The Integrative Vision Framework || Broaden Your Thinking
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Dear subscribers,
I apologize for the wait between deep-dives. Besides life getting in the way, I’ve been participating in some panel discussions that have kept me from writing. However, I’ve spent a lot of time crafting this article, and I believe it will be valuable for those who struggle with thinking big picture and covering all areas.
Below, I outline one of the most valuable tools I’ve created, which has helped me many times in my career. I call it the Integrative Vision Framework, and I’m excited to share it with you.
Let’s get started.
It’s no secret that as you progress in your career, the scope of your responsibilities increases. This can range from the number of direct and indirect reports under your organization to the work and processes you are accountable for.
With this increase in accountability comes the need for leaders to broaden their thinking. In many cases, experienced leaders naturally adopt a broader perspective due to ample experience and the lessons learned from navigating the corporate world. But what about new managers or leaders without years of experience facing growing challenges with larger teams?
In my opinion, there's a gap that needs addressing. Managers often lack proper training on how to make high-value decisions, take calculated risks, and align execution with strategy. This ultimately comes down to the way leaders think. Specifically, we need to place greater emphasis on expanding our horizons of thinking to translate strategy into tactical action.
So what do you do in a situation where the scope of accountability is there but not necessarily the experience needed to perform well in your role?
Your next step at this stage is to begin learning and applying a tool I like to call the Integrative Vision Framework.
The Integrative Vision Framework
This framework, which I've compiled piece by piece over the last decade, was created to help me distill learnings from both successful and failed projects and codify them to apply in all facets of my work. At its core, it gently encourages me to think beyond my bubble and instead operate with a 360-degree view in mind.
The beauty of the Integrative Vision Framework lies in its simplicity. It is nothing more than a series of calculated questions covering every angle, mimicking how seasoned managers approach high-impact decisions that result in massive opportunities or dire consequences.
To provide even more focus, the questions in this framework are broken down into four segments, which I have detailed below:
Segment #1: Strategic Alignment - Assesses how well a proposed initiative, situation, or decision aligns with the overall objectives of the company. This segment encourages you to think from the top down, from company objectives right down to your team.
Segment #2: Temporal Analysis - Focuses on analyzing the time-based implications of initiatives, scenarios, and decisions. These questions encourage you to view things from multiple time horizons.
Segment #3: The Value Chain - Explores the effects of actions or events based on your initiatives or decisions on operations and processes. This provides a comprehensive view to help see gaps and mitigate risks cross-functionally.
Segment #4: Data Insights - Dives into qualitative and quantitative data to help with decision making and value-driven predictions. Answering questions in this segment should arm you with making informed decisions and proactively adapting to changing circumstances.
If you’re like me, you enjoy visualizing things to accompany the text you read, so I hope the diagram below helps paint the picture a bit better. In a nutshell, answering each of these questions to the best of your ability should, at the very least, equip you to better align with strategy, execute with excellence, and be prepared for the multitude of risks that come your way. What’s more, you will begin to think beyond the tactical level under your control and enter the unfamiliar zone that spans across functions. This is the zone seasoned leaders constantly inhabit.
The rest of this deep dive will focus on the questions themselves, introducing a few layers of context that will hopefully provide a complete understanding of the material. Let’s start with the questions in segment 1.
Segment #1: Strategic Alignment
Question #1: How does this initiative, decision, or event support and advance our company's strategic goals?
Starting from the top is more often than not the smartest decision you can make. Ideally, every decision you make and everything you work on, once realized, takes the company one micro-step closer to its short, medium, and long-term objectives.
When exploring this question, you want to first understand what those objectives are, including how success and failure are measured. If you’re having trouble figuring out what these goals are, you can leverage annual reports (if your company is public), presentation decks from company meetings, or even have discussions with employees who have this visibility.
With a firm grasp on company goals, shift your focus to your current situation. Will the initiative you’re managing directly (or even indirectly) contribute to these overarching goals? Is the decision you’re debating about centered around any of these objectives? If the answer is an easy no, it certainly raises the question of whether you’re working on the right things.
Question #2: How will this initiative, decision or event affect neighbouring departments?
With an understanding of the business, it’s easy to immediately shift your focus to your team, as that’s where your experience and comfort lie. Instead, I challenge you to first scope out each of the functional groups available at your organization and deeply consider how they can be impacted by your work.
Answering this question is really valuable, as it, when done right, identifies gaps and levels of uncertainty (otherwise known as risks) early in the process, giving you ample time to build plans around them. Thinking of the degree of impact on multiple functions provides exponential value to your company, as it sets them up to have more win-win situations. As you probably know, nothing sets a company up for failure more than a continuous cycle of reactive situations due to unidentified issues cropping up spanning multiple teams.
Question #3: What are the potential impacts of this initiative, decision, or event on my department?
Now, we begin to approach some familiar territory but in an entirely new way, thanks to the work we've done with the first two questions. Putting in the work allows you to think of your department as one of many versus the single source of focus many managers fall prey to today. Looking at it another way, this question encourages leaders to view the organization as an interconnected system rather than a collection of isolated departments.
Looking at your department specifically when asking this question, you may uncover some of the usual suspects, such as resource constraints, team morale, and, if you’re lucky, opportunities for growth. At this stage, you’ve identified some surface level impacts. Try to dig deeper based on what you’ve already learned through this framework by considering how your department fits into the broader organizational puzzle and how it can contribute to overall success. With this, leaders can proactively adjust plans, allocate resources effectively, and collaborate with other departments to achieve shared objectives. This is what the integrated vision framework, at its core, is all about.
Question #4: How can this initiative, decision, or event impact my team?
This final question of the strategic alignment segment should be familiar to you, as it's one of the first skills you must master as a high-performing individual contributor or new manager. At this stage, your primary focus is on the team as you analyze ways they might be positively or negatively impacted by the situation at hand.
When navigating this framework, it's crucial to consider all aspects, including the work itself, the team's overall temperament, and the unique talents of each individual. Avoid fixating solely on potential pitfalls by actively seeking opportunities that could arise from whatever challenges you face.
Segment #2: Temporal Analysis
Question #5: What are the immediate implications of my situation?
The first question of segment 2 shifts the focus from the stakeholders around you to time itself. When paired with the second and final question of this segment, it becomes a powerful combination of executive-level thinking.
I like to look at anything short-term as an opportunity to test your agility, as often short-term events are chock full of urgency and shifts in focus, regardless of whether we’ve planned for it or not. By asking and then answering this question ahead of time, it forces you and your team to collaboratively examine the immediate consequences and outcomes resulting from a specific course of action or scenario. Great managers extend this in any area beyond their circle of influence, from operations, resources, and even stakeholders. This question can be applied as broadly as you want it to.
Properly answering this question also helps you anticipate and prepare for potential challenges, seize immediate opportunities, and make agile adjustments at the team, department, and organizational levels. What’s more, focusing on the short term helps you anticipate and address emerging issues before they escalate, ultimately fostering resilience and adaptability in the face of uncertainty.
Question #6: What are the long-term consequences of this situation?
Many times, an impact that surpasses a certain order of magnitude isn’t something immediately apparent. Instead, a cascading sequence of events takes place over a wide period. This is why you, as a strategic thinker, need to think in the long term.
Let’s try to illustrate this better. Deciding not to focus on an FAQs section and proper UX when launching a brand new mobile app may have low impact in the short term when traffic is low. However, it becomes a different story entirely when popularity begins to rise, and app traffic increases along with it. You may find yourself in a situation where call centers are flooded, resulting in angry users who may take their engagement and attention elsewhere, leaving your app dead in the water.
Planning for long-term impact requires meticulous attention to detail, many eyes reviewing, and the ability to think in systems to come out on top. It’s not easy, but a tip I like to use is to think in multiple levels of impact. In other words, what are the potential scenarios to watch out for if I go with option B versus option A? And for each of those scenarios, what scenarios branch out from that? The bigger the web of impact you can map out, the better prepared you’ll be.
Thinkers who can balance their attention on the short and long term, regardless of the situation, are a rare breed and are highly desirable in the world of work.
Segment #3: The Value Chain
Question #7: What impact can be expected upstream?
Businesses, at their very core, are nothing more than a series of processes. From the people involved to the specific systems at work, the integration of value from one step to the next is what defines a business.
To think broadly and strategically, you will have to compartmentalize processes to not only fully grasp their interrelated parts but also to see where true value lies. For me, breaking down processes into upstream and downstream layers makes the most sense.
The upstream layer looks at everything involved in making a process run. Specifically, this includes the inputs of the process and what makes the process function.
To put this into context, let’s use a real-world example from one of my businesses, Colossal Cookie Co. My company relies on specific ingredients from various suppliers to maintain a consistent level of quality. These ingredients are one of the many inputs in our process of manufacturing our products. If at some point, we’re looking to move warehouses, one of the areas I want to double-check is if our supplier can reliably deliver these key ingredients to our new location with the same level of frequency. If not, I will have to either come up with a solid plan B or abandon the plan altogether.
All the components that make up a process can span in the thousands, and you may not identify everything needed, which is okay. Grasping the core components is usually sufficient, and this exercise becomes easier the more you do it.
Question #8: What impact can be expected downstream?
If upstream focuses on the inputs and the process itself, then downstream speaks to the outputs and the end users of the process.
This question is the easier of the two to answer as your area of focus is narrow. Is your initiative going to impact any of the processes? If so, in what ways? How will this impact the end user and other stakeholders relying on this process? Will they be accepting, or is there friction you have to worry about?
By effectively answering this question, you should have a better understanding of potential impacts on delivery schedules, customer satisfaction, or product quality, to name a few.
Segment #4: Data Insights
Question #9: What insights can historical data provide about the current situation?
More and more businesses are defining themselves as data-driven companies compared to their traditional categorization, and rightfully so. Data is becoming the most valuable resource, accelerating growth based on facts rather than opinions.
Historical data, specifically, offers a wealth of information that can help predict outcomes, identify potential risks, and uncover opportunities for improvement.
For instance, consider an e-commerce company planning to implement multiple languages on its site. Analyzing historical data can provide several key insights, such as existing customer demographics and preferences, sales trends and conversion rates, user behavior, and customer support needs. After reviewing the data, the company notices that users from France, Germany, and Spain have high bounce rates and low conversion rates compared to users from English-speaking countries. Implementing French, German, and Spanish versions of the site could potentially increase engagement and conversion rates, and this can be verified with some well-crafted A/B tests.
Question #10: What can macro-level trends help us anticipate about this situation?
Any key decision needs just as much focus on the external as it does on the internal. One of the best ways, in my opinion, is to monitor and analyze data at the macro level. Examining macro-level trends enables businesses to gain insights into broader economic, social, technological, and environmental shifts that may influence their operations and priorities.
Obtaining external data isn’t very hard but can be expensive. Some examples are industry-specific research reports, government publications, and academic journals. Some free options are annual reports (from a competitor in the industry, for example), reputable news publications, and tech news platforms.
If you're a professional who tends to always look inside the company, broadening your view to the macro level will definitely provide insights missing from your initial findings, resulting in you becoming a much better thinker overall.
Conclusion
Over the years, this framework has helped me expand my thinking and has aided me in leading some of the most transformative initiatives. Like most things, a great framework is dynamic and adaptable to the situation at hand. I encourage you to experiment with the questions and tweak them until you find the perfect fit for you.
Complexity is at an all-time high in the corporate world, and we need a steady increase in leaders who can navigate disruption through expanded thinking. I hope the integrative vision framework will help propel you forward to handle this challenge.
Amazing job! Thanks for sharing