SENSE & RESPOND FOR LEADERS

In this workshop, senior product and engineering leaders will develop strategies for sensing and responding to unanticipated events in complex adaptive systems. This workshop series aims to develop a leadership team that communicates quickly and effectively, exhibiting heightened situational awareness.

We will look at several dimensions in which it’s essential to select the right sense and respond strategies:

  1. People and Organizations - How do we know what’s going on within our organization? How do we communicate strategic direction and create alignment within the groups we’re accountable for? How do we create a sensing and responding organization? What protocols build trust in our community of stakeholders?

  2. Planning & Risk Management - How do we build resiliency into our plans and commitments? How do we communicate plan changes? How do we manage risks for mitigation or avoidance? How do we stay on top of status to use meetings for higher-value activities?

  3. Systems and Operations - How do we monitor and understand the health of our systems and operations? How do we ensure that we're not just firefighting but systematically improving our systems and processes? What is leadership’s role in creating a feedback loop that allows us to learn from incidents and prevent them from reoccurring?

  4. Markets and Customers - How do we identify shifts in market trends and customer needs? How do we continuously adapt our offerings to meet these evolving demands? How can we leverage our insights to anticipate future market developments and stay ahead of the competition?

Leaders will design and implement several sense & respond strategies and experiments to be run over two months.

OBJECTIVES

  • Increase the leadership team’s overall situational awareness

  • Develop strong and effective communications within the technical leadership team

  • Develop 2-3 sense and respond strategies across key domains (people, org, planning, ops, etc.)

  • Understand how to adapt strategies to the appropriate complexity of a problem (categorize, analyze, probe, or act)

  • Identify and develop systems, behaviors, and tactics to build situational awareness across key domains

  • Form a peer-to-peer community of leaders to exchange feedback, share best practices, and extend support

  • Create a plan to enroll director-level leadership teams in improving communications