If a big problem in your company has been stuck for a while, the first question is whether you need someone to build the map or someone to run it. When the problem is still complex, a strong operator will give you a lot of motion in no agreed direction. You need the map first.
Most owners already feel this, even if they would put it differently. I use two plain words for it, and the difference between them decides who you should hire.
A complicated problem has a lot of parts, but every part can be known, laid out and handed to someone, so there is a clean line from it back to simple. A complex problem depends on things no one can fully know or control, like how people feel and what they choose to do, so it will always be complex, however good the plan.
A complicated job breaks down into simple ones
A warehouse is complicated. There are a lot of moving parts, but each job inside it is simple and clear, and people can do it well with little need for judgment. Someone can lay it out, teach it, and hand each piece to a person who owns it.
A complex job stays complex
Making a poster is complex. You are trying to make people feel something and then get them to act on it, and nobody can write down steps that guarantee either one. More planning will never turn that into a warehouse.
What you can do is find the parts that can be known. A poster still has a deadline, a budget, a print run and a wall it has to hang on. Take control of those and move them forward as much as you can, so the complicated work underneath, the parts a team can own, gets done.
The map is the difference between a dream and a plan
A dream is the whole complex thing: where the company could be in five years, what customers will want next, what AI should do for the business. A plan is the part of that dream someone has pulled out and made complicated, broken into jobs that people can own and carry. Most companies have plenty of dreams. What they are short on is the step in between.
That step is the work I find myself doing in most rooms I am in, and I describe it as being "constantly tasked with making the complex complicated." My own record on it, as I put it: "sometimes succeeding, usually getting closer than most." The complex part never goes away. The map just keeps growing the share of it a team can own.
This is also why owners often hire the wrong help when a problem stalls. To someone who is a visionary but not a map builder too, the person who drew the map looks like an operator. So the owner goes looking for another operator, when the problem in front of them still has no map.
When the plan already exists, hire someone to run it
Building the map and running it are two different jobs. If your problem is already complicated, with a plan the team understands and too few people to carry it out, you need someone to run it, and often that is a full-time hire. Paying someone to map it again would only slow the work down.
Ask which of your problems is still a dream
Take the problem that has sat on your leadership agenda all year and ask whether anyone can lay out its knowable parts as jobs, each with a person who owns it. If nobody can, it is still a dream, and the first piece of work is the map.
How the owner and a partner share that work is in Share the vision, then let your partner draw the map, and choosing which problem to map first is in Pricing, people and AI are one decision. If you are deciding between a fractional executive and a full-time hire for the job, here is how the two compare. If you want help telling whether your problem needs a map or a runner, tell me what it is.
John Wyatt · John Wyatt's page · All posts · RSS