Issue #53: Creating Clarity in Complex Businesses
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Most of you reading this operate complex (and probably complicated) businesses.

Technology, go-to-market, operations, finance, legal—each function has its own priorities and ways of working, yet all must operate in synchrony if the company is to execute well. This is hard enough in stable markets; in uncertain ones, it can be practically impossible.

To stitch these pieces together, you need a clear view of the business that answers three critical questions:

• Where you are: current operating model, current metrics.
• Where you need to be: target operating model, target metrics.
• How to get there: initiatives and activities you must pursue to bridge the gap.

Let’s call this a blueprint. Unlike mission statements or vision decks, a blueprint is prescriptive. It defines exactly what you need to do and how you need to think. Even in complex businesses, there are simple truths. A blueprint allows you to define a straightforward structure for how the business works—or how it should work—to which you can add necessary components.

I’ve spent the past few days building a blueprint for a modern insights agency (link at the bottom of this newsletter), and it occurred to me that, in addition to sharing the blueprint itself, it might be even more helpful to share the process by which I built it.

The Five Pieces Every Blueprint Needs

Here are the key parts of any blueprint.

1. A single spine

Pick the value chain that spans the entire enterprise.

In my own project, I used a classic agency operating model:

Lead → Order → Delivery → Invoice → Cash.

Yours might be Prospect → Activation → Renewal or Idea → Launch → Scale.

Everything else bolts to this axis.

2. Three to six principles

Define your non-negotiables—rules that must hold whenever you face trade-offs around money, time, or politics. These are the hills you’ve decided you will die on, so choose them carefully.

You should not compromise in advance. Initially, these principles may feel uncomfortable or unrealistic given your current situation. Approach this task by asking yourself: “If we were operating under no constraints, how would we ideally want this to work?” If you’ve never looked at Edward De Bono’s Six Hats method, I encourage you to do so—these principles require you to wear the green (creative) hat.

I defined six principles, including things like “Configurable, not customised” and “Machines act first.”

Fewer than three probably means you’re not clear enough on what you truly need; more than six tends to dilute the focus.

3. A lightweight scaffolding

Begin by breaking your spine into logical stages.

Here, think about what is logical from your customer’s perspective, versus what might seem logical to you internally. Typically, the customer’s perspective is the best way to partition the spine. In my case, I used:

• Lead-to-order (the sales funnel through to closing)

• Order-to-delivery (taking and executing the order, then delivering the output)

• Delivery-to-cash (closing the project and receiving payment)

4. Stage blocks

Within each stage, go just one level deeper by listing only the services or activities needed to move work forward in that stage. There should be a logical flow, but avoid defining discrete, detailed processes—that can come later. Instead, your goal is to broadly state the necessary components for each step.

5. Human checkpoints and KPIs

This defines how the business operates:

• What are the goals and KPIs for each stage?

• Which roles perform which types of work? Where does automation play a role?

• How is revenue generated and margin preserved?

The benefits of a blueprint should be clear. It’s a simple way of describing the business that works for everyone from board members to line managers, yet powerful enough to inspire transformative action. It creates guardrails that prevent backsliding when work becomes tricky. It helps surface priorities and clarify what good and bad look like. Most importantly, a blueprint serves as a powerful tool for communicating intentions and creating dialogue throughout the organisation.

How to build it, step by step

You can do this yourself, or ideally, work with a team:

• Sketch the spine on a whiteboard or a blank sheet of paper.
• Write your core principles in bold marker.
• Name your stages and clearly section them off.
• For each stage, identify your stage blocks, creating a mini-spine within each. Keep it clean, but note interdependencies to the side or on Post-It notes.

From there, you can enrich your blueprint further, perhaps by:

• Marking with colored dots where human intervention is needed, or where automation should take over.
• Indicating the key metrics for each stage.
• Highlight areas needing deeper investigation versus those where minimal change is required to reach your target model.

You’ll likely have a few pages when done, but your top-level spine should fit clearly on a single page.

A Real Example

Click the link below to see how I’ve used this exact technique to develop a blueprint for a modern insights agency—from lead to cash, fully instrumented, credit-metered, and auditable. It is a little further along (I turned it into an ebook), but if you were to take the different section headings, it would align with this idea.

When you read through it, you’ll see that perhaps the most valuable purpose it serves is to show that, even if the path is hard, it’s possible to imagine a fundamentally different future for a business—and a practical, clear path to get there.

People, stuff, travel, reading, and more

• New e-book out, as you see above. It's the culmination of years of thinking, months of working, but only about a week of writing. Let me know what you think.
• Two newsletters have become required reading for me when it comes to AI. One is Marc Ryan's (ex Kantar) Grey Matter Unloaded, which addresses technology in an insights context. (This recent post on AI for non technical audiences is quite good. The other is the Every newsletter. (This post on the coming age of wisdom work is also quite good.) Both are must reads.
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