#225: Heidegger, Strategy & Design
Dear Friends
As you know this letter grows out of my coaching practice. I write it to guarantee that I am always learning and improving my ability to support my clients and their organisations.
Those coaching conversations necessarily shape what I research and write. In any week, I work with ten people, a mixture of executives in some of the continent’s largest corporations, the founders and leaders of medium-sized businesses, individuals who are in various stages of scaling their businesses and a handful of young leaders who are on the cusp of accelerating their professional lives. Their diversity gives me confidence that you will also find value in the themes of our conversations.
The increased complexity of the world, the lingering effects of economic depression and the ongoing need for adaptation means many clients are focused on moving their businesses and people into their next phase. In a word, strategy,
As a result, the last two weeks have immersed us in Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy Bad Strategy. This week will be the last email on his book for a while. If you find this series of letters useful, I suggest you read the book.
In fact, if you’re interested in joining an informal reading group to discuss it, email me. I might consider bringing a group of readers together to explore Rumelt’s ideas in greater detail.
/strategy
Last week’s letter identified the features of bad strategy. The second half of Rumelt’s book focuses on designing powerful strategies. He identifies eight levers of power. It is impossible to do justice to them in a few hundred words, but so we will focus on just one – the power of design.
Rumelt observes, “It is often said that a strategy is a choice or a decision. The words ‘choice’ and ‘decision’ evoke an image of someone considering a list of alternatives and then selecting one of them”. He goes on to say the best strategies are much more “designs than decisions – are more constructed than chosen” (echoing Jim Collins’ HBR classic, Turning Goals into Results: The Power of Catalytic Mechanisms, in which he advises ‘create don’t copy’).
This is cautionary, intimidating and liberating.
Cautionary, because it is all too easy to default ‘this is the way it must be done’, carelessly crushing exciting possibilities. The power is in creation, easily crushed by copy-paste, and in a world where we all breathe corporate self-help jargon, it is easy to be seduced by a slogan, a quick fix, an absolute answer.
It is consistently the most humbling experience of my coaching practice, to listen deeply to founders, mindful of general lessons and principles (protect cash, focus energy, proximate moves are powerful etc) and respectful, even protective, of the unique path they’re forging, searching for alchemy rather than solution.
Intimidating because of course it means it is down to us. And liberating for precisely the same reason. We can create. Indeed, good strategy demands it.
Embedded in the concept of design are important subtleties.
Designs are coordinated and integrated. Designs arrange, adjust, connect and make trade-offs between several elements to create interlocking wholes. All too often strategy is a list of disparate actions pursued in a siloed fashion by different departments.
Good strategy diagnoses challenges, identifies opportunities, and designs a response where activities across divisions are co-ordinated to focus competitive impact.
//self
After last week’s ‘bad strategy’ letter, many of you emailed to say, ‘That describes our strategy’. Some of you described goals but no actions. Others described long lists of uncoordinated, unintegrated actions. Many reflected that the strategy wasn’t clear on the problems being addressed. It’s easy to identify, but a little harder to understand how we end up there.
Rumelt reflects that strategy work is necessarily complex. We can never absolutely know the answer. We have to make sense of an array of facts and then make a judgment call about what to do.
He says, “Facing a complex situation like this makes most people uncomfortable. The more seriously you take it, the more you will see it as a real and difficult challenge that requires a coherent response. And that realization will, in turn, make you even more uncomfortable”.
We dislike ambiguity and discomfort. We don’t like not knowing. We want answers, action, certainty. And so, we grab onto the first idea, or we skip over the analysis because it’s befuddling and difficult. It is far easier to agree on the next action. Then we can all breathe a sigh of relief, ‘That’s it. Strategy done for another year’.
But remember, “Being strategic is being less myopic—less shortsighted—than others” and “Good strategy grows out of an independent and careful assessment of the situation, harnessing individual insight to carefully crafted purpose. Bad strategy follows the crowd, substituting popular slogans for insights”.
To be a good strategist, to craft good strategy we need the capacity to deal with complexity and ambiguity, the stamina to keep investigating, exploring and analysing, the courage to say we’re not sure, the persistence to ask one more question and humility, being acutely aware of the bias underlying our own thinking.
(You may also enjoy Jim Collins’ ‘The Triumph of Understanding over Bravado’).
/// soul
In the strange way this letter often works, as I was grappling with how to end this week’s letter, one of you sent me an invaluable resource.
In this case, Ridwaan Rasool led me to Heidegger’s Discourse on Thinking, and in particular a 1955 memorial address (Ridwaan spotted it in CEO of The Atlantic, Nicholas Thompson’s excellent The Best Things to Read). Heidegger is a useful guide to developing our strategy brains.
Heidegger differentiates between calculative and meditative thinking.
“Calculative thinking computes. It computes ever new, ever more promising and at the same time more economical possibilities. Calculative thinking races from one prospect to the next. Calculative thinking never stops, never collects itself. Calculative thinking is not meditative thinking, not thinking which contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that is”.
Heidegger reflects that calculative thinking unlocks great possibilities and efficiencies and yet, alone, it is insufficient. He argues we need meditative thinking, a mode of thinking that connects us to mystery, for it is by being connected to mystery that we design, and create new possibilities.
Meditative thinking requires being connected to the world around us, being rooted and yet (even in 1955!) we are ‘homeless’, “Hourly and daily they are chained to radio and television. Week after week the movies carry them off into uncommon, but often merely common, realms of the imagination, and give the illusion of a world that is no world. Picture magazines are everywhere available. All that with which modern techniques of communication stimulate, assail, and drive man—all that is already much closer to man today than his fields around his farmstead, closer than the sky over the earth, closer than the change from night to day, closer than the conventions and customs of his village, than the tradition of his native world”.
It requires conscious work to remain rooted, to not be seduced by and act according to the illusion of a world that isn’t. It requires us to both actively release our attraction to false words and remain open to mystery.
“Meditative thinking demands of us not to cling one-sidedly to a single idea, nor to run down a one-track course of ideas. Meditative thinking demands of us that we engage ourselves with what at first sight does not go together at all”.
Heidegger reminds us “releasement toward things and openness to the mystery never happen of themselves. They do not befall us accidentally. Both flourish only through persistent, courageous thinking”.
I wish you a week of courageous thinking. Our world needs it.
All the best
Karl
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