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T W I T T E R : #LASCOT16

“Perversion, at its most fundamental, resides in the formal structure of how the subject relates to truth and speech. The pervert claims direct access to some figure of the big Other (from God or history or Lean/Agile Thought Leaders), so that, dispelling all the ambiguity of language, he is able to act directly as the instrument of the big Other's will.”

PERVERSION

OUTLINE

•  Assumptions •  Systems •  Strategy, WTF? •  What *is* Strategy? •  The OODA Loop(s) •  Structuring Structures, Bourdieu Remixed •  Propensities, Efficacy, and Capability •  Dispositionality •  Final Thoughts

ASSUMPTION 1

We all exist (beingness) with(in) system(s).

ASSUMPTION 2

We are all responsible for the design, development, and maintenance of purposeful systems.

ASSUMPTION 3

Before an organization can design a strategy, that is – how and what it can do to gain, retain, and exploit the initiative to gain a position of comparative advantage, it must decide what purpose their system serves inside a larger system.

From “Strategic Navigation,” William Dettmer

WHAT IS A SYSTEM?

“A set of interrelated things encompassed by an arbitrary boundary, interacting with one another and an external environment, forming a complex (co-evolutionary), but unitary whole and working towards a common objective or shared goal.”

— William Dettmer

From “Organizational Leadership and Culture,” Edgar Schein

ORGANIZATIONS AS SYSTEMS

“Ultimately, all organizations are socio-technical systems in which the manner of external adaptation and the solution of internal integration problems are interdependent.”

— Edgar Shein

STRATEGY Not everything is strategy, and not everyone is a strategist.

WHAT ISN’T STRATEGY?

1. Planning (and plans) 2. Goals 3. Objectives 4. Aspirations 5. Tactics 6. Fluff 7. Mission, vision, and values statements

(The 9th waste in Lean)

STRATEGY, WTF?

•  Most organizations don’t have strategies — they have Sunday words, buzzwords, jargon, and gibberish masquerading as strategy.

•  Organizations rarely address the competitive landscape and the challenges, constraints, and obstacles that stand in the way of them pursuing a plan of action to compete against their adversaries.

•  Many organizations have a set of objectives, too many in fact, some contradictory, all competing for limited resources and are therefore nothing but aspirational statements of desire. (We will be the Partner of Choice for X, Y, and Z, leveraging A, B, and C, to disintermediate our market and delivery 15% EPS growth over the next 10 years while doing ALL THE THINGS!)

•  Organizations often don’t have strategies that clearly indicate what they will *not* do.

Strategy form seems to follow organizational function. Companies develop their strategic plans in terms of their existing subsystems and silos – be they functions, divisions, or departments. This may only be acceptable given highly stable, slow moving environments. #ConwayFTW

CONWAY’S STRATEGY

In highly dynamic contexts, it’s important not just to respond to change but to also shape it through the management of propensities that change the dispositionality of the organization relative to the system.

Successful strategies tend to emerge from environmental situations or from within the darkest bowels of an organization as often as they are deliberately planned from the top down Hoshin Style.

WHAT IS STRATEGY?

“The most basic idea of strategy is the application of strength against weakness. Or, strength applied to promising opportunities.”

— Richard Rumelt

SOURCES OF ADVANTAGE

•  Understanding the market: is it stable and slow moving? Dynamic and tubulent? Tending towards monopolistic or highly competitive

•  Having a coherent strategy: one that coordinates policies and actions aligned to purpose. (A good strategy doesn’t just draw on existing strength; it creates strength through the coherence of it’s design.)

•  The creation of new strengths through subtle shifts in viewpoint (Frames). An insightful reframing of a competitive situation given the emergence of new dispositionalities of the systems at play.

•  Use of techniques like Ritual Dissent to challenge existing Doctrine & Frames to allow new information to enter the system.

WHAT IS STRATEGY?

“Strategy is a deployable decision-making framework, enabling action to achieve desired outcomes, constrained by current capabilities, coherently aligned to the existing context.”

— Stephen Bungay

“Decisions without actions are pointless. Actions without decisions are reckless.”

— John Boyd

The problem in most organizations is the learned helplessness of *not* being able to make decisions. The question we at PraxisFlow seem to be constantly asking of senior leaders in large enterprises is this...

What does the flow of decisions within your organization look like? Is your system optimized for making those decisions?

STRATEGY REQUIRES

Managing a Portfolio The Three Horizons Model

1.  A clear and unequivocal understanding of your system’s overall purpose.

2.  A complete, accurate determination of the discrete conditions, terrain, context, market – the propensities & dispositionalities – of the organization relative to the competition.

3.  A guiding policy for dealing with the current challenge. This includes both doctrine, and an overall approach to cope with or overcome the obstacles identified, modulated by efficacy, and taking into account the current dispositionality of the organization relative to the situation at hand.

4.  A set of coherent actions that are designed to carry our the guiding policy.

OODA LOOPING Situationally modulating dispositionalities

OODA LOOP

Boyd discovered that the key to winning was twofold: an effective pass through the OODA steps initially, followed by fast, successive adjustments to the changed environment through more repetitive OODA cycles.

OODA

To the extent that a strategist (military or civilian) can navigate through the OODA cycle faster than the opponent, control of the initiatives (openings of options) accrues to the OODA user, while confusion, disorientation, and ambiguity accrue to the opponent. In it’s ideal state, Boyd suggested it’s like commanding both sides of the conflict.

OODA

FEEDBACK LOOPS

Managing a Portfolio The Three Horizons Model

1.  Feedback is self-generated, an individual or system notices whatever they determine is important for them and they ignore everything else (Framing).

2.  Feedback depends upon the context; the critical information is being generated right now.

3.  Feedback changes; what an individual or system chooses to notice will change depending on the past, present, and the future.

4.  New and surprising information *may* get in, the boundaries are permeable, but there are various social and cognitive biases that make it difficult for new information to enter the system.

5.  Feedback is self-sustaining, it provides essential information about how to maintain one’s existence, it also indicates when adaptation and growth are necessary.

— Margaret Wheatley

AUTOPOIESIS

“Feedback is absolutely necessary for a system to maintain itself and to recreate itself.”

FRAMING

“A frame is, simplistically, a point of view; often, and particularly in technical situations, this point of view is deemed ‘irrelevant’ or ‘biasing’ because it implicitly references a non-objective way of considering a situation or idea.

But a frame – while certainly subjective and often biasing – is of critical use to the designer, as it is something that is shaped over the long-term aggregation of thoughts and experiences.”

— Jon Kolko

OBSERVE You can’t outsource competitive research

OBSERVE

ORIENT Sensemaking in Competitive Environments

ORIENT

ORIENT

Orientation is: the worldview, the schemata, the mental models, the views of reality, the insights, intuitions, hunches, beliefs and perceptions of the various participants shaped by Culture and guided by Doctrine.

WHAT IS CULTURE? “A pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration (…) A product of joint learning.” – EDGAR SCHEIN

Organizations are socio-technical systems in which the modality of external adaptation and the solutioning of internal integration problems are interdependent, co-evolving, and complex.

DOCTRINE

“ Doctrine is defined as the fundamental principles by which social systems or elements (organizations and teams) guide their actions in support of objectives. ”

“Principles and rules are intended to provide a thinking man with a frame of reference. ”

— Carl von Clausewitz

DOCTRINE

Principles are not supposed to be checklists or constraining sets of rules. They are meant to foster the initiative needed for knowledge workers to be adaptive, creative problem solvers. They provide a basis for incorporating new ideas, technologies, and organizational designs.

Doctrine acts as an enabling constraint allowing knowledge workers to make decisions under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Establishing and using jargon, command language and symbols with common meanings enhance communication to take action.

Four Elements of Doctrine

1.  Fundamental principles 2.  Tactics, techniques, and procedures 3.  Frames for sensemaking and decisioneering

4.  Symbols, command language and jargon

DISPOSITIONALITY What it isn’t, and what it might be

Any action to execute a strategy, however minimal, changes the strategic environment. And in a changed environment, the originally conceived strategy may no longer be optimum, which generates the need to adjust the original strategy and re-execute.

PROPENSITIES

“PROPENSITIES are aspects of the system which can be known and managed in various ways which then influence the overall dispositionality of the system as a whole.”

— DAVE SNOWDEN

DISPOSITIONALITY

Potential (as it relates to power relations between adversaries) is born of dispositionality.   Disposition includes the particular shape of the object (round or square), as well as the situation at hand (on level or sloping ground), the relations to other things and their position. Maximum potential is conveyed by the differing nature of the gradient so it’s both static (the things, materials, places at hand, 6 forces, 5 constants), as well as dynamic (the opportunity, directionality which may be influenced by intendings).  

Wardley, Simon, “On Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners and Theft.”

DISPOSITIONALITY

BOURDIEU’S HABITUS

“The relation to ‘what is possible’ is ultimately a relation to power.” — Pierre Bourdieu

In general, then, strategy aims, through a series of repertoires and routines, to determine the principles within the structuring structures of habitus, through which one evaluates the prevailing dispositionalities, power relations, and plans of operations in advance to generate advantages and realize the strategic objectives.

FINAL THOUGHTS

•  Start with the current situation, context, and dispositionality of the systems at play;

•  In highly stable, slow moving environments, Hoshin Kanri/strategic planning is fine (and so is waterfall and Six Sigma);

•  In turbulent, quickly evolving, dynamic contexts, you need to cycle through your OODA loop at an accelerating pace;

•  While getting inside the OODA Loop of your opponent (disrupting their Observe/Orient);

•  To create a greater set of potential options of dispositional advantage relative to your competition.

REFERENCES Bourdieu, P. (1980). The Logic of Practice. Stanford, Stanford University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgemen of Taste. London, Routledge.

Bourdieu, P. (1986). ‘The Forms of Capital’. Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Capital. J. G. Richardson. New York, Greenwood Press: 241-58.

Dettmer, William (2003) “Strategic Navigation: A Systems Approach to Business Strategy,” American Society of Quality

Foucault, Michel. "The Subject and Power." In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, edited by H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, pp. 208-226. 2nd ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Gaventa, J. (2003). Power after Lukes: A review of the literature, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies. Jullian, Francois (1977), The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China, MIT Press

Juarrero, Alicia (2002). Dynamics in Action, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusettes

Snowden, Dave , “Propensities,” Cognitive Edge Blog

Moncrieffe, J. (2006). “The Power of Stigma: Encounters with ‘Street Children’ and ‘Restavecs’ in Haiti.” IDS Bulletin 37(6): 31-46.

Rumelt, Richard, (2012) “Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why it Matters,” Profile Books Ltd

VeneKlasen, L. and V. Miller (2002). A New Weave of Power, People and Politics: The Action Guide for Advocacy and Citizen Participation. Oklahoma City, World Neighbors.

Wardley, Simon, “On Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners and Theft.”

Wardley, Simon, “An introduction to Wardley (Value Chain) Mapping”

COLOPHON

This talk was conceived and designed based on conversations and work done with Jabe Bloom from 2011 – 2016. All typefaces are from Heoffler & Jones.

•  Header Text is in Vitesse Black •  Body Text is in Quarto Light •  Quotes are in Quarto Light Italic •  Labels and Body Text are in Open Sans

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