Strategy in the 21st Century

[Bill Moore]

I loved this quote:

“You cannot know any more as a leader. Therefore, your role as a leader has changed to becoming the one figuring out what the best way is to frame problems, what the most important questions are to be asked.”
Patricia Seemann, founder, the 3am Group

The level of knowledge between leaders and followers are often equal, and in some cases, especially technical, the follower will have more knowledge. The leaders role is to lead the group in framing the problem to enable the group to address it. Our as Patricia stated, to ask the right questions.

What must be regarded as the pre-2008 and pre-2014 ‘old think’ now has to be viewed as no longer fit for purpose and in large part redundant. Past beliefs and assumptions must be jettisoned. They need to be replaced by a pragmatic realisation that such old ways of thinking carry not just a high price but an even higher cost. “What you need to think about are the necessary structures and tools that the business must employ to try and minimize conformity and cognitive bias”, said a leading consultant.

In my view, we have creative people in the military, at least in the special operations world, but that creativity, that ability to think in ways that doesn't conform to engrained ways are thought, are difficult to act upon when our bureaucratic systems tend to oppose implementing ideas that do not fit into existing processes and the existing timelines (The situation on the ground could change 5 or more times, by the time a change is implemented. Thus, when it is implemented, it is no longer suited for the current situation).

In all of this there is one major hang up. Many leaders don’t feel comfortable believing in strategic thinking anyway.

In fact, many military leaders brag about not thinking strategically and just acting. They embrace tactics, the illusion of short term success, while losing strategically. They system rewards this behavior.

Short-termism is the inevitable reality both in the public and private sector. “Strategic thinking is something which doesn’t happen very often, even when people say that they take time out to do strategic thinking. In my experience, not a lot of that goes on. And without strategic thinking, and without some imagination, then it’s easy to understand why people don’t think the unthinkable, because they haven’t thought of all of the possibilities that could face them in the future”, as one former security specialist now in the corporate world told us.

Getting back to understanding the world we live in, I found the following comments of interest. This type of understanding may have led to different decisions in Vietnam and elsewhere.

An insight by Professor Ngaire Woods of Oxford University is especially intriguing. “If you want to get a sense of what kinds of social change are likely to happen in a country, or what the extremes might be, look to the film makers of that country. Look to the people who are documenting the experience of communities and people. My prime example would be of an Egyptian film – Heya Fawda? [Is This Chaos?]53 which was made several
years before the Arab Spring, and completely predicted [it] theme-by-theme.

“I'm not saying, ‘read any old film like the weather forecast’. But I’m just saying: look for who the social commentators in a society actually are. The artist, the filmmakers – whatever – are usually telling you about something that you’re not seeing through the eyes of government analysts and advisors and academics and social scientists and such like”.
These rather unexpected pointers are a sobering reality check of what is possible when it comes to spotting, then identifying both ‘unthinkables’ and ‘unpalatables’.

There is an imperative to change fundamentally organisational systems: “The way we are structured, organised, the way we share information, the way we process information, the way we reward people, the way we take risk and analyse risk. The way we organise what is up, what is strategic, what is not, what is tactical. Who has the right to do what, what type of control”, said one exceptional leader currently in the throes of a top-to-bottom refit of an organisation distinguished by its extraordinary complexity.

Part 3: What to do, next post