In part one of this series of posts on managing complexity with strategy I set out the world in which we operate – our lived experience – is a series of inter-woven complex systems.
I concluded by calling out three things:
- Complexity destroys siloed thinking and actions
- Strategy is emergent, not reductionist
- Big data and computational techniques can help strategy overcome complexities
This article explains how we can use strategy and strategic thinking to help us see simplicities in complexity .
1. Using Strategy to Break Down Silos
Drawing on John Lewis Gaddis’ work, strategy “requires a sense of the whole that reveals the significance of respective parts.”
So, getting strategy right means having the ability to see the bigger picture contexts influencing a specific situation and understanding the implications of all the moving parts.
Or, as we discussed in Part 1: good strategists need to draw on that ecological sensibility that allows us to identify and join the dots from (inter)national policy development through to effective communication.
Some strategists do this more than others. For example, it’s common to see creative strategists highlighting the importance of anthropology in understanding the cultural and social forces at work influencing consumer behaviours.
Upstream strategy development, however, from corporate organisations to governments, is generated from schematic process charts – often divorced from the context in which they need to operate.
As good strategists we need to overcome this. Or at least help our clients overcome it.
But the reality is one of the biggest challenges to this is often existing business structures and client needs. Too often these create the same silos dividing up the different skills and strengths strategists bring to the table.
By tackling what IRIS’ CSO has called strategy’s “superiority complex,” however, we can begin to break down silos.
Writing in WARC’s Future of Strategy report, IRIS’ CSO claims we should be confident in pushing strategy as a discipline that “change[s] from a focus on advising on [one single aspect of a client’s business] to one that runs at the future” offering “new kinds of solutions to new kinds of problems” [my emphasis].
We can’t achieve this by being locked within silos. Silos created to focus attention on one part of a complex problem. A fact rendered visible and important in our Covid-19 world.
2. Using Strategic Imagination to Overcome ‘Unknown Unknowns’
The second thing we need to understand is how to make sense of and apply strategic thinking to the inter-connected parts of complex situations that emerge.
As I spoke about in Part 1, a good strategy is more than the sum of its parts. Reality can’t be comprehended completely and then a strategy implemented piece-by-piece.
This isn’t something clients or managers generally want to hear. But it’s the reality.
So how do we overcome this reality?
We do it using our imagination. In fact, devising and implementing strategy – despite the data, charts and ‘planner wank’ – is really a creative endeavour.
Quoting John Lewis Gaddis again, strategy is “the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities.”
Doing this well means being comfortable with creating (or helping create) the vision for a desired end-state and knowing roughly how this can be achieved.
And the key phrase here is: roughly.
It means being able to hold approximations of possible outcomes in mind. To quote Donald Rumsfeld, it means factoring in to your planning the “unknown unknowns” of the situation.
What I’m getting at here is: good strategy development and delivery requires a creative leap.
Which often, for clients and managers, means a leap of faith.
A more time-worn approach is articulated by the sixteenth-century Italian diplomat and political strategist, Niccolò Machiavelli.
Just as data scientists will use computational models and machine learning to trace behavioural patterns so too did Machiavelli argue that strategy meant “seeking patterns – across time, space and status” by looking at situations from multiple perspectives.”
He wrote:
“those who sketch landscapes place themselves down in the plain to consider the nature of mountains … and to consider the nature of low places place themselves high atop mountains”
Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince
These ‘sketches’ of reality, Lewis Gaddis argues, “convey complexity usably”.
An artistic analogy is also used by Clausewitz to directly link good strategy to imagination.
He argues good strategists are able to perceive and recognise reality quickly by deploying an “inward eye” giving them an ability to see what the “mind would ordinarily miss or would only after long study and reflection.”
So, good strategists deal with emergent, and, ultimately unknowable, realities by ‘sketching’ the complexity of the world as an interpretable concept and using imagination to infer the missing pieces of the strategic puzzle.
Using strategy as a discipline to “run at the future’s problems” enables us to out-think the deficient siloed approaches to tackling modern, complex problems. Similarly, recognising and championing imagination in strategic thinking and planning allow us to think and act in accordance with our world’s emergent realities. In turn helping avoid a reductiveness that attempts (and fails) to render the world as the sum of its parts.
3. Using Data and Modelling to Super-Charge 21st Century Strategy
There is another, more modern, way strategists minimise the imaginative leap of faith – using data and computation to plot the complexity of emergent systems to inform strategies.
By tracing behavioural patterns and mapping the different outcomes generated by strategists, (or usually the data scientists Dominic Cummings is so fond of) we can predict the likely results and regenerate optimal strategies.
I’ll talk more about this computational approach, its limitations and opportunities more in my next post. Hold tight.
You can read the first article in this series here – Managing Complexity with Strategy
