Project Management

Can you Coddiwomple?

From the PMI Global Insights Blog
by Cameron McGaughy, James Turchick

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Categories: Agile, Benefits Realization, Leadership, Strategy

Coddiwomple

(originally posted on LinkedIn and on The Agility Series Blog)

On a recent Sunday morning, and as I am apt to do on weekends while drinking my morning coffee, I spent the first hour or so wandering through Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter seeing what my connections have been up to over the past few days. That morning I saw a post on Facebook by a old friend of mine on the definition of coddiwomple.

Ever had that moment where you see a description of something or you a come across a word that succinctly summarizes something for you?

Coddiwomple is one of those words for me. For those who have read my recent book on Organizational Agility or my Adaptive Strategy Framework Guide or my first book Agile Value Delivery: Beyond the Numbers, attended any of our webinars, read any of my previous posts, or is an member of my LinkedIn group know that I write a lot about uncertainty and the fact we live in a VUCA world.

Living in a VUCA world means that we cannot use the past to predict the future which is a basic assumption behind most strategic planning exercises that try to lay out a vision for the next 3-5 years. Couple this with the fact that our window of opportunity is now often measured in months and not years, and that our windows of stability are now measured in weeks instead of months, leaders of every organizational size and in every sector are challenged more that ever to learn how to be adaptive. They need to learn to base their decision-making on what they and their people do next based on what know today they did not know last month or even last week.

Does that mean that strategy execution is now a crap-shoot? No. What it does mean is that we can no longer assume that we can simply make a plan and work the plan. It means leaders and their teams need to do strategic iteration as opposed to strategic planning as I describe in my Adaptive Strategy Framework Guide.

Being able to prioritize what you and your teams do next means you need to have some sort of destination in mind, a vision of the future. This enables you to move towards that destination, however vague it may be, in a purposeful manner.

By taking an adaptive approach to how you realize strategic goals and objectives also means that you may in fact end up at a slightly different destination that what you originally envisioned. And that's OK as it will be where you need to be, which is not necessarily where you intended to be. Being where you intended to be as opposed to where you need to be is failure - it means you executed to a strategic goal where all the signs along the way meant you were going in the wrong direction, yet you and your teams chose to ignore the signs anyway.