I’ve recently been involved in discussions regarding the value creation process that we like to pursue with our management consulting clients as they seek to clarify their strategic path forward as organizations. With that as background, today I ran into a video on TED.com that confirmed a lot of the thinking we have behind our value creation process and leadership paradigm at Granada Advisors: Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action | Video on TED.com http://bit.ly/cUv2nm

The parallelism between our value creation process and the Simon Sinek video lies in is his framework of WHY, HOW, and WHAT. The Granada translation of this is SELF AWARENESS / VALUE PROPOSITION, STRATEGY, and TACTICS. As I bumped into this video, it reminded me of what a powerful paradigm this can be and how it has enabled the businesses and other organizations that espouse it to greatly enhance their performance.

In our firm, we start with succinctly identifying an organization’s Value Proposition (defined as how an organization uniquely creates value in the world). For our consulting business, Granada Advisors, our value proposition statement states: “We provide our clients the CLARITY they need to be decisive, provide RESOURCES needed for their ideas to gain traction, and do all this in efficient way that SPARKS PERFORMANCE and CREATES VALUE.”

In essence, there are four key elements: CLARITY, RESOURCES, CHEMISTRY, and VALUE ADD. In our corporate philosophical framework, these elements comprise the supporting “Benefits” which undergird the combined value proposition statement. Each of these concepts have a benefit statement associated with them — I could talk for hours regarding what these four concepts mean to us as an organization, but suffice it to say they are not haphazardly put together but are the result of extensive work in figuring our what exactly our secret sauce is as a firm. Going through a process to identify and succinctly state an organization’s value proposition is a critical precursor to STRATEGY and TACTICS.

Your ability to identify your organization’s value proposition is a function of the collective SELF AWARENESS (the “WHY”) you have as a group. I believe it is the role of the business leader to inspire individual and group introspection within an organization to the point where collective SELF AWARENESS is possible. In a state of SELF AWARENESS, you are best able to tease out your unique VALUE PROPOSITION and then get on to the business of strategy and tactics. So, to sum up….

Within a CONTEXT of COLLECTIVE SELF AWARENESS you should,

1. Identify your organization’s VALUE PROPOSITION, defined as the unique way in which you create value in the world.

2. Formulate STRATEGY, drawing upon your unique strengths as an organization which create value as indicated by your value proposition.

3. Generate TACTICS that put your strategy into play in the real world, with real situations and real customers.

This framework of VALUE PROP —-> STRATEGY —-> TACTICS all in the context of SELF AWARENESS will enable you to inspire your customers / stakeholders and powerfully lead your organization.

So I’m fascinated by this concept of DESIGN THINKING and how it can apply to STRATEGY GENERATION. In particular, I think a really good strategist cannot be satisfied with just following the old models, however useful (e.g. Porters Five Forces). A strategist cannot be an automaton, who simply gathers data and plugs it into a framework of analysis which they are comfortable using. A true strategist must enter the realm of META-FRAMEWORKS. In other words, design a process-oriented context that facilitates the creation of analytical frameworks.

To take the “frame” analogy even further, a typical strategist is like an optometrist. They provide many different lenses through which to look at the world — to look at data and turn data into actionable intelligence. Maybe they provide lenses of various colors, shapes, sizes. This is pretty good.

But think about taking it a step further. What if you could design lenses for the specific scenarios, customize them for each situation, or come up with a complete new way of “seeing” the world that doesnt even involve a “lens” per se. Maybe you could get really crazy and figure out how to create night vision lenses, or lenses that turn dark in the sun, or ways to see into space using radio telescopes. What can you see? Stars, nebulae, galaxies? What about dark matter? What about extra-solar planets or “exoplanets?” Some of the latest advances in astronomy involve advanced techniques for identifying planets in solar systems outside of our own. This is really exciting stuff! These new techniques can not only identify the existence of these planets, but also their chemical composition, temperature, and if it’s possible that life could be sustained there. The INSIGHTS these new techniques are able to produce are very material. And they are, in degree and kind, drastically different from the “insights” a typical optometrist can produce by setting you up with a new pair of shades.

So where am I going with all this (at 2:01 AM)? As business leaders, we must always try to see with new eyes. We can do this through constantly designing new frameworks, new lenses through which to look at the world. And this goes to the point of the matter: a healthy dose of self awareness, design thinking, and commitment to process will result in a context in which new frameworks of analysis can come into view. And these new frameworks will reveal things we may never have imagined were even there.