The Optimised Portfolio

We are the sum total of our actions. If we did everything we were currently working on… who would we be? Is every action working to be our best?

People or organisations are not measured on what they claim they are… but on what they actually do. People or organisations who have the fortitude and self-awareness to constantly and consistently consider their options, and optimise their actions towards a meaningful purposeful existence… are likely to be considered as living out a highly respected, highly capable, highly effective, mature existence. 

Its true, they are rarely found… but we can all aspire… learn from those who demonstrate these behaviours… and lift our own game. We are not looking to be perfect… but we can be better.

Visualization of the complete pipeline of work being done by an organization, or indeed, across a sector or a community creates a higher order of shared understanding, answering many parts of the core Future Fiduciary question, “Are we optimally invested in our own future?” 

It enables us to consider the subsidiary questions “If we did everything we are currently working on, who would we be?”. “Is that who we want to be?”. And, “What different things do we need to be doing now to change the otherwise inevitable future outcome of our actions?”.

Decision-making to consistently optimise the portfolio – and make sure that everyone’s effort is being prioritised to the most valuable areas – can then be made in the presence of risk and uncertainty mitigated valuation of the likely outcome of delivering on the full portfolio of an organization’s activities. Its a practice that everyone participates in. Everyone has their role and discipline and contributes to shared knowledge and learning about the portfolio as it develops.

I’ve had the opportunity to interview the chairs of a handful of Fortune 200 scale organisations about their board, and their organisations’ Future Fiduciary capacity. Multiple chairs responded “Optimize? We’d never use that word here. We don’t optimize. There’s no way to optimize. It’s not possible“. But I got a starkly different response from the chair of the real out-performer in the group. “Optimize? Oh, you’re never finished optimising.” he responded to the same question. “No, every decision in this organization every single day, not just at the board, but right through the whole organization, is improving the value of our long-term prospects.”