's just say that my current graphical abilities are limited to "underlining"- if I were to produce a cartoon, would be on the... line of "La linea", but with much less grace.

In my experiments, instead I saw that, as expected from somebody used to work on coordination and orchestration activities, it does not take that much to be decent in "prompt engineering", i.e. presenting your "case" to an AI chat so that it can provide something useful, and continue on that narrative.

Incidentally: I disagree with those who say that prompt engineering is going to be one of most hot jobs long-term; short-term, yes; long-term... models will become "smarter" at extracting from what you ask a conversational thread that will really deliver the prompt needed to do what you want.

When it comes to narratives, I am good also in business at "treatments", i.e. converting a concept into a short story that covers end-to-end your case, and then in delivery, but I am used to interact with audiences.

Hence, when I move from storyboard to delivery... usually skip the scriptwriting side (also if since I was a kid I was used, for family reasons, to read and reread scripts for theatre or something else).

Therefore, I will probably stick to concepts, treatment, use a visual AI to help in creating faster a storyboard, but either will skip, or enroll others to prepare full scripts, or try developing some (albeit in the past prepared and delivered short scripts, e.g. as part of project presentations and direct marketing, considering the potential reactions of the audience, to be prepared to keep the "story" on course).

As for the delivery, I tested a bit (assuming that was creating a potential cartoon series to use in business, but focusing just on few "frames"), and there is potential to have at least a first draft- but, for the time being, I think that human intervention is still better.

Anyway, for business storytelling, I think that the full cycle is becoming increasingly feasible, and should be able to be embedded soon in publications.

The main reason? Since at least the late 1990s, we like a lot to talk about differentiating business models, innovation, etc, but after you remove the jargon or specific lingo, it is pattern repetition after pattern repetition.

And, as some said, anything that is based on a pattern can be automated- eventually.

Already in the 1990s I remember how often I found in business people who assumed to be creative thinkers, but did not realize how much they actually were part of their own reading, culture, times- and how often they "recycled" elements of all into something that they assumed to be "creative".

Our IPR law current approaches did not help: I wonder how much of our pre-WWII culture would still be feasible if we had had the late XX century approach to copyright and intellectual property, to say nothing if it had already existed in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome.

Therefore, another area of obvious potential interest is having something less probabilistic and more deterministic embedded in AI models supporting the research phase, e.g. to generate potential scenarios that are credible and can then be discussed by people.

Reason of the "less probabilistic" and "mor deterministic"? Certainly because my AI journey started decades ago with PROLOG, which had a different logic from our current most common models.

And also because I find funny reading some of the "hallucinations" (e.g. when an AI goes creative about who wrote what when- reminds of Borges and Eco with their fictional bibliographies) but, in our current knowledge dissemination environment, quite open to "circular self-referential", the risk is that we end up with reference work and even schoolbooks that contain even more fake or distorted information than they do now.

Only: while our current distortions are really linked to political or other type of bias, the AI-generated hallucinations are potentially more subtle.

It is interesting how the BYOD (use of your own personal devices in your workplace- I published two mini-books on that in the past, BYOD and BYOD2- you are the device) now evolved into the potential impacts of the use of generative AI in business to... avoid working.

Personally, I considered a badge of honor receiving this "AI generated" score on one of my recent articles:



Each one of the previous four sections of this article could actually be converted into a presentation, but instead will just, eventually, release material that could be useful to implement some concepts.

This article had a simple aim: share