Exploring for strategy

strategy (29), eng-strategy-book (18)

This is a work-in-progress draft!

Explain the general role of exploration for writing strategy.

Exploration is about updating your priors before working on a strategy. For an area that you’ve not spent much time working in, or that you haven’t spent much time working in recently, it’s important to go broad before digging in, to avoid getting captured by your prior experiences.

topics:

  • what is strategy exploration, and why it’s a valuable step
  • when to explore and when to stop exploring
  • dig into mechanisms for exploration, including: internal precedent, industry papers, conference talks, your professional network, and reading widely
  • why exploration isn’t evaluative

This is an exploratory, draft chapter for a book on engineering strategy that I’m brainstorming in #eng-strategy-book. As such, some of the links go to other draft chapters, both published drafts and very early, unpublished drafts.

What is exploration?

update your priors, avoid getting caught by your experience or lack of experience

most exploration will be external to your team, but depending on your company, much of your exploration might be internal to the company. If you’re in a massive engineering organization of 100,000, there are likely existing internal solutions to your problem that you’ve never heard of. Conversely, if you’re in an organization of 50 engineers, it’s likely that much of your exploration will be external.

what are some examples of strategies that struggled/failed due to lack of exploration?

When to explore

always, first step!

when can you skip?

what is right question to ask yourself when considering if you should stop exploring?

How to explore

Some resources:

  • internal precedents
  • review industry papers
  • conference talks
  • using your network
  • reading widely

Mine internal precedent

Review industry papers

user Uber’s service migration as example, wrt mesos and kubernetes papers

Listen to conference talks

Find an example of using these for a strategy, but basically listen to what people claim to be doing.

Using your network

ask people you know :-)

https://staffeng.com/guides/network-of-peers/

https://lethain.com/building-exec-network/

Read widely

  • Example from a strategy
  • Read books on similar circumstances that might change your thinking, How Asia Works is a good one on different kinds of markets, and so on
  • Read widely, I’ve collected some resources I’ve found valuable in the Further Reading appendix. Note that this is a bad reference here, since it’s about strategy, not about reading within a given strategy’s exploration. Instead I should find an example where books were actually relevant to the strategy itself.

Save judgment for later

If you run into things while exploring that you strongly disagree with, that’s a good sign: it means you’re encountering new ideas.

Summary

TODO: decide if I should mention wardley mapping in explore or in diagnosis or neither

You can also use some techniques like Wardley mapping, which is covered in the Refinement chapter.