Leaning and Discovery Enables Execution

One of the most salient statements in Steve Blank's "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" - for me anyway - seems logically obvious in hindsight (one of the most prolific biases I experience). This is a common scenario of invisible wisdom that required someone insightful like Steve to call it to my attention. But I digress.

Here is is:

"In the early stages of a startup, focusing on "execution" will put you out of business. Instead you need a "learning and discovery" process so you can get the company to the point where you know what to execute." - page 20

What I soon realized after fully understanding the concept and how it applies to the Customer Development model, is that this is a powerful principle which, while appearing simple and intuitive, applies to so much more than I would first realize.

Coaching

As a coach, this same statement sums up how I approach a client engagement, regardless of what the SOW states. In essence, trying to execute without a process of learning and discovery may not put me out of business, but it may make me ineffective. Do you really know what to execute without a process to get in there and see what is really going on?

Organizational Development

In organizational development, without a clear understanding of strategy, OD design is rather meaningless - how can you assess the components of design - structure, work and collaboration systems, reward systems. or people development systems - without a clear strategy defined or discovered? I would like to say it is merely about understanding articulated strategy, however in real life it feels more like learning and discovery through dialogue with leadership.

Facilitation

Someone recently asked me how I designed a large group facilitation engagement. And as I thought through the process from beginning to end, I realized that while I have a framework with criteria for the actual design, I spend a significant amount of time in learning and discovery about all kinds of information - points of view, biases, tensions, motivations, desires....the list gets long when I really try to articulate all the dimensions I'm interested in learning. Then the execution - or actual design - is rather straight-forward - and without all that learning, nearly impossible.

So it makes sense why that singular sentence was so impactful - it articulates a pattern I use over and over in these and many other scenarios.

What is then more interesting to me are those instances where I don't seem to follow that pattern and execute before learning - probably some significant opportunities for improvement there.