#290: The Strategy Thinker You Haven’t Yet Read (but should)

Good morning, dear friends

Today’s letter is more essay-like than letter-like, so pour the coffee or the tea (or the wine, if it is time) and settle in.

A few years ago, one of my nieces spent some time with us. One morning we headed to the bookstore, as we had since she was 5 years old. Our ritual has been the same for over a decade: we browse and build a stack, I buy them (what else are Uncles for?) and head to a coffee shop where we page through them in companionable silence (these days, the silence is frequently interrupted by young university-student waiters trying to figure out how to extend the conversation beyond taking our order; beneath the table I reach for my sawed-off shotgun).

On this morning, she’d added Octavia Butler to her pile. She asked, “Do you like her?” I prevaricated, “I don’t really like science fiction”. She frowned slightly, “Isaac Asimov?” I shrugged and nodded. “Philip K. Dick”. The same response. “Douglas Adams.” The same response, accompanied by a slight trickle of sweat down my back; one’s body knows when you’re in the presence of an apex predator. “So, basically, you’ll read sci-fi as long as it’s by old white guys”. I foolishly tried to recover, “I like Ken Liu”. “Oh, another man. Really, Uncle Karl”. I turned to the beautifully made-up shop assistant for help; he silently handed me Butler’s The Parable of the Sower.

Published in 1993, it is hands-down one of the best books I’ve read for navigating modern life. Butler in turn led me to the work of adrienne maree brown (despite what Microsoft’s autocorrect insists, she prefers the lowercase), specifically Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and that, my dear friends, is where we are going today.

Now, brown is not the kind of strategy thinker you would encounter in a b-school setting. She breaks the mould, in the best possible ways. I hope that today’s letter encourages you to engage with her work.

Her strategy work is informed, not by quantitative studies of multiple companies, or deep-diving into biography, or company history or business school case study, but rather by weaving together a deep reading of science-fiction and lived lessons from intentional action and reflection.

She writes, “I read sci fi and visionary fiction as political, sacred, and philosophical text… I spent the first part of my life learning what history’s victors wanted to tell me to believe about the past, including the simple assumption that it was the past. I see massive patterns of violence and inequality in history, which perpetuate in the daily news. Science fiction, particularly visionary fiction, is where I go when I need the medicine of possibility applied to the trauma of human behavior”.

At this point, some of you are already reaching for the familiar comforts of Harvard Business Review. Don’t. Let me calm your sceptical nerves.

I first encountered the idea that science fiction could be applied to strategy at a place no less august than UCLA’s Anderson School of Management.

The Advanced Management Programme lecturer quoted cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson – “The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed” – to introduce a classic innovation case, that of CEMEX (Google it. MIT and HBS have also written several case studies on the company).

If you’re still sceptical, chew on this extract from Butler’s Parable of the Talents (sequel to the Parable of the Sower):
“Purpose    
Unifies us:    
It focuses our dreams,    
Guides our plans,    
Strengthens our efforts.    
Purpose    
Defines us,    
Shapes us,    
And offers us    
Greatness”.

Or this, “When we have no difficult, long-term purpose to strive toward, we fight each other. We destroy ourselves. We have these chaotic, apocalyptic periods of murderous craziness”.

If you’ve ever been in a business that has lost connection with its purpose, this resonates. If you’ve ever lost sight of your own purpose, it resonates. Butler is basically Jim Collins but even more eloquent: it is strategy by stealth.

(An aside: Butler’s President Jarret presaged the arrival of Pete Hegseth by some 27 years. Now that is strategic foresight!)

I love how brown starts her book, “First and foremost, thank you for opening this book. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed living, learning, and gathering it.”

In the context of the performative declarations that begin so much non-fiction, it is refreshing to encounter this acknowledgement: all our knowledge is lived, learned and gathered, we are always building, creating, melding – almost nothing is ours alone. And so, from the outset, you know that you’re embarking on a different kind of journey into strategy. Therein is its power. Her approach provokes our usual understandings. Her work will almost certainly make it onto only a few business school curricula. It is outside the frame and that is the reason to read it.

She continues, “You are basically holding a book of me saying, “Wow, everything’s so amazing!” Or, ‘That’s not wow… Why not go with the wow option?’” Amazing. Not the work that has 10X’d this or accelerated that, no LinkedIn hype machine here, just an intuitive embracing of ‘here are ideas that have resonated and worked’.

It is powerful. So often I see businesses stutter as founders start to scale. Suddenly they can afford to lift their heads, they can employ consultants and professionals with long corporate CVs. The templates and the standardised processes arrive and along with them self-doubt.

Yet, for most of them, their growth started without a business plan, without the strategy template. Their start, and often their first seven to ten years, are driven by that brown-esque energy – wow, that’s amazing, let’s do that and wow, that’s working, let’s do more of that. Those that make it successfully to the next phase are able to modify their new employees’ well-intentioned offers and integrate with their lived experience and their instincts (which aren’t so much instinct, as the deeply encoded knowledge, often not made visible, derived from many hard lessons and some successes).

Another reason I loved brown is her insistence that “what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system”. She reinforces her position with Camus’ words, “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

In my coaching practice, a leader might say they want their business to be more adaptable. I might ask them if they can touch their toes (hypocrite: I can’t).

Seriously though, we say we want our customers to feel cared for. Do you care for yourself? What evidence can you provide? Do your colleagues feel cared for by you? Your customers may well, temporarily, feel cared for but if the people delivering it don’t, you can guarantee it will eventually wobble (Uber, anyone?).

Over the years, a couple of business writers have tried – mostly unsuccessfully – to weave love into their thinking about work and strategy. It is a pity that they don’t succeed, because those tough early years of business-building are indeed driven by great passion.

brown achieves the integration with elegance:
“One thing I have observed: When we are engaged in acts of love, we humans are at our best and most resilient. The love in romance that makes us want to be better people, the love of children that makes us change our whole lives to meet their needs, the love of family that makes us drop everything to take care of them, the love of community that makes us work tirelessly with broken hearts.

Perhaps humans’ core function is love. Love leads us to observe in a much deeper way than any other emotion. I think of how delightful it is to see something new in my lovers’ faces, something they may only know from inside as a feeling”.

With a framing like that, there is truly no argument.

It is incredibly hard to get right in the mega corporations we have built. You might have a job very far from the customer. You may deliver a service that is very abstract or not very cuddly. Still, we have those around us, the people on our team, the other teams we engage with and, of course, every person who crosses our paths. There are ways to bring the love alive.

If you’re unconvinced of that approach’s power, brown quotes Sierra Pickett, who tells us, “Starlings’ murmuration consists of a flock moving in synch with one another, engaging in clear, consistent communication and exhibiting collective leadership and deep, deep trust. Every individual bird focuses attention on their seven closest neighbors and thus manage a larger flock cohesiveness and synchronicity (at times upwards of over a million birds).”

There are times where strategy feels impossible, where the complexity is too much for us to hold. Start with the seven. It works. Pretty much always.

Love is a tricky idea in corporate life. brown draws inspiration from Hafiz, the great Sufi poet: “How do I listen to others? As if everyone were my Teacher, speaking to me (Her) cherished last words” and “The less I engage in gossip, the less I harbor suspicion, the more space I find within myself for miraculous experiences”.

The second quote hit home; when gossip flavours our bonding in business, family or friendship life, we lose our capacity to generate our future, to find the path that will serve us best. It happens so easily; without caution it becomes corrosive.

Importantly, love does not mean ‘no conflict’. Organisations need it. We need it. It is how we get to uncover what we’ve missed. And although that is true, many of us were raised in homes or contexts where conflict was either destructive or buried. We carry that memory with us into our workplaces. This is true for all of us: conflict and love mean different things to each of us. Add race and gender and positional power and generational trauma, corporate life can quickly get tricky.

It is useful, brown tells us, to first make conflict and disagreement visible and acceptable, reminding us “When we feel scared, we destroy each other instead of working to get to the root of our fear”.

Underneath all corporate strategy is at least some personal fear – what happens if this doesn’t work, what will happen to my reputation, will I lose my job and have to take my children out of their school and move from the house I worked so hard to get? It is useful to remember that fear is there, and it shapes what we do.

She suggests that we talk about what conflict means to each of us. Emotions are always there. Effective teams make them apparent. Use simple but discombobulating and powerful questions like:

• How did conflict happen in our families?
• In past (romantic, familial, friend) relationships, what are the best ways we have handled conflict? And what are the worst?
• What emotions are we most comfortable with? Least comfortable with?

I can’t do justice to all her work here. Read her book. I’ll share more in the months and years to come.  For now I leave you with these nine principles that are the reinforcing rods of brown’s approach to strategy and action:
“Small is good, small is all. (The large is a reflection of the small.)
Change is constant. (Be like water).
There is always enough time for the right work.
There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have. Find it.
Never a failure, always a lesson.
Trust the People. (If you trust the people, they become trustworthy).
Move at the speed of trust. Focus on critical connections more than critical mass—build the resilience by building the relationships.
Less prep, more presence.
What you pay attention to grows”

All the very best

Karl
PS: If strategic eclecticism appeals to you, you might want to work with me. You can learn more about my coaching practice here. If someone forwarded this letter to you and you enjoyed it, you can subscribe here and find the archive, since January 2020, here.