From strategic planning to purpose and resilience
…most people didn’t (and still don’t) know what ‘strategy’ is: the choice among alternative courses of action, not the determination of goals and objectives. It’s about how, not about what.
Most of the ‘strategic’ plans I was given (by bosses, and by clients I was advising) were not plans at all, but rather targets. I began to realize that my bosses and clients didn’t have the foggiest idea how to achieve these targets, which is why they just set them and left it up to me to achieve them. Indeed, for the most part they didn’t care how they were achieved, so I got rewarded and applauded when the targets were achieved (even if it was not my doing) and chastised and rated poorly when they were not (even if the failure was not my doing). In part this is because in most organizations today the bosses do not now how to do the work of their subordinates, so they can offer nothing of value in setting strategy (i.e. in intelligently suggesting how to achieve objectives and targets).
Instead of strategies being developed collaboratively and intelligently, they are either left up to individuals (who are given only objectives and targets), or imposed without consultation; in the latter case, the worker must figure out how to work around the (inappropriate) strategies to achieve the targets and objectives, while still helping the boss save face by making it appear s/he at least tried to implement the strategies.
Natural Enterprises…these organizations are driven by a Purpose — a shared “Why are we here?…Instead of getting “stretch targets” that can never be achieved, they aspire to sustainable happiness of their members (workers, customers, community). They worry not about how to ‘grow’ to get somewhere else, but how to continue what they do well now…Since they have no objectives and targets to become what they are not now, they are free to focus on assessing the risks and threats to sustaining what they have already become. And they have no illusions of being in control: instead of trying to change their environment, they seek to prevent (in a few cases), mitigate (more often) and adapt to (most often) the changes, risks and threats that they envision
Related
Ability to respond to emergent outcomes…
Strategic plans nor change initiatives work out as designed
Strategy and the unpredictable
The lack of long term accountability (and short term greed) neglects resilience
Strategy lies between directedness and execution. It lays down ‘lines of action” that the firm intends to initiate and that are supposed to bring about desired outcomes. Since outcomes depend on the interactions with and between many other agents (inside and outside the firm’s boundaries), strategy really represents an attempt to control a process of interactions, with the firm’s own intended “lines of action” as control parameters.
Strategy then must include provisions for actively monitoring the world to discover unexpected consequences, as well as mechanisms for adjusting projected action plans in response to what turns up.
- Michael Lissack
Understanding, not asserting control
It is just not meaningful to interpret strategy as a plan to assert control. Rather, strategy must be seen as a process to understand control: where it resides, and how it has been exercised within each of its loci.
Thus in a complex world, strategy is a set of processes for monitoring the behaviors of both the world and of the agents of the organization, observing where attractors are and attempting to supply resources and incentives for future moves. Command and control are impossible (at least in the absolute and in the aggregate), but the manager does retain the ability to influence the shape of the fitness landscape.
- Michael Lissack
