Strategy is overrated
You may think it's how you steer your organisation - but is it really..?
“No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces. Only the layman believes that in the course of a campaign he sees the consistent implementation of an original thought that has been considered in advance in every detail and retained to the end”. — Helmuth von Moltke1
The above insight from von Moltke, often abbreviated to the punchier aphorism “No plan survives first contact with the enemy”, is an important reality check that often gets overlooked in the detailed operational machinations of strategy work.
It’s easy enough to point out, after the fact, that an organisation has failed because “it had the wrong strategy”.
But why did it have the “wrong” strategy?
Largely because it’s impossible to predict the future.
And, even if you could predict the future, no-one would believe you.
As my former Society for Organisational Learning colleague Arie de Geus pointed out in his book The Living Company: 2
“Imagine that it is 1920 and you have somehow been granted absolute power to predict the future. You happen to visit the mayor of Rotterdam and, during that time, you describe in vivid detail what is going to happen to his town over the next 25 years. Thus, in an otherwise perfectly normal working day, the mayor hears about the advent of the Weimar Republic, hyperinflation, the 1929 stock exchange crash, the Great Depression that followed, the rise of Nazism in Germany with its (for Rotterdam) damaging economic policy of autarchy, the outbreak of the Second World War, the carpet-bombing of the town’s city centre and, finally, the systematic destruction of the town’s port installations during the calamitous winter of 1945. The mayor listens to this information placidly. He gives every sign of believing you. And then he asks, ‘If you were in my shoes, hearing all this, amid all the other opinions and facts that reach me during the course of my day, what would you reasonably expect me to do about this information?’ What is it reasonable to expect the mayor to do? When I ask this question in discussion groups, we always reach the same answer: there is nothing the mayor can be expected to do. Even if he gives your prediction a higher degree of credibility than most of the other information which reached him, he would have neither the courage nor the powers of persuasion to take the far-reaching decisions required by such a prediction. The future cannot be predicted. But, even if it could, we would not dare to act on the prediction”. 3
So what can we do instead to ensure your organisation remains fully focused on value creation in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world?
That’s the question addressed in this 10 minute Future-Fit Culture Frequently Asked Questions video…
The above video cites this previous article:
Questions for reflection
Does your organisation focus too much on strategy and not enough on sense making?
Who in your organisation could do something about that?
Why not forward this article to them..?
“Kein Operationsplan reicht mit einiger Sicherheit über das erste Zusammentreffen mit der feindlichen Hauptmacht hinaus. Nur der Laie glaubt in dem Verlauf eines Feldzuges die konsequente Durchführung eines im voraus gefaßten in allen Einzelheiten überlegten und bis ans Ende festgehaltenen, ursprünglichen Gedankens zu erblicken.” Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke (1800 –1891). The quote is from his 1871 essay on military strategy.
The Living Company on Goodreads. The cited section is on p49-50.
See also this previous post on Arie and his work.