Gate 1 of 5
Right team
The bottleneck that stays the same across a company’s whole lifecycle: assembling the right people in the right roles, which no strength elsewhere can stand in for.
Boat Lock
Keynote · Strategy, execution, capital allocation
Everyone says leadership, vision, culture and technology are what make a company great. But what if that’s incorrect?
As a result, most budgets are allocated to leadership offsites, values sessions and investments in the latest technology. Four years of data from 759 leaders show that five different capabilities decide performance, and this talk, with cutting-edge research and statistical analysis, will demonstrate that perhaps your assumptions are wrong and you are “opening the wrong gate”.
Best for
Boards, executive committees, private capital, and any team about to sign off a transformation budget.
Boat Lock
The problem
It’s a common belief that in business, leadership is the most important element for success, along with a clear vision, a healthy culture and cutting-edge technology. As a result, most budgets are allocated to leadership retreats, culture transformation and large company-wide technology implementations. But how important are these actually, and how do we validate or compare them?
Boat Lock
What is
happening now
Almost all performance research reports correlation, i.e. what high performers have in common, but it cannot tell you what a company is unable to succeed without (necessity). The first draws attention to the visible where leading companies all seem to have inspiring vision, large markets and incredible technology. What isn’t spoken about are the less sexy attributes, the foundations that are rarely spoken about.
Boat Lock
The keynote
Four years, 759 leaders and 157 organisations across South Africa, India, Thailand and Qatar, using Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) alongside fuzzy-set configurational analysis, and drawing on the 50,000 datapoints collected through WhatTheForesight. Performance turns out to behave like a canal lock, where a boat cannot rise unless certain gates are open and, once they are, the rising water does the lifting. Through Craig’s research, five capabilities are identified as the minimum requirements to reach 80th percentile performance: right team, investment discipline, agility, operations and governance each have to clear a minimum to reach high performance. Below a set minimum on any single one no strength elsewhere compensates, so a brilliant team cannot cover absent capital discipline and no amount of vision lifts a boat whose other gates are shut.
Leadership, vision and culture sit above the gates rather than among them (i.e. they are not absolute necessities) and they mislead precisely because top performers score highly on all three. Technology is the biggest outlier, being the capability organisations most want to buy (most hyped) but the smallest correlation to perceived profitability. Most organisations are investing in the hype, without the return.
This is known as the “overclaiming trap” where investment is made in a tangential area versus identifying the true underlying blocker. The “Overclaimer” archetype emerges the most often (39 per cent), convinced it is world class at execution and innovation while a genuine mandatory gate stays shut. You can find out if you are one of these companies by doing a free survey at whattheforesight.com.
Five
gates
Performance turns out to behave like a canal lock, where a boat cannot rise unless certain gates are open and, once they are, the rising water does the lifting.
Gate 2 of 5
Investment discipline
Capital allocated with discipline, stage by stage and with explicit criteria for stopping, which is also the gate technology depends on before it pays off at all.
Gate 3 of 5
Agility
The capacity to move when conditions shift, a hard gate with a high bar and few exceptions among the companies that reached high performance.
Gate 4 of 5
Operations
Operating effectively is unglamorous and binding, and a board that believes the company is world-class while operations scores below six is usually overclaiming.
Gate 5 of 5
Governance
Governance opens through measurement discipline and better use of existing resources rather than through a new vision statement.
Boat Lock
What you get
This keynote examines the 25 attributes that companies should focus on to create more resilient future strategies as indicated by a singular metric (Future Fitness Score), and how to release the 5 key gates to reach the highest echelons of performance. The keynote demonstrates what needs to change at each gate, and which behaviours, to ensure you can reach maximum performance. Find your own shut gate
Strategyexecutioncapital allocation
“Dr Wing’s research really makes sense about why all the spend we have made into technology isn’t paying off. We are simply investing in the wrong things. Your work is so important and should be a Harvard article.”
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Preparation
hardens decisions.
He takes bookings for keynotes, MC and hosting, workshops and advisory work, both directly and through speaker bureaus.
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