🎻S3T Playbook: Harmonize Different Kinds of Expertise to Achieve Success
Introduction
Today's leaders must excel in getting very smart people with divergent sets of skills and expertise to improvise work together as one team. This is not easy, and it's different from the command and control delegation hierarchy of the 2oth century. But it is the only way to avoid a brand and enterprise level catastrophic loss of control. This S3T Playbook shows you how to harmonize different kinds of expertise to achieve a desired outcome using AI, stablecoins, quantum computing and other emerging technologies.
Today's opportunities and threats require close-knit multidisciplinary improvisation
Today's emerging technologies offer huge promise (and peril), and the path to real world value and benefit is rarely clear or smooth.
Navigating this journey increasingly requires a close-knit multi-disciplinary improvisation that must go beyond simply delegating tasks to different groups. It requires a different level of thinking and working together. Rather than "fire-and-forget" tasks to "task owners" who work in their respective teams or verticals, teams today must get comfortable doing their tasks with their collaborators looking over their shoulders, or working alongside them. Notably this upends the conventional wisdom about "task ownership" "one throat to choke" that so much of agile project management is based on.
Why Classic PMO task assignment needs to be reconsidered
Traditionally, project managers advanced by proving they could manage larger and larger projects. They leveraged status meetings, RAID logs and clear task assignment and ownership to drive accountability, and in many cases this was sufficient to help get the projects done.
Today it's different; advancement comes from successful execution of more complex cross-domain projects. Instead of " 2 year middleware implementation" think "3 month pilot to production initiative that blends AI + data modernization + security + clinical expertise".
Today's project leaders must have domain-specific expertise - along with the ability to make sure cross-disciplinary teams are solving problems in the most effective manner.
This forces a departure from traditional task assignment models of "who's on point for x? Ok assign this task to them and then we'll expect its solved by next status meeting".
That approach fails when x is something that no single domain can solve singlehandedly.
- Status meetings and RAID logs become sources of confusion and churn, especially when product owners, scrum masters and other project leaders aren't tracking with the complex inter-disciplinary issues in play.
- Likewise assigning tasks with due dates only tends to exacerbate silo culture and complicate root-cause analysis.
Instead project leaders need to focus on collaborative work efforts where individuals with different expertise are working together vs. taking tasks off to by themselves and trying to solve them in isolation.
The key to unlocking real-world value and benefits lies not in the technology itself but in our ability to harmonize and orchestrate the right ensemble of expertise from diverse disciplines. The following S3T Playbook equips executives and innovators with the strategies necessary to foster collaboration and drive successful outcomes in this challenging environment.
Blending varying disciplines into a cohesive planning and execution is extraordinarily difficult.
Each discipline comes with its unique set of principles, rules of thumb, guardrails, learned through trail and error and often solidified by experiences involving embarrassing or painful failures. This in turn tends to foster a natural rigidity in perspective and approach, with each expert bringing a distinct set of do’s and don’ts. Always do x, never do y.
Often what is applicable in one domain doesn't apply as directly in another, and there's no single expert that trumps all others. Leaders must learn how to navigate this reality, or risk experiencing a catastrophic loss of control at the enterprise or reputation level.