Reading/Strategy/Strategy Process

Earlier this month, some members of the Reading team spent two days learning how to go through the exercise of "playing to win" methodology of strategy. The meeting, by all means, was not set or designed to come up with a strategy for the movement in two days, in a closed room, by less than a dozen of people - the focus was on learning how to go through the thinking process, how to evaluate our concerns, and how we cascade our choices and solutions for suggested issues. The Reading department is relatively new, with mostly remote staff. Coming together to learn through the exercise was an important step towards systematizing the planning process and aligning the ideas moving forward. We also have a slidedeck from the first meeting and you can check the Q&A for further questions.

How the process works

 * Defining problems,
 * Bucketing,
 * Picking one problem to go through
 * Generating choices for how to over come the problem
 * Generating possibilities that each choice could entail
 * Narrowing down possibilities
 * Defining obstacles that would make the assumed possibilities not effective
 * Designing tests to evaluate obstacles

Step 1: Identifying issues

 * Identity crisis around reference versus learning ███
 * We don’t manage change well ███
 * Balancing resourcing, innovation, and maintenance ███
 * We are bad with people: communicating and listening. We don’t understand our community of different users ███ ███ ███
 * Because of how giant we are, we struggle to scale. ███
 * Our decline in North America traffic endangers our fund raising model ███ ███
 * Lack of shared understanding around primary stakeholders ███ ███
 * We have a mentality of “Us + Them” ███ ███ ███ ███
 * Being both a tech company + non-profit is challenging ███ ███
 * Factionalism within the foundation + the movement makes it hard to collaborate ███ ███ ███
 * No framework to gracefully handle tension in our world ███ ███
 * As a Reading team we lack diversity ███ ███
 * Lack of understanding around reader/editor relationship ███ ███
 * Not effective at problem solving with community ███ ███
 * We have only one way for users to consume content ███ ███
 * Foundation fails to support non-encylopedia projects and we are wasting opportunities ███ ███
 * Not doing a good job in partnerships ███ ███
 * Not playing in the education space, which means our competition occupies and takes away from us ███
 * We lack a lean-back experience ███
 * The web is changing and we don’t have a clear understanding of our place ███
 * People in other countries are not aware of Wikipedia ███ ███
 * Goals of editors and readers are not always the same ███
 * The web has new contribution/presentation methods that are not present in Wikimedia ███ ███ ███
 * People feel unsure about the quality and accuracy of our info ███
 * Our technical platform needs investment in order to reflect user expectations ███ ███
 * Proprietary web trends marginalize us and lock us out of potential markets and conflict with our values ███ ███
 * We don’t participate in the creation of standards ███
 * We’re not engaged in the conversations around open standards ███ ███
 * Competition is better at presenting information ███
 * We don’t serve our users who don’t speak English ███ ███
 * Other channels and formats are diverting attention ███
 * Audiences might veer towards more passive/distracting/trivial activities ███ ███
 * We don’t optimize content for learning across different audiences and different needs ███
 * No obvious way for readers to engage in knowledge contribution ███
 * We are not playing (visible) in important spaces - educational search engines, social, etc. ███
 * People aren’t reaching us because of intermediaries (other platforms) ███
 * Dealing with decline of desktop web ███ ███
 * Our content is being consumed without participation back ███ ███
 * Readers don’t understand how Wikipedia works ███
 * The world needs better access to open knowledge to deal with pressing issues of the day ███
 * Wikipedia has failed to become relevant on mobile presentation-wise ███
 * People need trusted, easy-to-understand information that could impact quality of life ███
 * Wikipedia is not seen as an authoritative source ███
 * We don’t have partners ███
 * We don’t know what we should partner on ███
 * Too many possible partnerships ███
 * We don’t partner with the largest syndicator of our content in a measurable, impactful way ███
 * Users are not reaching us and the web is getting more closed ███
 * Third parties may be diluting our content ███ ███
 * We know there are pipelines but not how to leverage them ███
 * Not enough local content ███

Step 2: Clustering
The eight themes emerged from the above problems those where:

Step 3: Partially completing the process on one theme: Our core capabilities, infrastructures, and workflows are not optimized for emerging platforms, experiences, and communities
The process requires constructing distinct choices to solve the issue, and then deriving possible ways of solving the issue. After describing possible ways of solving the issue, the process requires further exploration about what would need to be true about the industry, customers, capabilities and cost model relative to other players, and the reaction of other players. The following table describes just one potential choice. During the face to face session, the team delved more deeply into just a couple of relatively simpler possibilities from the table:


 * Focus on improving our end user experiences Possibility 1: enable readers to share content to read inside and outside Wikis


 * Focus on enabling others to improve end user experiences Possibility 1: Set of pre-built content for embedding existing Wikimedia content.

These two possibilities are by no means complete strategies in their own right. The team will explore more possibilities. And of possibilities that appear viable as part of a cohesive strategy, the team will construct cascades about the markets, products, capabilities, and management systems required to support such possibilities, as well as some lightweight tests that can be conducted to reasonably determine the viability of the possibilities.

Next Steps
Follow the process, and for our targeted problem think of possible choices. For Every choice, generate a number of possibilities that the choice entails. After than, design tests to verify concerns against possibilities.
 * Let's carry on the process together: