strategy

This post is largely inspired by a comprehensive blog entry by Dave Snowden on a new approach to Scenario Planning.   Much of what he says is key to the thinking behind our new Thrive! product.

Seneca said: "The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty"

In one of her articles Margaret Wheatly writes about the metaphors we use when speaking about dealing with complex problems, most of these relate to attacking the problem, not actually engaging with it.  Most people and organisation seem to have an inherent dislike for complexity and uncertainty, wanting to eliminate or reduce it all costs.  In their efforts, they often cause more risk to their companies. ...

After two weeks of spending all my time on preparing a BIG tender sumbission, I came across a link to this HBR article on Dave Snowden's blog this morning.

We believe that businesses have become addicted to prescription - mindlessly copying the latest best practice or case study. Very seldom do we come across leaders who are trailblazers, preferring to be the firs ones to venture into a new area.  Usually we're asked the question: So, where has this been done before?  Everyone seems to want a fail-safe recipe. 

I think this paragraph brings the point across quite eloquently ...

Following on from my previous post where we used the metaphor of Starfish and Spiders to look at distributed vs centralised organisations or complex vs ordered problems, let's explore how one would go about dealing with Starfish problems.

Using old-fashioned frontal or direct assault techniques when attacking a Starfish problem or organisation actually strengthens it, making it more open and more decentralised.  Death-blows are temporary, and in the end makes matters worse as it doubles the threat.  There are several reasons for this, one of which being that a key characteristic of a Starfish organisation is that collective knowledge is stored in a diffused manner throughout the system, this decentalisation makes it highly adaptive and very difficult to destroy.

Another feature of a Starfish structure, is that the structure promotes the formation of splinter, franchise and copycat groups, all operating under one ideology - often with slightly modified strategies, but using the same tactics.

So, how do we go about defeating a Starfish? ... 

Leon from Occam's Donkey alerted me to an article that was published in a recent Scientific American on the impact that the language leaders use when referring to terrorism has on the perception of the general population.   For example, a metaphor of "law enforcement" triggers very different responses than a "war" metaphor.

The article starts with the sentence "How we characterise an issue affects how we think about it".  This is perfectly illustrated by typical responses to occupational safety incidents.  Because people tend to classify these as ordered or simple problems, they apply ordered solutions i.e.  they create rules. 

I came across a billboard with this statement last week.  It's part of a marketing campaign for one of the short term insurers. 

When I read it, my first thought was that this is probably one of the silliest statements I've seen in a while, but after thinking about it, I realised that someone who doesn't look at life through a complexity lense may think that it's rather clever.

So why do I have a problem with it?  Well, first off, I'm not sure you can ever really have foresight.  Certainly not when dealing with the type of complexities that insurers would typically deal with.  I'm sure there are many predictions that can be made by actuaries and the like based on complex statistics that I'd rather not want to think about, but even those are vulnerable to the inherent unpredictability of complex systems.