Control Tower Fallacy

That “control tower” looks like what it actually is: a glorified dashboard.

Dear CxO,

That “control tower” looks like what it is: a glorified dashboard.  

True control towers have these two capabilities:

1. Making projections of the future and calculating tradeoffs with an integrated model.

2. Making decisions, deploying responses, and orchestrating action with digital enablement

The reasons are the following,

1. You cannot change the past. You can only change the future.

   If your control tower is not showing you reliable computations of future performance, then there is no way you can be successful by looking at past data.

2. You cannot escape tradeoffs.

   If your control tower is not computing the interactions and tradeoffs among the material aspects of your business, you can not know the causes for observed variations & deviations, and you will always miss the optimization potential.

3. You need orchestrated action to change the future.

   You cannot act on charts and graphs. You need the digital means to formulate and orchestrate actions across teams and regions. 

Please let me know if you would like to learn more about how to hack the complexity of creating a future-looking, holistic, and action-oriented system.

Best Regards

Eren

© Saip Eren Yilmaz, 2023