The return of annual planning?
Given the year (and a half) we’ve just experienced, companies have had to come to terms with a huge amount of adversity. We closed, we reopened, we reclosed, we cancelled, we backed off, and sometimes we even went ahead too quickly (shout-out to my restaurateur friends!). In short, what we just went through was, without a doubt, for many companies (and people), the most difficult experience we’ve had in the past 30 years. A period of uncertainty and loss In my last article, I mentioned that my clients seem to have traded in their long-term plans for short-term initiatives that produce immediate results. Obviously, in many cases, this is the right thing to do to ensure their survival. But now that many seem to have been able to get their heads above water, it’s time to start moving ahead with the projects that they put off for a time. The post-lockdown recovery has brought a new challenge to be faced by employers: a labour shortage. The BDC estimates that 40 percent of Canadian entrepre …
The 5 levels of website optimization (part 1 of 3)
This weekend, I took advantage of the rain to help my wife book an opera ticket for her next trip to Australia. This experience reminded me of the difficulty some companies and associations encounter in allocating their resources (internal and/or external) and in prioritizing their optimization strategy. So that you can relive my user experience, I therefore propose two small user tests (5 to 10 min maximum in all and for all). This will then allow me to introduce the optimization pyramid with the description of the "functional" and "accessible" levels in part 2 and the "ergonomics", "intuition" and "persuasion" levels in the last part. TEST 1: THE SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE WEBSITE Context: You are going to Australia at the end of June for conferences and you want to take this opportunity to go see an opera at the Opera House in Sydney. You arrive on June 27 with a one-day time difference (departing from Montreal) and you leave Sydney for Cairns on July 1 around 5 p.m. Doing a Google search, …
Adaptability in times of chaos
I don’t need to tell you these are strange, possibly unprecedented times for businesses. Things were complicated enough a few months ago, but at this point we’ve sailed past complicated and landed at the edge of chaos. This situation has gotten me doing a lot of thinking and talking with the rest of the team I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about our situation, and talking it over with my fellow managers and the rest of the team. How should we be reacting? What moves are the right ones to make in an ecosystem where the rules of the game change every week, sometimes every day? I’m a big fan of frameworks to help clarify my thinking. Several years ago, Simon Éthier, a longtime colleague and VP, Consulting here at Adviso, introduced me to the Cynefin framework. At the time, our goal was to determine the best services to offer clients based on the system they had in place. However, this framework is also extremely useful for thinking your way through the thick fog brought on by the pandem …