BBC 2017 Speaker Series – Consultant:  Michael Lachapelle

In anticipation of his presentations at Building Business Capability in Orlando, Nov. 6-10, 2017, 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, Designing and Changing Business: Working with the Business Model Canvas and Designing Value Propositions that Matter to Your Customers.

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: The biggest challenge most companies face is the growing complexity of the market environment. Given the rate of change in markets and technology, we can expect the gap in understanding to continue to grow. Having a structured approach to customer insights remains the biggest deficit for most companies.

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: The most common term I have heard over the past year is “sensemaking” – helping decision makers to make sense of their complex world and the forces influencing their businesses. Business analysts need to develop frameworks and approaches that can address complex situations, reducing them to simple principles, and from there deriving complex analysis.

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: This past year I have been working with new collaborative thinking tools and using human-centered design methods to generate ideas for innovation. The activities for collaborative thinking have really opened up possibilities for identifying and discussing key issues of innovation and operations. The human-centered design approach has brought a new way of looking at generative research and focusing people on creating solutions.

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. The talk will focus on gaining better insights about what motivates your customers and how one uses that to design better value propositions.

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Don’t miss Michael’s presentations, Designing and Changing Business: Working with the Business Model Canvas on Tuesday, November 7, 2017 from 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm and Designing Value Propositions that Matter to Your Customers on Wednesday, November 8, 2017 from 10:25 am to 11:25 am, at Building Business Capability.   Click here to register for attendance.