Peter Compo’s Approach to Navigating Business Complexity

Please note that the transcript is created by AI, so may have the odd typo.

Nigel Rawlins: Welcome, Peter, to the Wisepreneurs podcast. Could you tell us something about yourself and where you're from?

Peter Compo: I'm from New York City originally, and, where I grew up in a musical family. Long line of musicians, in and around the city. But then I went on to get a degree in chemical engineering. Uh, got my, uh, PhD in chemical engineering and moved to Wilmington, Delaware, where DuPont was where I went to work for 25 years.

And so since then I've lived in Wilmington, Delaware, which for people outside of the States is not far from Philadelphia.

Nigel Rawlins: Now, when you said, in New York City, I think I read somewhere your father was a musician.

Peter Compo: Both my parents were musicians and, uh, there were many generations of musicians on, on both sides. And, now my son's a musician too. So it continues.

Nigel Rawlins: obviously a musician as well as a chemical engineer. Was it hard to not go into music yourself?

Peter Compo: Well, I was not doing that well back then. My early days were not so good. And so, the music world was not for someone who needed structure. And going to school, and I went to school forever. And eventually they throw you out, you know. That gave me the structure I needed actually, but I never lost the music.

And in fact I'm doing more now and I have a site where I have quite a bit of music on my YouTube site and so forth. So it never, I never lost it.

Nigel Rawlins: Now, that's good to hear. Well, Interesting you talk about music, you've had a musical career, but to be honest, doing a PhD, that's no mean feat. That's pretty hard work, and you know, I don't think I could ever do a PhD. I don't think I'd have the discipline to sit through it, and especially chemical engineering.

Peter Compo: I, I think if you just kind of hang in there, um, there were many people who did much better than me and were much smarter than me, but if you, if you just kind of hang in there, it, you start to get the, the knack of it over time. And I enjoyed it. And I enjoyed the the rigor of it and the logic of it.

And, and so it was not a, not a burden to do.

Nigel Rawlins: Well, that's what I can see, because we're going to talk about your book, The Emergent Approach to Strategy, but the things that obviously have informed what I've, I've read in that book, which I think is absolutely fascinating and absolutely fantastic. And I'll be honest upfront, it has changed the way I think about business and my own business.

But also that musical thing, because would you say that music's almost like a science in many ways, even though it's seen as creative and so on?

Peter Compo: I think this is one of the themes in my life that I've seen the same patterns. in music and hard science and engineering and then in business and operations and technology development. I think all fields have a discipline and a rigor. It's just not obvious in the more abstract things in the arts.

Music is very abstract, but it doesn't mean that there's not this kind of underlying deep rigor to it. It's not arbitrary. It's not anything goes. And, uh, there is a great commonality amongst all endeavors. And also we tend to call music creative, but you know, you can be creative in accounting too. You can find new solutions.

You can find efficiencies and ways to help visualize what's going on. And, you know, I, I always use accounting as an example, because I thought that there were many times when I, when a great finance accounting person could bring such clarity, to a business. So I think we, we kind of label these things a little bit wrong by calling the arts creative, or maybe a R& D person who's making new products creative, but everybody else in the organization is not creative.

I just don't think it's true. It's just a different field. It's a different endeavour.

Nigel Rawlins: I think that's a very important point. All right, you've had a career of 25 years at DuPont. Now I'm assuming you did a whole range of things, and I want to talk about your book, but what I want to know is, how did your career lead you to the book. And then we should talk about the book.

Peter Compo: Well, we started hitting it a little bit, all through those different endeavors and yes, I had a very diverse career at, at DuPont. I worked in many different ways and different people and, and different, businesses and also different levels of the company and marketing and business and operations planning.

And I think that it was seeing, as I said before, the similar patterns in all of these things, and the particular pattern we're talking about, and that I'm talking about, is the Darwinian nature of creativity and change and innovation. And, that was the thread that I saw and not worth going into how I even saw it in my graduate research that I worked on, on particles that would stick together.

And there was a survival factor that was very, very natural selection like, but just in the, in the physical domain. And so I had this interest all along in how does creativity occur? How does innovation really occur? And. It stayed with me through all those experiences. But when I got to DuPont and the corporate world, and certainly DuPont was not alone in this, I was discouraged by the way people thought about innovation and about strategy.

And the two are intimately linked, right? A strategy is to try to innovate, try to create something, some capability, some physical things, some tangible thing, or a capability. That is new that wasn't there before. And, I was a little frustrated with the state of affairs of strategy and innovation thinking throughout the industry, not just DuPont.

And I started taking notes and I started, uh, thinking, Hey, I got to say something about this, you know? And, it kind of grew over the years. I would just keep taking notes and keep thinking and theorizing. I came into contact with things like complex adaptive theory. I studied biology a little bit. I, um, I listened to other people about it and it was just one of those things that wasn't planned.

And at some point I said, if I'm going to do this right, I'm going to have to quit, and just go out and spend full time researching and writing. And that's kind of how it happened.

Nigel Rawlins: And the book emerged. So

Peter Compo: It did.

Nigel Rawlins: what did your wife think?

Peter Compo: Oh, she was perfectly happy to have me go in the back and leave her alone, I'm sure.

Nigel Rawlins: Because I was thinking you quit your job and you went out to write and you've got this amazing book. Let's talk about the book. It's called The Emergent Approach to Strategy, Adaptive Design and Execution. Now, I'll be honest to the listeners. I have read it once on my Kindle. But I had to buy the physical book, work my way through it.

I've taken 160 pages of, well, 160 cards of notes. I've distilled them down to about 50 and I've distilled it down to a page now. And I think I'm getting my head around it, but Peter. Tell us something about why is it the emergent approach to strategy?

Peter Compo: It's because I mentioned this Darwinian view of an adaptive view of creativity and innovation. Actually, Darwin and biological evolution are probably the most inspiring case of what generally can be called emergence. And that is this remarkable property of things that action and interactions and forces at low levels, at the, what we can call different things, the micro level, the local level, can over time, over generations, lead to the emergence, the development of new structures, new capabilities, new ideas.

And that this theory of emergence that has been, of course, it's very old, David Hume and so forth, you know, it's always been in philosophy. But over the last decades, it's slowly becoming more and more a true science and a true understanding. And I don't believe there's anything that doesn't follow the laws of emergence, and follow the laws of how adaptive systems emerge. And it's contrasted with the idea of you can plan the future. It's contrasted with that creativity is this Eureka thing where it's just serendipity or planned, that you have a vision and then you know how to go get it. It's not those things. And the idea of emergence is that the alternative is this discipline at those lower levels that lead to those things.

And it can be planned to some extent. I think the word that's better is you can shape the direction. And isn't that what strategy's for? Trying to shape a direction. Instead of saying, Oh, I know how to get there for sure. And then modifying over time as you walk down the road, as you implement.

Nigel Rawlins: That is definitely what the book has been telling me, that it's at the lower level things that eventually emerge to something. And that the future is so difficult to predict. And that's why I loved your book. The main thing I was thinking about in terms of your book is, for example, the people I work with often work for themselves, they may have worked in a company like yourself and they've decided they're still young in their 60s. They don't want to stop working, but they don't want to work full time, but they do want to do something.

And that's where I thought your book was fabulous in terms of the practical parts of that is how we actually, maybe design or discover something that we can do or something we can do in business. So let's go through some parts of it. So the emergent thing is because It emerges from some of the little things, but we have to decide what those little things are, don't we in many ways. And you start with we've got to have an aspiration. Let's start there. So you suggest it starts with an aspiration. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you mean by aspiration and what's involved in that? And then we'll work our way through the framework.

Okay.

Peter Compo: Yes. And by the way, before we do get into that, you said something important. This whole idea of low levels and high levels and how emergence occurs. It's very abstract and we don't have a common language for this. You're not required to understand all that theory, right? Because I've translated it into practice, into simple practice things that you don't have to be thinking about those things.

And you're starting off with part of that practice, right? That articulating an aspiration is a great way to start. You don't need to absolutely start this way, but generally you need some sense of what you're trying to accomplish. And I use the term aspiration for probably two reasons. I needed an overall term that encompasses three types of aspirations that people can use.

A vision type aspiration, broad, abstract. I don't know the specifics, but I want to go and be like this, right? Or do something like this. Or a mission, which is a little more specific, narrows things down, puts you in a little more of a box. I'm going to do this, but I'm not going to do that. Visions are more, what do I want to be?

What do I, how do I want to feel? All that kind of stuff. And then there's a third type of general aspiration. And that is specific goals. I want to make X thousands of dollars by 2025. You know, pick it. It's usually got a number associated with it and a date, two numbers, a date and a number. So the theory of strategy and the emergent approach doesn't care what the aspiration is.

It's not just for business. It could be for IT and HR, or people have even bugged me about articulating my musical composition strategy. And what I'm trying to achieve there, what's my aspiration in composing? It doesn't matter, but the aspiration is very important because it narrows the world down of what might be, and as we're probably going to talk about in one minute, how you then work from that aspiration down to something else.

Nigel Rawlins: The other thing I threw into my aspiration is, what are my values? What's important? All right. So that the aspiration, but having an aspiration doesn't actually make anything happen. We've got to figure out what do we have to do. So let's, let's move into that bit.

Peter Compo: So, two quick points. Your aspiration may change. As you work. Yeah, your vision may stay the same, but your specifics, your specific mission, your specific goals may change as you discover. So I just want to put that out there. There's nothing that says in the process, and in fact, everything is provisional when you're doing strategy like this.

Think of it as a puzzle and you could change any part in any time. So what do we do with an aspiration? Unfortunately, the vast majority of strategies out in the world, and I'm talking about from the biggest businesses to governments, to the smallest community group and everything in between is to take that aspiration, that goal, and break it into a million parts and make long lists of sub goals.

Okay. We want to increase profitability, or I want to get 10 new customers in a year. Okay, what do I have to do to get 10 new customers? Well, I got to do advertising and I'm going to do that. And I'm going to do a new collateral and I'm going to do that. And I'm going to join this network and I'm going to pay for this and I'm going to do, and I'm going to develop these new products and just work backwards until you've got essentially what's a laundry list of bullet points

and, you know, that, uh, uh, that doesn't work. That's not a strategy. So in summary, the so many strategies are designed where they say, I'll start with my goal, my aspiration, whatever it is, and I'll break it up into a million pieces. And this is often called cascading. And this is why so many strategies are lists of things to do. And they're not really strategies for a lot of reasons.

Um, instead, the trick is to ask what's in the way. I call it the bottleneck. You don't have to use that term. It can be what's an obstruction, what's a limitation, what's a barrier, or just the words, what is in the way of keeping you from this aspiration. Rumelt uses that term, Richard Rumelt. What's in the way?

This is really the magic to finding a strategy. And it's along the old folk wisdom, right? Of what's become folk wisdom. A problem well defined, Is a problem half solved. And that's really why the magic to finding strategy is articulating and understanding what's the bottleneck. So that's the second, that's really the second step after aspiration.

Nigel Rawlins: Okay, so to find the bottleneck, you use an influence diagram. Can you explain what you mean by an influence diagram?

Peter Compo: Yes. It's really, it's really quite simple. And in fact, it looks like cascading. It looks just like this idea of breaking out a, um, an aspiration, a goal specific or broad, doesn't matter again, um, working backwards from that goal. Some people call it, uh, reverse engineering. For example, Roger Martin and others call it reverse engineering.

And that's exactly what it is. You work backwards and break up that aspiration. And what you find is that if you move backwards from that aspiration, the amount of decisions and actions and choices you have to take grow really big. So you have an aspiration to get 10 new customers. All of a sudden you find you got a list of how many things that you might have to, or maybe should do.

And so you get this, what I call a characteristic shape, of an influence diagram. It starts very small on one side and then imagine a V or a flock of, uh, of, uh, geese, right? It's very small in the beginning and it opens up and it gets bigger and bigger as it goes back and actually scrolls out a little bit.

It's not even a straight V. And on the left hand side, are all these possible actions you can take. That's why I use the flock of geese. When you look up in the sky, you see them, you see the lead bird in the front, and then they're moving to the left, right? You see the, the flock, the V form out there. You could draw it any way you want. I just happen to go from right to left. And, uh, so that's the way you should visualize it.

That the right hand side is the point. And that's the aspiration. The left hand side is this huge number of things you might need to do or want to do. But again, it's not a strategy just to list all those things. So the second point, then, is how do you decide which of those things to do? And that's where the bottleneck comes in.

So smack in the middle of this picture of this V on its side, There's a line, a barrier, the bottleneck that says, I need to bust that bottleneck. I need to overcome it. I need to resolve it. I need to, I need to bust through it. Whatever language or image you want in your mind, Uh, I like bottleneck because it implies rate.

You increase the size of the bottleneck, you de constrain the system and there's more flow. So whatever image it is that you want, think of that bottleneck being right in the middle. And now the question on all those actions you might take is, what is going to get at the bottleneck that's in the way. Not everything matters.

And in fact, when everything matters, nothing matters. And I just find it so remarkable that no matter what the aspiration is, and again, this applies to anything, articulating the bottleneck, and it doesn't even have to be right at the beginning, but you got to start thinking about it. It could be this, it could be that, it could be this.

That's when the magic begins. That's when you start saying, Hey, wait a minute. If that's the problem, we should do this. Right? And I never thought we should do that, but you know, unless we fix this. It doesn't matter what else we do. So the bottleneck is this thing in the middle that you got to fix. You got to get around or else you can't get to the aspiration.

Nigel Rawlins: it's the stuff we have to actually do. And I think you mentioned there are four killer problems to get through that bottleneck. And we had one of them, we were actually going to do this a week ago, and my internet was down, which was one of the killer problems.

Peter Compo: Well, uh, we could, uh, maybe, maybe we'll throw in one other idea and then hit the killer problems. What is the strategy? A strategy, so think back again to that V on its side. And on the right hand side is your single aspiration and you work back and I draw it, if you, see the, the graphics, you will see choice, action, choice, action, all of these possibilities on this big side, right on the open V side.

What is a strategy? A strategy is the central rule, guiding light. The central principle that gives guidance for taking those actions such that you bust that bottleneck, not such that you achieve your aspirations. It is true that your whole point is to achieve the aspiration, but you can't do it directly.

You have to work through what will get rid of the bottleneck. And as you get rid of bottlenecks, your system improves, you get better, and you get the next bottleneck, and you keep going, and you're constantly elevating the situation as you fight off what's in the way.

Nigel Rawlins: Now, that was very important, that, that idea of strategy. We should talk a little bit more about strategy and then come back to what we call the killer problems.

I had not realized that a strategy in the way you define it is actually a rule to make decisions against. And, and I've got to be honest, I've done lots and lots of things, but I've never been disciplined enough to follow a strategy rule until I've read your book.

And I thought, Oh my golly, you know, it's, it's taught me to discipline rather than reading 50 different types of books. Maybe I need to concentrate on the ones to help me reach my aspiration. So yes, I, I hadn't realized that through following your process, you come up with a strategy rule that you then stick to, which is really quite important.

Peter Compo: Well, this is a a major outcome of the model. And I've derived strategy. This is not me just saying, Hey, I think it's a rule. It actually comes out of a model of adaptive systems and a model of emergence that you can follow in the first half of the book. Not even the first half, the first quarter of the book.

Again, you don't need this model. to use the practice, but it's good to know that it comes from something foundational. There are very few people who have derived the function of strategy or the definition of strategy from a model. I know of one other who did it from game theory, but the vast majority of strategies in the world are not a game theory type situation, right?

You're not faced with two or three very exact or very clear choices. And I'm also not the first person, though, to have suggested that a strategy is a, uh, a rule. I think I'm the first also to be very clear that it is a central rule. It is the overarching rule that everything must adhere to. You can't have a rule that, okay, well, in this case, we're not going to do it, right?

It is the overarching rule. Then there's other tools, tactics and plans and other things for dealing with smaller questions. But this one overall rule, a strategy gives the overall guidance that will direct all the resources to busting that bottleneck in the service of achieving the aspiration.

Nigel Rawlins: And on that topic, you've actually got a point of view about the use of the word strategy and strategic. Let's go into that for a bit, and then we'll go back to looking at the framework.

Peter Compo: Well, it's quite easy to explain. I think that 95 percent of all the uses of instances of people using the word strategic actually are not only not needed, but do damage. Because what happens is you put strategic in front of a word and all of a sudden you think you've created insight or that you've said something, uh, powerful, you know, our strategic initiatives.

Okay. so are we going to talk, what about our initiatives then? Right? Are we going to have non important initiatives? Who wants to have non important initiatives? Okay, we're gonna have a strategic dashboard. All right. Who's going to sit around for the meeting afterwards to talk about the non strategic dashboard? It's a nonsense word in so many cases. And not only do you reduce the noise level of the discussion, but you force people to talk in plain English. No jargon. What do you mean a strategic initiative? Well, uh, uh, you know, okay, let me think. Um, one that we must do? Well, I'm not so sure about that.

Maybe then it isn't so important that we do it. Well, what does it mean, you know? So, and I've heard people talk about this a little bit too, but I'm really bringing it to the fore. Get rid of the word strategic. And it'll help you think.

Nigel Rawlins: I've got to agree so much. Anybody who's seen my writing, if you do see that word strategic in there, it means I didn't proofread it properly. I have been avoiding using it since I've read your book. I see it everywhere. Yeah, you're right. It's a very busy word that means nothing, but it, it sounds good, doesn't it, to some people.

But if everyone's using it, it means nothing.

Peter Compo: You know, I think there's an occasional time, you know, okay, we need some strategic thinking here. I think that has some meaning because it says we have to think about the full picture. We're not allowed to just look at a sub part of this thing. Okay, that's valid. I can live with that. Uh, strategic management?

Not so sure. What kind of management is not strategic? Oh, is that the management where we're not going to follow the strategy? You know, in most cases, you don't need it.

Nigel Rawlins: If you work in a job and you decide you're going to be self employed or a consultant or something like that, you suddenly start using business lingo and, you know, strategy is one of them, and modelling, and I guess there's a whole heap of them.

And just because you use those words does not mean you actually understand it or it actually means anything. Okay, so where do we go from there?

Peter Compo: We took a little detour to talk about strategic, but we, um, but getting back, we, we've defined what I call the triad so far. And that triad of aspiration, and remember, that can be a simple goal, it doesn't have to be a big deal, uh, or it can be a big deal. Um, if the aspiration is a big deal, your bottlenecks going to be a big deal.

And your strategy is going to be a big deal. If your aspiration is small, your bottleneck may be small. Your strategy may be small. Um, but you have this aspiration on the right hand side, this V, you've got the bottleneck in the middle. That's what's in the way of achieving it. And the strategy is the central rule that brings together all of the choices and determines which are truly needed for achieving the aspiration by busting the bottleneck.

And I call it the aspiration bottleneck strategy triad.

We

Nigel Rawlins: should mention that within that V are all the things that we think we should be doing and then we group them together a bit and then look at the interactions because basically you labelled them all the variables that are affecting what we need to do to meet the aspiration and then out of all that we, we sort out What's the major bottleneck?

And then, okay, that's the major bottleneck, this is how we're going to bust it, because we're going to use this strategy rule. And then you talked about killer problems. The killer problems are the ones we've got to overcome.

Peter Compo: Yeah, the killer problems are smack in the middle of this model of how strategy was derived from a model of emergence, a model of adaptive systems. And what they say, if you keep that V in your mind again, uh, that there are some fundamental barriers, not just your specific bottleneck, but fundamental, uh, problems that exist in all creative endeavors, all change endeavors. And the four are, one we've talked about a lot. There are so many possible choices. They have to be made coherently, and there's no way to do that without some kind of guidance, some kind of rule. There's others though. The second is, there's a time delay between when you take the actions you think are right. There's a time delay between your hypothesis, your strategy framework is a hypothesis, right? There's a time delay between when you take the actions and when you find out whether or not you're getting the result you thought you should get. And the bigger and more difficult the program is, the longer that takes. You're trying to create a whole new product line, you know, and you think it's going to be four years. Well, it's kind of tough to wait four years to find out whether you're doing the right things, you need a better way. Right? So the time delay between action and desired result is the second killer problem. The third killer problem is. There are influences outside of your control.

Government, regulation, all of a sudden. Interest rates is one that in the last few years, how long did we have low interest rates that people got lulled into the belief that money was free for, for how long, right? And then all of a sudden, boing, they're, uh, they're 5, percent again, right? Uh, depending which one you're looking at.

Competitor action. Can't control it. You might influence it, but you can't control it. Uh, macro trends around products and markets. You know, it's obvious that there are things out of anybody's control. This adds a whole another uncertainty for how to choose what to do. To get a certain result in the future.

And the fourth, in some ways, is a summary of the other three. And that is, if you look at that V again, with all those possible choices on the left hand side and possible actions and decisions you can make, and you look at that, aspiration, what you're trying to achieve on the right, it's just terrible, but the thing that's most important, that aspiration on the right and achieving it, is the least actionable thing. It's all the actions and decisions on the left hand side that are granular enough that you can actually do them. You can choose, to create a new product or choose to invest in new, new development or new marketing plans or partnerships or whatever we might use for a specific example of how to grow customers.

You can do those things, but ultimately they don't matter unless they filter up to achieving the aspiration. So I like to somewhat think of this fourth killer problem is almost a summary that what's most important, the emergent outcome you want, the result you want in the future can't be managed, cannot be directly achieved, but the things you can directly do. don't ultimately matter. And so what it says that you can't work directly on what ultimately matters. This is life. This is creativity. And this is what this model of strategy and model of emergence is trying to reveal. And that's where we get from that, we're able to say, well, what is a strategy? What is a bottleneck?

And how do we, how do we bridge these killer problems? How do we solve them? And actually, we come up with a few, a few requirements of a solution to the killer problems. One is you got to give people real time guidance. You can't say, I want you to work on this aspiration of developing a new product line that we think is going to take four years from now.

That's not enough guidance. There has to be more specific guidance about what are the nature of the products? Or what are they aimed at and what resources we have and things like that. And that information needs to be something can be followed in real time. The second thing is a solution has to be on the left hand side of the influence diagram.

It can't be, as we just said, directly getting the aspiration. And the third is the strategy. The solution to the killer problems must unify all those decisions. So you can't say you have a strategy for growing to 10 new customers within a year or two, um, or whatever timeframe, uh, your strategy is to create a new product line, you know, that may not give guidance to the rest of the organization.

It has to unify. And the end of the story is the functional thing that most can meet those three requirements and are the best solution to those killer problems that are universal to all creative effort. is a rule, a central rule. And that's why a strategy is so powerful. It can achieve meeting these requirements.

It's the best possible way to meet the requirements, tactics, plans, metrics, they can all meet it to some extent, but they're limited. That's why it starts with the strategy central rule, and then you fill in with all that other stuff to complete the story.

Nigel Rawlins: It's actually quite a, bit of work to actually come up with all of that, isn't it? Because there's a whole lot of thinking, it's quite a discipline. And the whole point of I wanted you on the podcast for is to explain to people who may be working for themselves or thinking of becoming self employed that It may be coming across complex, what we're talking about, but it is actually quite simple when you start to think about it.

But it is a discipline of thinking. A discipline for making decisions, but you've also got some frameworks that you discussed to work through to get a better picture of this. Could, could you talk a little bit about those frameworks? There was a simple one, and then there's the more complex one, which you, you call the, strategy alternative matrix.

Peter Compo: And again, I want to stress. You don't have to keep all this theory in mind. I, we're just, uh, you know, we're just proving it exists and giving some logic for why strategy is defined the way it is. It's not needed to use these tools. So a simple tool is the one we've already talked about. The triad, the, uh, the simple statement of, can we articulate our aspiration?

Can we articulate and discover and agree on what's really in the way of that aspiration and then what is a central rule that will help us focus on that? And maybe we should give a very simple, you know, follow up on that example we were giving. We feel as though we need to increase the number of customers we have.

And a traditional way is to write down all the things that a business has to do and do it better, right? Every single thing. Or, We say, well, what's really in the way? Is it our reputation? Is it the products? Is it our resources to be able to to get out to people? Is it people don't know about us?

Is it lack of skilled staff to be able to do it? I mean, we could just go through all the things that businesses deal with. I'm trying to keep in mind smaller businesses that you, you have in your uh, network here, right? Um, All of these things can be, uh, can be relevant and 10 times more that you could think of, right?

That can be in the way. Um, but what if it turns out that there's one that's really, really the big one? Maybe it is. you need to get a reputation first. Somehow you've got to get some kind of view that you know what the hell you're talking about, or that you're a relevant player in this thing, and

you might think that having a big brochure of all your products and all your services and, you know, developing them to the last little bit, um, it might turn out that it would have no effect until your reputation gets out there. And so the strategy rule might be something along the lines of, we're going to put everything else on hold and we're going to say, how the hell are we going to bust this bottleneck of reputation or mind space that people would think we're, we're a player in this,

in this game. There's so many different ways that you might go after that, and it might depend on other things, like how much money you have and so forth, whether you can buy that, or whether you have to do it by, by yourself, or whether it's a matter of getting a great marketing person, or whatever it might be.

But the point is, if you've got 10 things you're going to focus on, and that one gets one tenth of the focus, um, you're probably not going to get there. Or get there very slowly. We can come up with other examples, you know, but, uh, I want to be sure that there's some sense of what that central rule is. And then the trick is you can't violate it.

Then somebody says, Oh, come on, we're going to work on some new services, new products. No. And how many good strategists have said the term, you know, have said the most important thing is to say no. right? The most important thing is to define what you're not going to do. And that follows perfectly because what defines what not to do?

A rule. A rule is something that tells you what not to do. And you've got to stick with that rule, even though shiny objects appear all the time.

Nigel Rawlins: That is my biggest problem. You've, you've explained it perfectly, but you know, the other day I had that aha moment with myself. That I realised, oh my golly, I'm trying to do too many things. I'm going to have to have that strategic rule. That's a perfect explanation.

And I think that's almost probably sufficient enough rather than us to go into the details of the other things. So that is actually fantastic.

Peter Compo: You know, the shiny object thing is really a good image in this because, you know, there are so many things that are seductive. And in fact, often I describe strategy as a way to avoid seduction. Seduction about the things that on the surface seem to be good. But if you really understand the bottleneck and what's in the way, and you're really adhering to your rule, you'd find out they're not, they're not good.

And, uh, you know, a classic one would be, I get this in nonprofits that I, that I'm involved with and serve on boards and help, fundraising. It's so hard to let go of all these smaller donors, right? Let go to put your energy into larger potential donors. But somebody calls, right? And says, you know, will you do this?

Can we do this? And, and you have to have the guts to say no. And that shiny thing is gotta be let go. For example, and you might have to live through some pain and that's another factor of strategy, right? There's got to be trade offs and there's got to be pain involved because you have to give up something to get something.

Nigel Rawlins: perfectly put. I think I have to cut up my credit card. That's the next, that's probably one of my bottlenecks there. Cut the credit card up. But I don't know if that's a men thing, but you know, shiny objects that, oh, I want that new app, and I want that app, and I want to try that app, and I want to try that app, which is what I have been doing, I must admit, but I do trial them.

Peter Compo: We all suffer from this. It's, it's very difficult. It's very difficult to go through life and not being seduced by shiny objects.

Nigel Rawlins: I think we've done pretty well. We've probably covered everything.

Peter Compo: Well, maybe we could just mention that sometimes the right strategy for busting the bottleneck is not so obvious. And you can make a little matrix where you compare alternatives. All right, alternative is one, to hire a publicist, help get our reputation that way. Alternative number two is we actually go bug people till they pay attention.

Alternative number three is we buy new suits. I don't know, whatever it is you're gonna do, right? And there's a disciplined way, relatively simple. but a disciplined way to compare those alternatives versus what you think matters and what you think will lead to busting the bottleneck. And that's called a strategy alternative matrix.

Mine isn't the first one ever invented, but I think mine has some very unique features that make it very practical. It's not all numbers. It's not all words. It's really down to earth and people can grasp it, I think, pretty quick. Um, but only if you need to look at alternatives to, to bust in the bottleneck.

I

Nigel Rawlins: Again,

that's a fantastic explanation of it. Um, so Peter, I think we've done pretty well. Is there anything else that you'd like to mention? The book is available as a Kindle, which is what I purchased eventually, but I think it's a better read in the physical book. I think it's much better in your hand and it's much easier to refer back to.

So on the Kindle, it's often difficult to go back and reread. I'm rereading it for the third time now, going into aspects and getting a deeper understanding of it. Your writing is very, very good. And there are gems in there that every time you go back into it you get a better picture and a better understanding.

So is there anything else that we haven't covered that you'd like to say?

Peter Compo: think we hit I think we hit the core and that there's really no need to pile on it at, at this point. I will say that we're working on a guidebook to help bring this out in, in a, even a little more detail and a little more practical bent, kind of how to implement those design principles that are throughout the book and that it is design principle based, not strategy advice based. Don't get my book if you're looking for a strategy to do something, right? I don't give advice on what you should do. This is all about how to find your own reality. Discover what you know to be the right thing to do.

Nigel Rawlins: Actually, a perfect way of explaining that, there aren't answers in the back of the book. You've got to figure it out and do it yourself.

Peter Compo: And isn't that real life? And the way I describe it in part two of the book, we hit this a little bit, and maybe it's worth saying. Creativity, innovation, and strategy development is like solving a puzzle. It's not like following a recipe. You pick your aspiration, then you do your bottleneck, then you get your strategy, then you do your tactics and plans and your metrics, and then you implement.

No, it's all one big mess. But imagine the puzzle that's a little different from the traditional. It doesn't have clear endpoints. Pieces change color. You'll never have all the pieces. I love it when people say, Oh, you know, as if this is meaningful, you know, sometimes you gotta make a decision without all the data.

What do you mean? There is no data of the future and decisions are only about the future, right? Um, It's a puzzle that the pieces will never fit. You'll never have them all. They'll never have all of them. You'll never even know where the ends are. And most important, there's no picture on the top of the box top that tells you what the picture should like.

You've got to discover it. That's what creativity and innovation is about. And what I've tried to provide people is a theory, but more important, a practice. Simple, in many ways, methods for finding that picture for yourself. Because that's real investigation. That's real creativity.

Nigel Rawlins: That's fantastic. All right, Peter. How would you like people to find you? I will put all of this in the show notes and your book and where to find it. So, how do they get in contact with you, Peter?

Peter Compo: I think, uh, you definitely can find me on LinkedIn. Of course, that's global. So, um, message me there. Uh, or you can go to emergentapproach. com, which has quite a bit of, uh, extra information, some additional examples. Something we didn't talk about, but you might find fun is the five disqualifiers of strategy in chapter eight, which are some fun tests that you can use to decide whether you're right on track.

There's some extra examples in addition to the ones in the book. So emergentapproach. com or LinkedIn. And of course the book is available from online retailers and obviously Amazon worldwide.

Nigel Rawlins: Fantastic. Peter, thank you very much for being my guest. Um, I was very, very reluctant to, uh, to talk to you until I read your book a couple of times and really studied it. I'm still obviously coming to terms with it, but you've been a fabulous guest and I hope people have got a good sense about what you've been saying and how useful it is.

So thank you for, for joining me.

Peter Compo: It's been a pleasure.