7.1 Opportunities and Strategy Part 1

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Hello and welcome back to Enterprise. Project Management with cane

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today will be going over less than seven opportunities and strategy.

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And this will be your potentially thing. I should be a very interesting topic of discussion because now you're really starting to kind of get into what I jokingly refer to as the big brain stuff. How do we go about

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executing strategy, talking about strategy, thinking about strategy, and that really speaks to even the higher level of how do we talk about reasoning?

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Okay, so before you can apply a strategic solution

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to a problem,

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the problem must first be defined. And don't,

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uh,

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sort of think too lightly of this. This is by far one of the more difficult things to do

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in terms of enterprise project management.

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We've talked about the investment mindset. We've talked about some of the other kind of things,

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and that's all sort of surrounding the problem definition and the problems in the solution definition, which is sort of the input for an enterprise project management process. So

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businesses and organizations

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at the enterprise level

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really 10 to sort of have a bureaucratic inertia. And so if there's no outside impact on them. They tend to do the same thing over and over again, and that's the Norman to be expected of. Nothing wrong with it. But it just goes to show you that things, that kind of perpetual motion machine, they just kind of keep on chairman.

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So before you get the input

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for enterprise project,

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what you're most likely going to face is either a problem or an opportunity and depending on whether you're a pessimist and optimist, there kind of two sides of the same coin. So every problem that organization faces is potentially an opportunity to be the first to market, to develop a better mousetrap

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to be the next.

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You know, Amazon, Starbucks, Google whomever, and really revolutionize your industry and potentially revolutionized the world. Ah, lot of those start off as problems, and you do what's called a need analysis or business case if we talked about earlier.

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And those, uh,

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that those processes are really the idea of trying to get your head,

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you know, wrapped around this particular problem and what opportunity is available to the organization to address that business problem or regulatory problem or societal problem wherever the case might be

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now, before you can really

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dive deep into strategy and how to define the problem and that kind of thing. We gotta first talk about the difference between complicated

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versus complex problems, and we'll drill a little bit deeper into this later. I'm not gonna give you a ton of historical reference, Aaron like that right now. But what I want you to think about

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is

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the difference between the two because they're two different words. So they have two different important meanings.

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Some problems are complicated

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and some problems are complex.

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How you solve a complicated problem

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is not how you solve a complex problem

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and the the key difference between the two. Really, at this point from what we're talking about is complicated problems, have a finite number of variables that we can control for and think about and talk about and playing around and so on.

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Complex problems have too many variables for the human mind. To really be able to

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build a model or build some sort of cognitive framework that will demonstrate and illustrate the solution to this complex problems doesn't mean that the complex problem is unsolvable,

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although in some cases it is up for some debate. But what it means is, is that you can't

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come up with a relatively simple solution

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for that problem.

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I think, especially nowadays, when you look at some of the things on the news and all the things going on in the world,

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you should be able to kind of illustrate that a lot of times we have these complex problems,

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whether it's global terrorism or whatever. It doesn't really matter. But you've got. We've got these very, very complex problems. And in the meantime, the folks that are trying to solve these problems are potentially Onley thinking and complicated terms. And I think if you once you understand it will be getting in more detail on those,

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it should sort of illustrated, even in your day to day life where you can see there is this.

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There's a gap between the two that we aren't very well equipped to face right now,

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so that's kind of just thinking about that. Their parts of problems different kind of frameworks

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between complex and complicated.

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And then you gotta even take a step further back than that and say, You know what is reasoning? Ask yourself, you know, right Now what is reasoning?

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What is the thing that you do in your mind to try to take a problem, understand it, formulated,

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develop a hypothesis of what's causing it, develop a solution and and actually use that logical deductive reasoning process

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to find that solution? If you you know it's again, we're going into the big break stuff, so it's kind of hard to necessarily talk about

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very linear early. But this is MME. Or just to get your mind kind of warmed up to what we're talking about when we start talking about strategy, execution and enterprise project management.

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We all have different styles of reasoning. There is no one size fits all that's going to say if you reason this way and you go A, B, C and D, that you will find the solution to all of life's problems and you're gonna be successful. That's not what I'm trying to say. What I'm trying to say is that

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reasoning

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is a process unto itself, and it differs based on your experiences, your culture, all these different things change how you reason, and it's important before you get into some of this enterprise strategic stuff to sort of understand how you reason and how your brain works.

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So along those same lines, what is your cognitive framework? So I've been postulating

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during this course based on my cognitive framework, the way I see Enterprise Project Management the way that I see solutions to these large scale, complicated, complex problems.

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And

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I think I'll call them best practices or frameworks or whatever. But that's just really my cognitive framework. It's what I bring to the table. When I go and look at an enterprise wide problem and try to help develop a solution.

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There's no necessarily

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right or wrong answers. There's best practices and, you know, things that have not been accepted to be best practice, but doesn't mean they're not gonna work. What's really important

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about Sir TV execution and strategic problem solving

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is to really inculcated and think about.

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How do I reason?

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What's my cognitive framework? How do I approach problems? Because the more self aware that you are,

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the better you'll be able to contribute to a collaborative problem solving process