Friends,
I hope that all is well with you and yours, and that this e-mail finds you on a boat with shoddy connection, in the tropics, three months after I sent it.
Your company could be here.
I am, for the first time, opening up to newsletter sponsorships. For more information about how to put your brand in front of thousands of highly skilled, highly engaged professionals, send me an email. First come, first served.
Now accepting keynotes for 24Q2-24Q3
Every year, I create three main presentation decks. For 2024, they are:
What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do: How to turn uncertainty into a competitive advantage. (Based on my new book by the same name.)
Regression Toward the Meme: Why modern leadership falls into old traps - and how to avoid them.
The Efficiency Illusion: How to uncover the hidden costs of digital commerce and create profitable growth.
If you want to book me for your event, corporate speaking slot, or workshop, merely send me an email. To make sure I am available, however, please do so at your earliest convenience; my availability is limited and the schedule is filling up fast. More information may be found here.
A couple of updates before we go-go
When it rains, it pours. Last week it was my daughter’s eyesight; this week we’ve had someone break into our garage. Sigh. Getting a bit fed up with the shittier sides of life.
At least everything concerning the second child is looking good. All tests, all ultrasounds, have come back perfect so far.
On a completely different note, it is migraine-inducing to see how infantile strategic management doctrine has gotten of late. The intellectual giants of yesteryear have become low-brow clickbait factories that play to the least competent in the room.
It is almost as if the business community collectively agreed that the best way to increase conversational value was to lower the denominator, not increase the numerator, and that individual progress was a matter of return on mental investment, not one of perpetual improvement.
Oy vey.
Moving on.
2024.3.c
The undeservedly unknown
Part III: Alicia Juarrero
In what has now effectively become a trademark for this theme, the Cuba-born Alicia Juarrero is far from an unknown within her niche. She is currently an Affiliate Scholar in Residence of the Neuroethics Studies Program of the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics, a Visiting Scholar in the Philosophy Department at the University of Miami (FL), and a professor of philosophy emerita at Prince George’s Community College in Maryland. In 2002, she was named the US Professor of the Year by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE).
Yet much like the thinkers that we have previously highlighted, she nonetheless remains an unexplored source of insights for most in the broader strategic management audience. The reason, of course, is that Juarrero’s output is not labelled with the correct keywords, hashtags, and markings; it is not published in the outlets that most read. This is unfortunate, because there is much to learn from it.
So.
With the risk of being unjustifiably reductive (her immense body of work involves much more), Juarrero’s main contribution to our evolving understanding of the world has to do with constraints. In the traditional approach to strategic management, they are causal obstacles to be removed as they hinder flow and alternative action alike. But constraints, as she points out, can create alternatives as well; they may enable action.
Constraints, therefore, do not function just by closing off possibilities; contextual constraints are also the mechanism whereby the creation of a new level of organization with greater degrees of freedom, takes place. … [In language,] altering the contextual constraints creates the possibility of new meaning. The creative possibilities of metaphor are a function of the capacity of sentences (not letters) to convey semantic information, a capacity created by the very contextual constraints operating first at the level of letters, then at the level of words, and so on.
In other words, context can change everything; what is limiting action may also create action. It all depends on space and time.
This is a point that, while seemingly obvious, is surprisingly rarely considered. As human beings, we are quick to put labels on our environment. Once we have, we become reluctant to change them; the world is not black and white, but if we pretend that it is, navigation is easier.
Now, Juarrero tends to break constraints down into two types: context-free constraints, which behave consistently throughout a system, and context-sensitive constraints, which vary depending on their context within it. Personally, in my admittedly very finite wisdom, I have always found this to be a false dichotomy. Everything is contextual. Even the context has a context (what I suppose one might call a meta-context); all systems exist within other systems. A team exists within a department, which exists within a company, which exists within a market, which exists within an economy, and so forth.
Thus, I prefer to use context-neutral constraints and context-partial constraints. Context-neutral constraints are often (though they do not have to be) corporate-wide, be it shared understandings or overarching goals. They are not completely context-free – as events such as Covid can change goals – but there is a significant degree of inertia to them. By contrast, context-partial constraints can change swiftly as the context does. The change typically has a profound, and equally prompt, impact on the probabilities of subsequent events.
Perhaps I digress.
Either way, understanding the nature of constraints means that one may deliberately use them to a strategic end or advantage; we can nudge the system in a desired direction and enable the conditions that hopefully will allow the outcomes that we are looking for to emerge.
In short, as Steve has pointed out, this means asking the following three questions:
What constraints can I change?
Among the things that I can change, where can I monitor the impact?
Among the things that I can monitor, how can I amplify the things that provide promising returns and dampen those that do not?
Without a doubt, this is a revolutionary approach to strategic management, and it largely comes out of Juarrero’s work - which is why it is so important.
Unfortunately, though, there is a bit of a caveat. Juarrero is brilliant - of that there is absolutely no doubt - but her writing style can be so dry as to at times constitute what a less generous soul might call chloroform in print. I fully acknowledge that the issue may be my own lack of insight into the relevant concepts, but her use of technical language, akin to that of Burgelman, occasionally creates barriers that require a great deal of effort to overcome:
To phrase it otherwise, the integrated pattern of a Bénard cell just is the novel set of conditional probabilities that describes the range and behavior of microstate arrays. It is important not to reify the emergent. Constraints are not forces operating on isolated and independent systems. There is no need to invoke vitalist entelechies or other such dei ex machinae. Whenever components are coupled and interact, it is more accurate to speak of tendencies or propensities described in terms of conditional probabilities.
You get her point, but it takes a long walk down a windy beach to get there.
Not all of her writing constitutes such difficult terrain, mind, and Juarrero is still very much worth it. My point is merely that if you are to consume here thinking alongside a tasty beverage, my personal choice would be a large cup of coffee, not a glass of whisky.
Next week, we are going to ramp up the excitement factor a bit with an author whose background is far more controversial (and as a result, perchance, more broadly read).
Until then, have the loveliest of weekends.
Onwards and ever upwards,
JP
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