In anticipation of his pre-conference tutorial at Building Business Capability in Vegas, Oct 31, – Nov. 4, 2016, we asked Michael Lachapelle, Principal Analyst at Business Model Fulcrum, a few questions about pursuing business excellence. Check out his interview in relation to his BBC presentation entitled, Using The Business Model Canvas To Describe & Change Business.

Q: In what ways are the organizations with whom you work pursuing business excellence?

A: One of the very important challenges companies face today is the growing complexity of the market environment. The best companies are trying to address this by focusing on building structured approaches to understanding their business and building customer insight. Big data can provide astonishing details about correlations and trends, but no amount of data will ever tell you why, or explain customer’s motivations. The key to customer insight is making sense of what motivates your customers, the outcomes they want and the pains they encounter.

Q: Can you describe the challenges organizations have or have already overcome in establishing more robust business capabilities?

A: Recently a report by McKinsey indicated 80% of the executives with whom they spoke felt their business model is at risk. Only 6% of those executives felt satisfied with their innovation performance. Whether you believe these numbers to be extreme, they do reflect a growing concern with many companies they have to build a stronger culture of innovation and ensure their companies have the structure, methodology and skills to drive innovative thinking.

Q: What’s the most valuable thing you’ve learned in the past year?

A:  The importance of context – there is no approved solution to success. ‘One size fits all’ and ‘just follow this formula’ are a mug’s game. Being successful is built on good strategic thinking with sharable frameworks and methodologies that can be embedded into the organization and effectively change the culture.

Q: What do you see as the most important goal or trend for business analysts and other professionals to keep in mind?

A: Staying current with new ways of thinking and new approaches. I find the profession lagging behind what is being taught in business schools and practiced in the boardrooms of leading companies. BAs need to orient themselves to an environment driven by design and visual thinking, customer and user engagement, business design and lean/agile approaches.

Q: What’s the latest method/process/tool you’ve implemented to help your business operate more effectively? Have you seen any results yet?

A: The most recent tool I have been using and promoting is a partnership model and risk assessment tool. Partnerships are a critical part of any business, yet the vast majority of companies give little thought to a structured analytical view of their partnerships and even fewer systematically assess the risks in partnerships.

Q: If you could go back 5 years in time and give some professional insight or advice to yourself, what would it be?

A: Learn more about the integration of visual thinking tools and design thinking approaches as a basis for re-designing the conversations around strategy and innovation.

Q: What’s one question you wished you were asked in this interview but were not? And how would you answer?

A: Where do you see the most fertile ground for business analysis in the immediate future? I firmly believe that developing good, interactive tools and design approaches to customer insight will be a very significant domain of work. Business is about the creation of value for the target customer-client-user-member. Any organization that creates and delivers value, the basis of the business model, will need to have solid tools and methods by which to understand their targets’ motivations.

Q: Sneak preview: Please tell us a take-away that you will provide during your talk at the Building Business Capability (BBC) conference this year?

A: The workshop is intended to give people some hands-on experience and insights in working with the business model canvas as a tool and business models as a common language to design, analyze and change the way business is done.

—————————–

Don’t miss Michael’s pre-conference tutorial, Using The Business Model Canvas To Describe & Change Business, at Building Business Capability on Monday, October 31, 2016 from 9:00 am to 12:00 pm. Click here to register for attendance.