Strategy as action
Strategy as action
This week at work we talked a lot about strategy. In particular we compared ‘Strategy as Planning’ with ‘Strategy as Action.’
‘Strategy as Planning,’ as suggested in this comparison developed by Zaid Hassan at the Complexity University, means that a strategy defines specific objectives, outcomes and measurable results that could then be used to decide if the objectives were achieved and the strategy was successful. Such an approach to strategy, we all agreed, would not do for the challenges we are aiming to tackle. As I mentioned before, our goal is to improve the wellbeing of young people in urban settings in low and middle-income countries. But what does wellbeing mean? And how can it be achieved? In our understanding, wellbeing is the result of many interacting factors and actors and might look very differently for young people in different parts of the world. So how should we define strategic objectives and results to be achieved in, say, five years time? Should we define how many young people’s “lives we improve” by 2030?
The alternative to Strategy as Planning is Strategy as Action. In Strategy as Action what is relevant is not what you plan to do, but what you actually do. Hassan sees planning as work avoidance, as strategy contained in a powerpoint deck. Strategy as Action, in contrast, is to get your metaphorical hands dirty, start somewhere, and iterate – learn while doing. There is a strong intentionality behind this approach. The set intention is used to decide if the changes that happen through the work are positive or not and, consequently, if we can carry on or need to pivot, and whether the changes should be further amplified or dampened.
My colleagues and I, we have a strong preference for Strategy as Action. This is how strategy has been lived in the organisation for the last five or six years. What has been missing, tough, is the infrastructure to learn and adapt. That is what we need to put in place now.
While we embrace many aspects of Strategy as Action as described by Hassan, there are others that we are not, and might not ever be. (Btw, I’m not necessarily agreeing with all aspects of Hassan’s definition of Strategy as Action, but it’s a good starting point for an exploration). For example, we are not yet hiring for what he calls ‘phenomenological skills’, for people with lived experience for example. We are still looking at ‘epistemological and technical skills,’ as if the problems we are tackling have predominantly technical solutions (some might …). What we are also not having and which seems hard to achieve for a philanthropic organisation in the Global North is real skin in the game, i.e. to suffer “meaningful consequences of pulling out or failing.” We are very privileged by living in a safe environment, receiving a secure, generous salary, while supporting young people who are often facing multiple, complex challenges in their lives.
There is also an argument to be made that action might not always be the best thing in a complex context. Sometimes, holding still might be more effective. In this stance I am strongly influenced by the thinking of both Gregory and Nora Bateson. The main argument is that by acting, even with good intentions, we are often recreating the very structures that are causing the problem we are trying to resolve. I have written about this before, so I’m not going to elaborate this any more here now, but offer it as food for thought.
The Paper Museum
From Gregory Bateson (Bateson 1972, 470):
It is the attempt to separate intellect from emotion that is monstrous, and I suggest that it is equally monstrous – and dangerous – to attempt to separate the external mind from the internal. Or to separate mind from body. Blake noted that “A tear is an intellectual thing,” and Pascal asserted that “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” We need not be put off by the fact that the reasonings of the heart (or of the hypothalamus) are accompanied by sensations of joy or grief. These computations are concerned with matters, which are vital to mammals, namely matters of relationship, by which I mean love, hate, respect, dependency, spectatorship, performance, dominance and so on. These are central to the life of any animal, and I see no objection to calling these computations “thought,” though certainly the units of relational computation are different from the units which we use to compute about isolable things.
Why have I added this to my paper museum? Every now and again I manage to get some reading of the great GB done. And every time I feel a sense of aw how he has experienced the world and has been able to describe that in his writing. This particular excerpt fascinated me because it shows that things like emotions and thought are not something that can simply be abstracted out of a body but something that are generated by the very complexity of that body in its context.
Reference: Bateson, Gregory. 1972. “Form, Substance, and Difference.” In Steps to an Ecology of Mind, by Gregory Bateson. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Image
I asked Bing image creator (powered by Dall E) to create an image that “depicts the nonlinearity of the world and that we cannot plan or know in advance what outcomes we can achieve.”