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Against strategy

By Nicholas Gruen - posted Thursday, 6 April 2017


  • "My mission is to have the absolute bestest first serve on planet earth"
  • "My mission is to have the absolute bestest second serve on planet earth"
  • "My mission is to have the absolute bestest return on planet earth"
  • "My mission is to have the absolute bestest groundstrokes on planet earth"
  • "My mission is to have the absolute bestest low forehand volley on planet earth"
  • "My mission is to have the absolute bestest low backhand volley on planet earth"
  • "My mission is to have the absolute bestest smash on planet earth"
  • "My mission is to have the absolute bestest topspin lob on planet earth"
  • "My mission is to have the absolute bestest defensive lob planet earth"
  • "My mission is to have the absolute bestest court speed on planet earth"
  • "My mission is to have the absolute bestest match temperament on planet earth"
  • "It would be nice if Black Ops could do something about Roger's comeback".[2. This dot point should not be here and was inserted by Troppo's AI division where we've got some guys working on humour wearing orange comb-over wigs. Total lightweights. Sad.]

This is the beginning of the list anyway. There was plenty more. Andy felt a bit daunted by it all of course - and that's before taking into account the fact that it usually takes him several days to get over his migraines. And the next half day was taken up debating which of these goals was the most strategically important. Anyway, the team agreed that they'd benchmark Andy's performance regarding each of these goals and then come up with a plan to get him to the goal.

The limits of strategy as strategy

What's the point of my story? Let me count the ways:

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  1. All of the qualities that turn up in the list are very important to Andy's game.
  2. Even with one of these goals, it's hard to have a 'strategic' view of the question from on high. One needs practical knowledge from the field of what can be improved most easily. A 'strategic' insight might be that what economists call Andy's 'objective function' - should be to rank all the possible changes he can make or practice he can put in by its prospectivity to improve his results in matchplay taking into account the ease with which the improvement can be wrought. [2. Technically one might define this 'objective function along these lines "Practise to maximise M/E" where M = match impact and E = ease of improvement.] Sadly, there's a fair chance that 'strategic insight' is useless since, if Andy and his coach are moderately intelligent they'll have come to some commonsensical version of it already.
  3. Strategy is about difficult choices involving tradeoffs. Strategy retreats or even exercises conceived of as essentially strategic can often offer the wrong circumstances in which to make these decisions, particularly before they've presented themselves to people in the process the organisation's operations.
  4. Such trade-offs are often hard to understand except quite close up and at the time of making them. They're hard to foreshadow in the kind of detail that would add insight.
  5. Each goal is largely independent. It's a mercy that things are 'modular' like this, because improving things is hard enough. But truly strategic discussion begins where this is not the case - where one aspect of an organisation implicates others with strategy seeking to understand, illuminate and then work constructively with this relationship.
  6. Apparently commonsense setting of priorities - where we agree for instance what the highest priorities in the list are - often gives the appearance of commonsense whilst actually being dysfunctional. Imagine trying to work out which objective in the list is the most important. You'd need a deep strategic understanding even to begin to do this sensibly. And yet this kind of prioritising is pretty standard at strategy retreats. People will buy into the debate. They'll argue, as do Woody Allen's parents in Annie Hall "have it your own way, the Atlantic Ocean is a better Ocean than the Pacific Ocean". But the fact is that if we set priorities by ranking the list above we've set a trap for ourselves. We think we're engaged in careful thought but it's the way we happened to organise the discussion is dominating the conclusions we come to. To go on and on strategising as to which is the most important of Andy's goals on the list above is to demonstrate that you're captive to the apparent commonsense of the process. Not only hasn't this putatively strategic process helped you, it's actively diverted you from thinking critically about issues at hand.

In this case, I can imagine only one question which requires some decision to be made which then structures other decisions and so, arguably requires 'higher' or 'strategic' thinking. That's the question of whether Andy should serve and volley more or less. If he's going to vary that, then that has implications for other goal setting rather than simply being sorted out on the training track and weekly scheduling where Andy and his coach, sports psychologist, masseur, physio, photographer, life coach, biographer, nutritionist and publicist can deliberate in a commonsensical way on how Andy's going in improving some aspect of his game and how that affects his priorities 'going forward' which, is an expression his team started using a lot more since the strategy retreat.[3. it's also the case that there are what one might call lower-order or 'lower-level' strategic relationships between the various strokes and manoeuvres Andy wants to get better at. Practice on one's second serve might help with one's first and so on, but I'm calling these 'lower-level' because they have some strategic content but are best handled at by Andy and his trainer, masseur etc. They needn't involve the board or even senior management.]

Note that, even here, if the one decision we've identified as properly strategic is to be made well, it will depend on the quality with which the insights at the coalface find their way into the strategic decision. So getting the right intel from within and without an organisation into strategic decision making will often be a central challenge. Both Andy's physio and masseur have confidentially told me that the extra work beefing up the second serve and rushing the net will involve further stress on already stressed parts of Andy's body.[4. They also told me, confidentially what that part of the body was, but that was extra confidential, so I'm afraid I can't share it at this stage, or even going forward.] Moreover, his sports psychologist says that Andy's confidence doesn't hold up when he fluffs early volleys, so that would need to be taken into account in both deciding whether or not to bring on Andy's power game and, if the decision were made, in its execution.[5. It's actually more complicated than this - as the last time Andy's sports psychologist told him he wasn't good at something, Andy had a two month form slump and his incisors grew an additional millimetre over that period (the picture above was taken before that period), so there's a tacit agreement that these kinds of things aren't discussed with Andy, though they can be discussed with his hard-driving mum, though there are said to be 'tensions' between her and Andy's sports psychologist which complicates things.]

Critical thinking and strategy

Today organisations outsource a lot of their high level 'strategic' thinking to consultants. The upside is that, being more highly paid, consultants are often more competent than those who'd do the same strategy work in many organisations. The downsides are considerable, however. Let me count (some of) the ways. Firstly, they're less invested in their clients' success than insiders. Secondly, they're typically largely bereft of corporate memory (though this is offset, or even outweighed, by their ability to generalise from experience in other organisations). But the big problems I think are that their schtick is so well attuned to flattering those who hire them - those at the top. So they're very good at simulating insight. As I wrote recently, there are lots of charts, recognised 'frameworks', proven means of engaging those who preside at the apex of decision making in the organisation - quadrants with animals on them for instance. You know the kind with Cash Cows, Dogs, Bulls and Naked Mole Rats - that kind of thing.

And here's the thing. Those ideas are handy, often compelling 'one-size-fits-all' heuristics. If that's the upside, and it is an upside, it's a bit like inspiration porn. High arousal, material which, in asserting the obvious might be useful, because it's easy to forget the obvious. But I worry about the downside. These heuristics don't encourage - indeed my guess is that they suppress - critique. And yet, as I think I've illustrated with my list of Andy's goals, simply going through a process of goal setting will be a trap. It is likely to give birth to a list of Very Serious Decisions made by Very Serious People that are either carefully expressed to be vague, ambiguous and/or all things to all people (AKA mission, vision and other theological statements) or which run the risk of being foolish on their face once thought about by those unlucky enough to deliver on strategic decisions in practice.[6.Thus when Shane Parish writes that the "problem with most management, leadership, and business books is that many of them harp on the same self-evident points, overconfident in the usefulness of their prescriptions for would-be imitators", he's being too generous. Because the idea of sorting out one's priorities and goals in some linear way may seem self-evident. I guess it is, but there are many ways to do it that end up with crude and wrong answers.]

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It's critical thinking that gets us to the insight that prioritising Andy's goals one goal at a time is foolish. It's critical thinking that suggests that, however much fun, entertainment and self-flattery we get from seeing the charts that benchmark each aspect of Andy's play, they don't themselves embody careful, disciplined, and imaginative thought about the problem. Without critical thinking, all that priority setting at Andy's strategy retreat seemed like the acme of commonsense. It's certainly not a surprise that it could have come out of a process in which people were arranged into teams at tables with little bowls of Cool Mints, who then reported back to the larger group which then boiled those reports down to the lowest common denominators - to all those conclusions simple enough to survive the winnowing process and sufficiently commonsensical seeming to become the landing point of a long day's journey into strategic outputs.

So here's my bottom line: The most important strategic question for the organisation - and the most difficult managerial task - is to have good lines of communication, mutual critique and feedback up and down and throughout the organisation - and indeed beyond it to customers and suppliers.

A postscript on strategy as the orchestration of distributed, critical intelligence

Yes, there are classic strategic questions to be deliberated at the 'top'. Organisations need to make large and often difficult choices. Should we refurbish our stores or spend more on marketing? Should we burn our existing source of finance and move to a cheaper supplier. Should head office be in the CBD or closer to our users? But making those choices as well as possible will very often involve being able to access the collective intelligence of the organisation at every level, and that is the hardest thing to bring off well. It was appreciating that that was one secret of Toyota's success. (As I recall the CEO of Ford saying to me in 1983, the 'secret' of Toyota's success was "meticulous attention to the fundamentals".) No doubt people thought about 'strategy' as in Grand Strategy. If and when do we go into the American market and how do we do it? Should we go after luxury cars and if so how?

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About the Author

Dr Nicholas Gruen is CEO of Lateral Economics and Chairman of Peach Refund Mortgage Broker. He is working on a book entitled Reimagining Economic Reform.

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