William Blake’s poetry and quote of “Seeing the world in a grain of sand ” continues to hold inspiration for many business leaders and technological dreamers dealing with globalization and the “flat corporation.” Yet as a pragmatist, I muse that if this is true, whose grain of sand provides improvement and profit out of the countless trillions of particles available? Furthermore, within a troubled industry clinging to dogmatic approaches, can invention really be spawned by the spear of consolidation, or worse, regulation?
To date, the projected recovery we have anticipated in the second half of the year has evidently become one of those grains of sand washed back into the sea for another day. Rising unemployment and inflation spurred by a change of global economic standing has shifted the investments and interest from West to East. So are we ready to throw up our hands in resignation and board the boat for another shoreline with the idea that perhaps by 2010 the mortgage industry will rebalance and the path made clearer? Hardly.
We must permanently think and act differently, but how? Lacking the “right” grain of sand, I, like most strategist and architects, began to draw. What I arrived at over the holiday break was something familiar, yet different it was a “Non-Model.” An illustration of the Non-Model you can deploy for your own organization is represented below. It moves beyond the “box-ticking,” passive approaches. The Non-Model is founded in measurement, assessment and projection. However, its multi-dimensional conclusions and composition are variable and interlocking depending upon your need and organization. As I said earlier, whose grain of sand is correct? The answer is all of them. We know from experience, that innovation is often more about the integration of disparate ideal to arrive at “new paradigm” solutions, and of course, profit.
Stating the obvious, the FSI and mortgage industries for too long have fixated on a series of one-off solutions for a particular opportunity or problem AVM, fraud, compliance, origination, foreclosure, loss mitigation, customer mining, e-closing, and the list goes on. Those principles or models of operation worked when we were community banks and knew our customers by sight. Do they really have efficacy within our forward and reverse supply chains (and yes supply chains run both forward and backward)? Do they make sense with the vast array of data sources, exchanges and oversight? Do they serve our customers and prospects?
On a droll note, I originally thought of calling the loosely coupled diagram an “unmodel” then I did a Google search on the term and quickly renamed it. Wow, now that was something I wasn’t expecting with that term!
