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There might be better ways to spend a bank holiday weekend than watching every one of Simon’s “Crossing the river by feeling the stones” presentations. At least every one I could find on Youtube. That was 20 and over 9 hours.
It was a fascinating voyage. I learnt many things. Here’s some:
- Simon continues to discover new ways to use the map and so is probably always going to be ahead of the pack.
- Some of his analyses (CEO tracking via private jet, weak signals) are fascinating.
- The content changed from 2014, the first I could find, to early this year. Obviously, if you do a world tour your delivery will be more polished, but some stuff is evolving. Does Simon keep a map of his presentation?
- History is less important now and interpretation is more important.
- Strategy is a loop, rinse and repeat.
- Optimising evolutionary flow before process flow and Cell based work is gaining prominence
- Agile is getting less stick now Prof Elizabeth Shove’s social practice has been introduced.
- Herbert A. Simon only came up once or twice. I think his ideas about subsystems doesn’t necessarily fit into strategic mapping. I’m with Fossy on this.
- The culture mapping in the last but one talk (Brighton 2019-12-15) could easily be a whole discussion to itself.
That’s about it. I have a spreadsheet where I collected the notes. I suppose I should map the whole lot but I’m still a bit shell shocked by the experience.
