TL;DR
Solutions are at the heart of our digital strategy. In order to frame a solution we need to generate many solutions, refine our solutions rationally and finally, distill our solution in order to compensate for the unknown.
What are solutions?
A solution is a systematic way to accomplish something. Solutions are the heart of our digital strategy and are made up of resources and processes. Resources are things of value that are required to deploy your solution, think ingredients in a recipe. Processes are instructions on how you put your resources to work, think instructions in a recipe.
Once we have articulated our success criteria and mapped our contextual understanding we need to move on to framing solutions. Within the domain of digital strategy, solutions are an interconnected set of ideas, tools and processes that help us achieve our success criteria.
Creating solutions
In order to create a robust solution we need to:
- Generate a volume of solutions
- Refine with rationality
- Distill into a kernel.
1. Generate a volume of solutions
Talent hits a target that no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see. Arthur Schopenhaur
The first stage of coming up with a solution is to generate as many solutions as possible. Our role in this stage of solution development is diversity and volume. We need to create as many diverse solutions as possible. In order to create many diverse solutions we need to involve as many diverse people as possible to help us.
Having a diverse group of capable brains collaborate on a solution will increase our final solution's supperadditivity, a term coined by Scott Page in a paper where Page proves that diversity trumps ability when solving difficult problems. Supperadditivity enables diverse teams to reach far more successful solutions than individual experts by constantly challenging and building on a solution with new, fresh perspectives. Within capable, diverse teams the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts, the whole is even greater than the most talented individual in the field.
2. Refine with rationality
With a wide range of solutions at our disposal we now need to narrow our solutions down. To do this we need to have a set of objective criteria against which we can evaluate a given solution.
To narrow down our solutions we'll evaluate them with objective criteria such as potential to succeed, cultural fit, relevance to customers, difficulty to deploy etc. When we have refined our list of potential solutions to a handful we then need to ask ourselves if our end solution is any one of the solutions we've refined to or a combination of several.
3. Distill into a kernel
Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Mike Tyson
When creating a solution we need to be careful that we compensate for the unknown. Although our solution may look great on paper it may not stand the test of time when we release it into the big bad world. In order to reduce risk we distill our solution into its simplest form - something that can be launched within as short a time frame as possible.
Distilling our solution into something we can quickly launch ensures we don't waist resources on unnecessary components and it allows us to identify and respond to unknowns far more quickly. By doing so, a distilled solution enables us to be more agile and build out a robust solution far faster than if we released our solution whole hog in a live environment.
The potential perils of going to market without a distilled solution are exemplified in Google's launch of Google Wave. When Google first launched Google Wave in 2009 they stated that “Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today”. The product was feature-rich and launched with a great amount of hype. Because of its multitude of features Wave was confounding for most users and Wave's active users were far fewer than Google would have hoped. Within a year of launching Google shut Wave down.
Conclusion
In this article we've gone through the steps to frame the solution for our digital strategy. In future articles we'll go into the tools, methods and processes we use within each of these steps in much greater detail.