Future thinking & strategy
Making sense of the future requires situational awareness, analysis of weak signals, and evaluation of potential future disruptions. It requires an outside-in approach to explore industry and technology trends, and the inevitable changes that you must respond to now...
Horizon Scanning
Thinking about the future means learning to think differently. Emerging change challenges our current assumptions, and over time our decisions, policies, and products today will become obsolete. Acknowledging, making room for, and “working with” disruption and convulsive change presents...
Wardley Mapping
Anticipating and gaming the future is easier when you have situational awareness. Wardley Maps depict an organization’s value chain, showing how activities and processes are evolving, providing a mechanism to predict future scenarios, and develop winning strategies and tactics. Mapping enables you...
Study Tours
LEF Study Tours provide a unique opportunity to fast track your expertise on a specific trend or technology. A week-long immersion, this intense, research-led experience enables you to engage with some of the world’s leading thinkers and innovative organizations on watershed changes that are fast approaching...
Digital Ethics
The ethics of business are nothing new. But as it becomes increasingly difficult to opt out of technologically mediated life, the ethics of how to do right with technology are becoming more and more urgent. What has changed is the potential harm and benefit of new technologies. At the core of being ethically digital...
Re-imagining business
Remaining competitive and relevant in a constantly changing world requires a willingness to re-think how the organization generates value, and how to organize itself to build and deliver customer trust while maintaining employee safety. It requires a confidence to re-imagine the business model by capitalising on advances...
Platform Organizations
Seven of the world’s eight largest companies by market capitalization are all some form of platform business. Each of them orchestrates ecosystems of thousands of organizations, serving billions of people. Every sector has felt the impact of these digital-first platform organizations, either by joining one of...
Digital Twins
Building and using digital twins takes you on a journey of modernization and transformation. A twin coupled to a product, asset, process or person becomes an integral part of the organization’s operating model. The integration and coupling of the twin into the operating model drives the organization...
Business Transformation
Digital Transformation is one of the most misused buzzwords of our time. Significant market hype can be bypassed by addressing the issues of IT Modernization, Business Transformation and related Industry Disruption differently. Successful transformation requires a considerable amount of faith, confidence and...
Operating Models
COVID-19 has been the biggest catalyst for ‘Digital Transformation’ of our time. Customer expectations have shifted and speed has become the most important business driver. In prior transformation efforts, many of the underlying technologies and platforms (Cloud, AI, RPA, IoT & Analytics) have under performed...
Sourcing
Being able to scale technology to meet business demands is crucial for survival in the digital era. Sourcing activities need to plot uncertainty and specify invisible unknowns. Constructing maps of digital business assets against market choices is a simple way to source effectively, and confidently plan for the future...
Technology Modernization
For any technology leader today, modernizing the technology foundations to newer, more capable, agile or efficient technology approaches is table stakes. Alongside the removal of inefficiencies and waste, a modern core is a gateway to future innovation, as out of date foundational technology can create...
Workplace & Workspace
Working practices and customer expectations have changed and organisations must adapt to retain both. Established customer expectations and employee working norms have been fundamentally challenged. Identifying the key critical success factors that matter most for the changes in your organisation will...
Leadership & capabilities
Competing in the digital age requires constant evolution to generate continuous innovation. Key to this is developing a learning mindset for the organization and the ability to nurture a virtuous digital learning capability, where every person is able to leverage technology to improve how they work...
Digital Mindset
While consumer services have long been the IT industry’s centre of gravity, technology is now being brought to bear directly on the human brain and body – with far-reaching implications for the 2020s and beyond. Development of the technology and digital capabilities is now the most important element of...
Digital Business Leadership
Successful leaders in the digital-first economy navigate and utilize disruption by organizing around constant evolution to deliver a winning vision and business. Being prepared with an understanding of how data, intelligence, connectivity and automation are combining to transform every industry is essential to...
Collaboration
Top down enterprise collaboration initiatives are awash with examples of failure to realise value but we know that better sharing and collaboration leads to value that couldn’t otherwise be achieved. In a world of more fluid and more ecosystem wide knowledge work, we must acknowledge the needs of individuals...
Business Relationship Management
Traditional Enterprise IT functions risk irrelevance unless they can match the pace of organizational and technological evolution. IT’s ability to flex beyond being the simple provider of services is crucial to this change. The journey requires a transition to become advocates and promoters of new technologies...
Future thinking & strategy
Making sense of the future requires situational awareness, analysis of weak signals, and evaluation of potential future disruptions. It requires an outside-in approach to explore industry and technology trends, and the inevitable changes that you must respond to now.
LEF help you to create the space to explore weak signals and market shifts, by exposing you to the evolution of technology and the opportunity this creates. We help you shape the necessary experiments to apply this learning to your value chains.
Two decades at the Leading Edge of change
Use LEF research and advisory insights to accelerate change in your organization:
- Establishing a powerful sense-making capability.
- Accelerating your adoption of Wardley Mapping.
- Exposing you to The Matrix through immersive experiences.
- Using digital ethics as a differentiator for your organization.
- Involving you in upcoming LEF research programmes.
Future thinking & strategy
Horizon Scanning
Thinking about the future means learning to think differently. Emerging change challenges our current assumptions, and over time our decisions, policies, and products today will become obsolete. Acknowledging, making room for, and “working with” disruption and convulsive change presents new opportunities. Foresight helps by asking people first to make their assumptions explicit, and then exploring emerging change as a way to reframe what they think, want and do, and, ultimately, helping us to create the imagination space to reflect on potential intended and unintended consequences of action and change.
The Pressures on the Professions Today
Use LEF research and advisory insights to accelerate change in your organization:
- Learn how to futureproof your thinking and planning.
- Understand how to look back at history, look forward at possibilities, and create actions that bridge from today to tomorrow.
- Learn about changes that are already happening - in society, across cultures, within politics, in the economy, in science and technology, and in the environment – and how to respond to them.
Future thinking & strategy
Wardley Mapping
Anticipating and gaming the future is easier when you have situational awareness. Wardley Maps depict an organization’s value chain, showing how activities and processes are evolving, providing a mechanism to predict future scenarios, and develop winning strategies and tactics. Mapping enables you to create a vocabulary around value components and their genesis, productization and industrialization, helping organizations think about which technological and societal shifts are most important to their future.
Use LEF research and advisory insights to accelerate change in your organization:
- Communicate, challenge, plan, learn, and mitigate risk.
- Bring to life future prospects, and explore – or pre-empt - the most opportune reactions to change.
- Highlight the supporting role played by technology for inspiring clear competitive advantage.
- Learn advanced techniques for gaming that competitive environment to your advantage.
- Identify the attributes of teams and individuals in different phases, characterizing ‘pioneers’, ‘settlers’ and ‘town planners’ to indicate appetite and ability for risk, development and delivery.
Future thinking & strategy
Study Tours
LEF Study Tours provide a unique opportunity to fast track your expertise on a specific trend or technology. A week-long immersion, this intense, research-led experience enables you to engage with some of the world’s leading thinkers and innovative organizations on watershed changes that are fast approaching, during a facilitated and outcome-driven journey to identify how your organization might respond.
A facilitated journey & learning experience with Disruptors & Innovators in the LEF ecosystem
Use LEF research and advisory insights to accelerate change in your organization:
- “The Study Tour was a wonderfully enlightening experience. The speakers & topics made me think really differently about my approach to challenges in the company & particularly how we can exploit new opportunities as early as possible”.
- “This tour positioned all of us to think very differently about how we’re approaching the cloud, our software development processes, & much, much more”.
- “Overall the experience was incredible. In my 20+ years in IT, this Study Tour has challenged me to think more differently than any other event I have attended”.
Future thinking & strategy
Digital Ethics
The ethics of business are nothing new. But as it becomes increasingly difficult to opt out of technologically mediated life, the ethics of how to do right with technology are becoming more and more urgent. What has changed is the potential harm and benefit of new technologies. At the core of being ethically digital is the need for a different mindset and a new methodology to upgrade key aspects of your operating model with a variety of outcomes.
Making Ethical….. Digital
Use LEF research and advisory insights to accelerate change in your organization:
- Upgrade your business model to create competitive advantage.
- Power up and scale up your contributions to a fairer society.
- Innovation is no longer just about moving fast and breaking things – avoid the things you break being people.
- Ethics as a differentiator – what does your organization believe in and why do I want to work here?
- Balance the tension of ”do then learn” vs. “learn then do”.
Re-imagining business
Remaining competitive and relevant in a constantly changing world requires a willingness to re-think how the organization generates value, and how to organize itself to build and deliver customer trust while maintaining employee safety. It requires a confidence to re-imagine the business model by capitalising on advances in technological capabilities.
LEF helps you to shape change by challenging where you want to play and how you will get there, using practical tools and frameworks built by experienced practitioners. We expose you to next practice shown by industry influencers and market leaders of operating model innovations.
Two decades at the Leading Edge of change
Use LEF research and advisory insights to accelerate change in your organization:
- Defining the agendas of technology modernization vs. business transformation.
- Demystifying the hype surrounding platform businesses and the hyperscalers.
- Providing a guide to digital twins and helping you avoid the labyrinth of dead-ends.
- Accelerating your approach in shaping new products and services.
- Supporting you in the development of new co-evolved operating models.
- Accelerating your plans for the future Workplace & Workspace.
Re-imagining business
Platform Organizations
Seven of the world’s eight largest companies by market capitalization are all some form of platform business. Each of them orchestrates ecosystems of thousands of organizations, serving billions of people. Every sector has felt the impact of these digital-first platform organizations, either by joining one of their ecosystems as a producer, consuming their services or having business stripped away. Traditional digital-second organizations can benefit from learning to become a platform organization.
LEF’s Platform Organization Landscape
Liberating Platform Organizations, LEF, 2018
Use LEF research and advisory insights to accelerate change in your organization:
- Demystify the hype and understanding the roles of organizations in modern platform orchestrated ecosystems.
- Understand how data ‘flywheels’ work in ecosystems – enabling organizations to work and learn at scale.
- Learn the main mechanisms that make platform organisations work.
- Identify which type of path to a platform business model your organisation could follow.
- Avoid the pitfalls for digital-second organizations when they liberate their own platforms.
Re-imagining business
Digital Twins
Building and using digital twins takes you on a journey of modernization and transformation. A twin coupled to a product, asset, process or person becomes an integral part of the organization’s operating model. The integration and coupling of the twin into the operating model drives the organization through a digital transformation journey. And increasingly, twins are disrupting industries –they enable organizations to work at scale, learn at scale and outrun competition. There’s so much to learn about Digital Twins, but so many dead ends. It’s like a labyrinth. You need a guide.
Digital Twin Uses in 2020: The 6 Ps
Digital Twins: A Guide to the Labyrinth, LEF, 2020
Use LEF research and advisory insights to accelerate change in your organization:
- Identify where you are in the Digital Twin maturity model, and how to accelerate.
- Understand the critical difference between your Digital Twins and your Simulations.
- Learn which of the 7Ps your Digital Twins need and their future agenda.
- Visualise how your functions, divisions and ecosystems partners share digital twins and digital threads with each other.
- See the ‘bigger picture’ of Digital Twin infrastructure evolving at Nation levels.
Re-imagining business
Business Transformation
Digital Transformation is one of the most misused buzzwords of our time. Significant market hype can be bypassed by addressing the issues of IT Modernization, Business Transformation and related Industry Disruption differently. Successful transformation requires a considerable amount of faith, confidence and perseverance at the highest levels of the organization.
The Three Main Types of Business Transformation
Use LEF research and advisory insights to accelerate change in your organization:
- Acknowledge and leverage any burning platforms as accelerators of transformation.
- Improve sense making and situational awareness to leverage successful transformation.
- Know when to act on the ‘next wave’ of technology more to unleash transformative potential than any previous wave.
- Develop leaders with the skills and traits to be successful at all phases of a transformation.
- Understand levels of disruption in your industry today and use that to accelerate change.
Re-imagining business
Operating Models
COVID-19 has been the biggest catalyst for ‘Digital Transformation’ of our time. Customer expectations have shifted and speed has become the most important business driver. In prior transformation efforts, many of the underlying technologies and platforms (Cloud, AI, RPA, IoT & Analytics) have under performed. Traditional Operating Models seem to be holding us back. They can be hierarchical, command and control based and perpetuate existing inertias.
Next generation operation models will shift towards nodes and webs and recognise that business value pools have moved. Your roadmap for success will depend on:
Direction: Communicating need for change
- Constant, consistent communications
- Multimedia: Blogs, podcasts, Zoom, etc
- Carrot & stick: Benefit of change, costs if you don’t
Dollars: Funding the path to change
- People work on what gets funded
- Fund innovation & breakthrough thinking
- Expect & reward useful failures, learn
- Do not concentrate all investments: Spread it around
Data: Measuring success along the way:
- Disruptive metrics yield disruptive results
- Everyone can & should innovate
- Measure progress towards success, & distance from failure
Upgrading your operating model is more than a re-org of existing resources, it’s a fundamental re-think of how your organisation can sustain itself and deliver value in today’s uncertain world.
Re-imagining business
Sourcing
Being able to scale technology to meet business demands is crucial for survival in the digital era. Sourcing activities need to plot uncertainty and specify invisible unknowns. Constructing maps of digital business assets against market choices is a simple way to source effectively, and confidently plan for the future. Options range from tightly integrated in-house operations to a blend of externally- and internally-sourced capabilities. What matters is that the choices made should demonstrably relate to sustainably delivering the competitive performance objectives of the business.
Constructing maps: a simple and cost-effective way to source IT and plan for the future
Co-created with clients during executive workshops
Use LEF research and advisory insights to accelerate change in your organization:
- Learn how to approach strategic sourcing for a technology function and/or a specific customer journey.
- Develop an outside-in approach based on dynamics from a customer, innovation and competitive perspective.
- Gain a greater awareness of how geopolitical changes are impacting sourcing decisions today.
- Learn why a Matrix Mindset is important to leverage cloud capabilities.
- Apply Wardley Mapping, and particularly evolution, to understand how best to make decisions for an unknown future.
Re-imagining business
Technology Modernization
For any technology leader today, modernizing the technology foundations to newer, more capable, agile or efficient technology approaches is table stakes. Alongside the removal of inefficiencies and waste, a modern core is a gateway to future innovation, as out of date foundational technology can create significant inertia.
The Three Main Types of Business Transformation
Use LEF research and advisory insights to accelerate change in your organization:
- Cloud computing is as much today about creating business capability as it is about IT.
- With so much capability offered by modern underpinnings, competitive advantage can be gained by assembling the right components.
- A modern and skilled workforce in the assembly of such components is of pivotal importance.
- The continued evolution of technology holds much transformative potential, but only if coupled with modern foundations.
- The IT Organization is evolving from Enterprise IT to Cloud IT to Matrix IT and must be culturally prepared for continuously evolution from then on.
Re-imagining business
Workplace & Workspace
Working practices and customer expectations have changed and organisations must adapt to retain both. Established customer expectations and employee working norms have been fundamentally challenged. Identifying the key critical success factors that matter most for the changes in your organisation will help you prioritise and shape the necessary actions. These success factors centre around the social and relationship capital that significantly enhances the knowledge capital of any organization. It also requires effective performance management with the right culture and values designed to support it.
LEF Advisory Framework for Workplace & Workspace
Co-created with clients during executive workshops
Use LEF research and advisory insights to accelerate change in your organization:
- Explore what the different needs are for your employees, and how to get everyone involved.
- Identify what rituals and practices work best for certain situations.
- Learn how to create and replenish relationship capital.
- Understand what productivity gains look like in the wake of established norms being challenged and changed for the long term.
Leadership & capabilities
Competing in the digital age requires constant evolution to generate continuous innovation. Key to this is developing a learning mindset for the organization and the ability to nurture a virtuous digital learning capability, where every person is able to leverage technology to improve how they work.
LEF helps you to develop competence and confidence through creating a safe space to enable curiosity and experimentation. We bring this to life by contextualizing the learning to your roles, your organization – and making it relevant to your situation.
Two decades at the Leading Edge of change
Use LEF research and advisory insights to accelerate change in your organization:
- Equipping your leaders to better exploit new technology capabilities.
- Developing the Digital Mindset of your teams.
- Equipping you with digital skills to help you shape new opportunities.
Leadership & capabilities
Digital Mindset
While consumer services have long been the IT industry’s centre of gravity, technology is now being brought to bear directly on the human brain and body – with far-reaching implications for the 2020s and beyond. Development of the technology and digital capabilities is now the most important element of any business transformation, and the most difficult. Helping employees realize digital capabilities and responsibilities ensures that confident and innovative conversations take place, with customers and across your enterprise.
LEF Advisory Framework for Digital Mindset
Co-created with clients during executive workshops
Use LEF research and advisory insights to accelerate change in your organization:
- Understand how the technology industry has shifted to consumerisation and then onto the ‘human platform’.
- Learn how to unlock change and creativity in your people and organisation.
- Help your people overcome their technology anxiety.
- Develop your people capabilities in exploring and applying digital technologies to solve business problems.
Leadership & capabilities
Digital Business Leadership
Successful leaders in the digital-first economy navigate and utilize disruption by organizing around constant evolution to deliver a winning vision and business. Being prepared with an understanding of how data, intelligence, connectivity and automation are combining to transform every industry is essential to evolve how you think and operate. And knowing where and how to play in the innovation landscape will help you accelerate the adoption of new ideas into your organisation.
‘The Matrix’ is changing how we innovate, operate and compete
Seeing Digital, LEF, 2018
Use LEF research and advisory insights to accelerate change in your organization:
- Learn about The Matrix, why it matters and how to leverage cloud capabilities.
- Explore why haptic learning and experimentation is vital to the learning process.
- Identify where you and your organisation play strongest in the innovation cycle and how to maximise that capability.
- Learn why professionals need to understand the importance of “double-deep learning,” mastering tech skills in addition to their own domain knowledge.
Leadership & capabilities
Collaboration
Top down enterprise collaboration initiatives are awash with examples of failure to realise value but we know that better sharing and collaboration leads to value that couldn’t otherwise be achieved. In a world of more fluid and more ecosystem wide knowledge work, we must acknowledge the needs of individuals and teams and then adjust processes and technology.
Winners set up collaboration for success by establishing the what, where & why
Who Shares Wins, LEF, 2016
Use LEF research and advisory insights to accelerate change in your organization:
- Organizations must first get clear about the what, where and why or enterprise collaboration.
- There is often immunity to change, we must create new possibilities and prioritise them.
- Rituals and practices are important; which ones do we want to transfer to the new working environment and which do we need to create?
- The isolation economy is an accelerator of opportunity. Isolation Economy (IE) = Digital First (DF) + Personally Distanced (PD).
- Time and space often govern the productivity of organizations, teams and individuals.
Leadership & capabilities
Business Relationship Management
Traditional Enterprise IT functions risk irrelevance unless they can match the pace of organizational and technological evolution. IT’s ability to flex beyond being the simple provider of services is crucial to this change. The journey requires a transition to become advocates and promoters of new technologies that can improve business results, before moving towards partnering on issues of strategy and organizational change and ultimately acting as peers shaping the future strategy of the firm.
Organizations now need digital leadership, not just IT management
Raising IT’s Game Through BRM, LEF, 2016
Use LEF research and advisory insights to accelerate change in your organization:
- Encourage IT to operate as a Partner and Peer, particularly to business areas at risk of future disruption.
- Individuals can help but require an extensive skill set, much of which is innate.
- Organizational inertias can get in the way of even the most capable BRM’s.
- Advanced BRM initiatives rely on qualitative metrics, while less effective approaches rely on quantitative and formal approaches.
- Operating in these areas requires a significant mindset shift, from reactive to proactive.
