Alignment & Coherence
The old and the new
Friends,
As we have seen time and again over the last few months, complexity science fundamentally disproves a number of established truths in strategy. But while the new body of evidence forces us to rethink our approaches, it also helps us understand why we have struggled in the past - and thereby provides a potential competitive edge over those who have yet to obtain the same insights.
Today’s topic provides a valuable example of how.
Anyone who has working experience will be familiar with the excuse that the strategy was perfect, but the execution anything but. Obviously, that can be the case, but it is nonetheless an argument that comes dangerously close to being flawed ab initio (or from the beginning, to use less pretentious terms). Every failure of implementation is by definition also a failure of formulation as a strategist has to take into account the capability (and willingness) to act.
The undeniable reality is that strategic plans regularly are diverted from or completely ignored, be it out of necessity, incomprehension or ignorance. A set of actions instead emanate as the organization learns what works in practice, explained in Strategy in Polemy by means of Mintzberg’s concept of emergent strategy.
Although this is inevitable, it also creates an organizational predictability conundrum: how can we both be responsive to unforeseen events and ensure that we remain on a desired course?
The answer is not easily found in traditional strategic theory as it is largely built on the behaviors of markets of yesterday, a fact that is commonly forgotten as strategists attempt to apply the methods to organizations of today. For all the ridicule aimed at operational specialists to whom everything looks like a nail because all they have is a hammer, we often fall into the same trap, albeit perhaps on a different level. If all you have are five whys, everything will be perceived as having a root cause.
I digress.
The point is that there is still an underlying assumption that strategists can foretell the future and define not merely where the company should be in the world to come, but also the optimum way of getting there - and that employees subsequently do what they are told along the way in precisely the way the strategist had intended. This is akin to drawing a line in the sand from the messy present to an idealized future state and expecting everyone to stand on it in the names of alignment and sticking to the plan.
It is a nice idea in theory, I admit, but then reality happens and people inevitably start to deviate, be it by accident or on purpose. Slowly but steadily the organization turns inefficient as effort is wasted either trying to get back in line or coming up with new ways of breaking the rules when they prevent actual work from being done. As we know from previous newsletters, the standard approach of then dialing up the alignment efforts merely exacerbates the problem; the system becomes over-constrained, breaks catastrophically, becomes unconstrained and descends into chaos.
Yet at the same time, stakeholder demands mean that we cannot leave everything to discovery and chance either. So what the hell do we do?
The solution, to steal a line from Sonja Blignaut, is to shift from seeking alignment to enabling coherence and build what I call directional opportunism.
Coherence, if one goes by the dictionary definition, infers the following:
logical interconnection; overall sense or understandability.
congruity; consistency.
In strategy, coherence allows for what one might label contingent truth, that is, an acknowledgment of an imperfect understanding of the world, but also an effort to head in the right direction based on the facts at hand.
Over the next few weeks, I will elaborate at length on what this means (as the practical implications are as wide as they are deep), but a direct consequence for strategic management is the necessity of moving from one proverbial line in the sand to two (known as boundary conditions in complexity lingo) and allowing employees the freedom to move within as they deem best given their present challenge and context. Technically speaking, the approach builds coherence by increasing satisfaction of a set of negative and positive constraints (echoing work by Thagard and Verbeurgt).
A simple way of illustrating it is this:
Another way to describe it is as a form of strategic consistency by the negative or apophatic. Instead of explicitly establishing what one can do and thereby implicitly what one cannot do, one explicitly establishes what one cannot do and thereby implicitly what one can do. Although it may appear a minor distinction in text, it is a massive difference in reality - the former creates robustness, the latter resilience. As such, the value is obvious.
But it also allows us as strategists to enable what one might sloppily call predictable emergence or emergent strategy within deliberate affordances.
As will become clear over the next weeks and months, the technique plays a vital part in my ABCDE framework, and I am bursting at the seams to demonstrate how.
Until then, have a lovely Midsummer weekend.
Onwards and upwards,
JP