At Jump, we've got lots of folks exploring a wide variety of topics on any given day. From healthcare, to technology, to cars, to the next generation of consumer packaged goods. Often, our work in those fields merge to create entirely new ways of looking at the world. And that's certainly the case with my colleague Conrad Wai, who's merging insights from the venture capital space with his experience in technology to produce some fantastic commentary on a new blog called Something Ventured. Recently, Conrad began a series of posts on hybrid strategy (obviously with a bit of a technology slant), and I'd like to share his initial post on hybridity here. Enjoy!

Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter is widely recognized as the father of modern strategy – he literally wrote the piece, “What is Strategy?” For over 30 years, he’s been refining the approach he first outlined in the 1970s. But the world has changed drastically in those years, and it continues to change so much, so fast. As such, the traditional modus operandi of analyzing a situation, setting a strategy, and then executing against it, doesn't suffice anymore. It's time to revisit the core of what the practice of strategy entails, and update it for today's world.

Imagine this: It's 2001, and you're in the depths of the dot com bust. You've been asked to turn around a struggling computer manufacturer. Sure, the overall market seems like it will rebound at some point, but you use different standards than everyone else, and you're becoming more marginalized by the day. You tell the Board that your plan is to partially divert the company's focus away from computers and enter the unproven, niche MP3 music player category. The iPod, and then iTunes, is born. And the rest, as we all know, is history.

Of course, the company is Apple. And although it now seems unfathomable to question their strategy, on the face of it, in 2001 such a plan must have seemed kooky at best. So how did that winning strategy come into being? Certainly not through an in-depth analysis of the declining music industry. Probably not primarily by considering core competences. And likely not from fiddling with different forces. So, if not through traditional strategic analysis, then how? (The lazy answer is "Steve Jobs." Fine. In that case, as we say at Jump, how do you do the job without Jobs?)

The real answer lies in using a hybrid strategy that combines the analytical with the creative.
Hybrid strategy is a deliberate mash-up of different disciplines. But it's not just about putting a designer and an MBA in a room together. That's a good start, but the real magic happens when a designer and an MBA occupy the same brain. After all, putting a red swatch next to a blue one isn't the same as mixing the two colors to make purple. My colleague Dev Patnaik puts it much more elegantly:

"When multiple disciplines inhabit the same brain, something magical starts to happen. The disciplines themselves start to mutate. They hybridize. We start practicing business like a designer. We shape technology like a social scientist. And we start thinking about the most complex problems that plague our societies like an entrepreneur."

So why is a hybrid approach so important? One word: ambiguity.
Organizations are increasingly confronted with complex, ambiguous problems. How do I build tomorrow's technology, not just race against my competitors on specs and price? What will the media landscape look like in five to ten years? How does my candy business stay relevant in an age of health and wellness? What's the future of transportation? Of water? Of energy?

Traditional strategy often gets bogged down by the vastness of uncertainty inherent in these types of problems. After all, you can't analyze your way into something radically new. How would you have modeled tablet computer sales when the category didn't exist yet? And how would that have helped you figure out how to beat Steve Jobs? Traditional strategy is good at analyzing the current state and extrapolating out from it. But it struggles when faced with a discontinuity, where the future will not be like the past. It looks at cell phone adoption in 1990 and, "accounting for" an accelerating pace of adoption, predicts that there will be fifty million mobile phones in 20 years. Not five billion, as it turns out. It can't make the creative leaps to say that mobile phones will be how people in the US find a restaurant for dinner, and have the power to help farmers price crops in Africa.

Analytical and creative: combining the two to create something new.
On the flip side, you can't have creativity alone. Cool new ideas aren't hard to come by. But you need analytical rigor combined with cultural empathy to differentiate between the iPhone and Minority Report. To evaluate and prioritize the extraordinary breadth of possibilities, you need to synthesize cultural forces, competitive actions, technological vectors, and internal capabilities. The real power of hybrid strategy comes in combining creativity with this analysis. That's what will allow organizations to think rigorously about innovative offerings, and think creatively about compelling new business models. And ultimately, that's how we'll solve the big, ambiguous challenges we face today.

In future articles, we'll talk more about how hybrid strategy shapes the problems an organization focuses on, the people who are best-suited to work on them, and the process they use. Many thanks to my colleagues at Jump Associates; most of the ideas in this article are theirs.

To read more of Conrad's blog, visit Something Ventured.