International Affairs Forum:  Your work at Revolution Advisors has included creating a number of key strategic planning points and development of related new terms.   Among them, the Art of Counter-Intuitive Strategy.   What makes this different from other ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking strategies? 

Brian Wilkerson:  This focuses organizations to get well ahead, whether they are opportunities or threats, before most other organizations would even notice them or perceive them.  Then, it explores how to capitalize on those things and try to take advantage of them.  It’s actually one of the reasons why we chose the knight chess piece as our logo. We focus on how you really make moves that are a little more unexpected and in chess, a knight really can be a game maker if you know what to do with it.

To give you a couple of examples of this approach, back in when offshoring was all the rage, we were getting criticized for some of the reshoring we were doing. We looked at how we actually take advantage of economic incentives to actually bring a different focus back into the US with cheaper prices for our manufacturing, better service, and better control.  Over the last couple of decades, there’s been a lot of focus by manufacturers into big box retailers, the Walmarts of the world. We’ve worked with a number of manufacturers to help them take advantage of smaller dealers, a bigger dealer network, and help them adjust their cost margins to those types of approaches. So while all of the restrategists were telling companies to change big box retailers, the big box retailers are getting more power, driving down prices, and so on.  There was a lot of advantage for these companies to go to smaller retailers.  We found that we can get clients with a much higher average profitability than the rest of the industry.

Counter-Intuitive Strategy even applies into some of the national security work that we do. We’ve worked on studying small asymmetric threats and how they would be countered.  The way to achieve that strategy is by looking much further out on the horizon at things that most people wouldn’t worry about. We identify things that are actually going to make a difference in the long term and how to get ahead of them.

IA-Forum: Another area you’ve examined is utilization of spans of control and layers of hierarch for effective strategic planning.  How is this affected by an expanding, interconnected global market?  How does it facilitate organizations’ ability to better position  themselves for success?

Brian Wilkerson:  When you look at most organizations today, we’ve gotten to the point where we don’t give our leaders the time and space to really work on strategy, whether it’s coming up with it, whether it’s making sure that people are aligned to it, or making sure that we’re doing execution effectively. If the spans of layers aren’t correct, there’s a situation where strategies start to fall off in the development phase or in the execution phase.

As an example, let’s say I’m a vice president of an organization. Part of my responsibility is strategy and part of my responsibility is day-to-day execution. If I’ve got too many direct reports from a span perspective, then I have a much harder time building the time into my day to understand what’s changing from a strategy perspective. I have less time to work with my staff to make sure that they’re aligned with the strategy that they’re executing properly. And the situation can be just as bad when there are too few direct reports beyond just the efficiency challenges. What happens then is that leaders just get bogged down.

You also have to look at where people are located and how close the business is to the customer. When analyzing structure, one of the biggest advantages organizations can have is to bring as many resources as close to the customer as possible, not only for the benefit of making sure they serve the customer but to be able to bring back an intelligence about what’s the customer looking for, what are they seeing, and what other kinds of things are they using.  An organization can then analyze how this information impacts its products or services which can then be used in the strategy pipeline. Those are the kinds of things that can really help organizations develop their strategy.

IA-Forum:  Let’s talk about your session at the upcoming ASP conference is Designing for Global Organization Agility: Creating a Nimble and Resilient Organization to Meet Global Challenges.  What will attendees learn and benefit from?

Brian Wilkerson:  The obvious focus is on is helping people create a more agile organization.  The main aspects of this are what works and what doesn’t work for organizations that have implemented, or a planning to implement an agile organization structure. We’ll talk about process more as well, what we call rapid strategy evolution.   We’ll discuss how you create a process so an organization can respond much better to changes in the marketplace and find niches that create a competitive advantage.  We’ll also focus on how strategy and organization structures can change in order to adjust to  hyperchanges in the market. Participants will learn a method for planning differently and how to translate that into an organizational process architecture that facilitates executing that strategy.

IA-Forum:  How do you see this approach being different from more traditional approaches?

Brian Wilkerson:  Our strategy is built on two dimensions, one around speed and the other around detail.  In this model, strategy generates much faster than it does traditionally. Traditional core strategy doesn’t change unless there’s a major transformation in the organization. Organizations need to improve at evolving strategy at a much faster rate as the marketplace changes and opportunities emerge. At the conference, we’ll talk about a five element process that you can perform to achieve that.

Another aspect we’ll discuss is that many organizations have started to lose focus on what information they use in their strategy because the amount of information is so overwhelming.  What we do is help them take advantage of that information by using techniques like simulations and other advanced scenario modeling to help sort through that information.  If organizations cut off their information sources and improperly screen that data, it makes them vulnerable to not achieving goals and cripples innovation.  So we look at how can you take advantage of this vast amount of information, have better ways to sort through it and actually use it in your strategy. Out of that, organizations can develop steps to really create an advantage.

Brian Wilkerson is the Managing Director for Revolution Advisors, a strategy and planning consulting firm. Mr. Wilkerson is a deep specialist in driving innovative strategies and using cutting-edge planning techniques to help organizations secure their future. He was recently awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to extend his advanced planning methods into the area of Economic Development planning.