I was thinking about Geoffrey’s Moore’s crossing the chasm concept, which Clayton Christensen also explored in the “Innovator’s dilemma”, and an old memory popped into my mind.
The first proper game I played was Prince of Persia on my dad’s computer – an IBM PC-XT, which had no hard drive, only a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive.
I found a version of that DOS game recently that I could try on Linux – and if you’ve played it you’ll remember the character jumping over hazards.
Moore’s book is about marketing – early adopters vs the mainstream. Christensen’s is about crossing the early thorny stage to find and serve a niche that eventually disrupts the status quo.
The idea of a chasm, a space we have to cross which has hazards in the way, is more generalisable to everyday business operations as well.
Take sustainability, for example.
I liked a post by Maria Svantemark about the questions to ask if you were going to take on a Head of Sustainability role.
Each one of the questions she asks is a little chasm that needs to be crossed. Will you have a supportive team? Will you have a budget? How much power will you have? What does the company want to achieve.
And of course I focused on the last one – which is how is data collected now?
If it’s spreadsheets and a SharePoint folder, it’s going to take a year of work before you can do anything.
The reality is that most organisations start with spreadsheets. And it makes sense to use SharePoint.
It’s a big chasm to cross to try and get them to stop doing what they’re doing and starting using an entirely new system – especially when it’s not clear exactly what time this system is going to save.
So we took the approach of crossing a little chasm instead. We keep everything in spreadsheets and build better data management and dataflow processes so that we can get the information we need quickly and easily.
Once we have clean data, we can feed it into other systems, that you can select because they add value to your processes – specialist billing tools, asset management tools, pricing and procurement, climate risk measurement. These then take the data we collect and give you added value.
Company operations are full of chasms.
Choose the ones you can step over rather than the ones you will struggle to jump over.
Handcrafted insight 