Thinker or Tinker - In Pursuit of Practical Strategy

My Tuesday post ('sdrawkcaB gniknihT...', aka 'Thinking Backwards') drew this response from Dave Snowden over at Cognitive Edge. First, mea culpa for a poor choice of words in referring to author and colleague Patti Anklam whom I hold in the highest regard. On to Dave's stuff. He writes (I'm excerpting what I take to be the espresso-essence here):

1) Future Backwards [an approach he developed] is not an alternative to Scenario Planning [generic], [but] is one of a body of techniques designed to handle the issue of managing uncertain complex environments...

2) Threats and opportunities in a complex domain are unlikely to be anticipated...

3) Discussion in groups, no matter how done, constrains possibilities to our imagined present and perceivable futures. That constraint prevents us detecting weak signals or sensing different potentialities.

I'm in near-total agreement on each point:

• narratives and scenarios are complementary,
• one can never adequately anticipate the unprecedented (resilience is a far better stance) and
• groups (as well as individuals) can be remarkably sheep-like.

Here's where I suspect Dave and I are probably seeing/touching different parts of the elephant (not the unspeakable one in the living room, but rather the one in the Indian parable):

Workshop processes, especially if they are reductionist - modular piece parts [my term] implies this - will always tend the accept the dominant culture of the group, or that of the facilitation team. The field of strategy needs research and planning processes which minimise the footprint of the strategist; they also require minimising the influence of the facilitator. Focusing on participation and inclusiveness runs a very high danger of group think and consensus - exactly the opposite of what is needed under conditions of uncertainty. The role of the scenario planning consultant is not to make people comfortable, the opposite in fact. There is no point to going to great lengths to prevent the dominant Mr Smith to use Mapping Strategy's example, if the facilitator then orchestrates the assembly. Now I assume that s/he has a way of avoiding this, although I am not sure it can ever fully be escaped. In many of the scenario planning processes I have observed the facilitator in effect strongly influences the group direction.

There's more here than I can easily address in one post. One important point Dave raises is the role of the strategist/facilitator. The classic 'pure facilitator' model is much like the classic journalistic, psychiatric or pastoral ethic: one must enter an almost Zen-like zone, dispensing with (or at least setting aside) biases and assumptions in order to draw out the best input from others. Nice ideal. I buy it--to a point. Only problem: we're all human. Better to clarify, understand and declare one's biases--and let others do the same. Call it the ethic of the blogosphere: an incredibly wide range of authentic and thoroughly biased voices get heard. Nobody can say that he or she is above it all.

I'll hit a few other points via a rough analogy aimed at teasing apart the differences between narrative and scenario techniques. (I'll stick with generic terms for each method for now; other posts outline how we each believe our versions are special.) Warning: this analogy deliberately exaggerates the differences for clarity.

Developing strategy is akin to crafting a three-dimensional object out of wood. I'm consciously avoiding terms such as 'sculpture', 'model', 'artwork', 'contraption' or 'prototype' (much less 'house' or 'book') since each carries with it a set of constraints and requirements that beg a more limited set of methods. There's a time and a place for 'blank-sheet' brainstorming and sense-making out of virtually nothing (analogized at left in the elegant carved-wood 'thinker' sculpture) and a different set of conditions under which discrete representational languages are better for groups to compare, contrast and converse about a more limited set of possibilities (analogized at right in Tinker Toys).

If one's starting material is a completely raw block of wood (i.e., the cognitive vastness of wide-open  assumption-free strategy 'space') and modularity, replicability and speed are lesser priorities, then the highly refined figure at left is clearly the most useful way to think about developing strategy--and the one I'd want on my mantelpiece. Not all strategy problems are that unbounded.

If on the other hand, some basic assumptions can be reasonably made (and others dispensed with) via some front-end interviews, research, listening, narrative, analogizing and sense-making, then a rapid prototyping approach to future possibilities using modular piece-parts can enable a far greater range of strategic innovation.

This is counter-intuitive.

Other analogies may be helpful. In industry after industry (automobiles, eyeglasses, computers, software, housing, music, etc...)--and professional services are no exception: e.g., legal advice, accounting, software coding and even strategy consulting--it was once thought that every creation needed to be a 'one-off', developed from scratch to unique specifications. The results could often be near-perfection, but at a high cost. Re-configuration and plug-and-play innovation were virtually impossible.

In each case, modularization, interoperability and standardization led to a flowering of creative possibility in combining those parts. Counter-intuitive. The carved figure seems more special somehow--and it is... in one dimension (call it artistic elegance). Only a few elite folk can create such things. They cannot do it quickly. Less overall variation. Less overall innovation. Less ability to involve the people who have to live and breathe and implement the strategy.

Again, I exaggerate to tease out the differences, not to slam Dave's approach which I do not claim to fully understand. Each has its place.

The broad goals of strategy in virtually any case and with any method are to end up with something differentiable (distinct from competitors, innovative in customers' eyes and if possible not easily copied), explanatory (symbolically representing something far more complex while helping people to comprehend it), resilient (i.e., adaptable to new information, insights and changing conditions) and easily shared (i.e., enabling good ideas to be translated into common and widespread 'gut' understanding, buy-in and action)--not necessarily in that order. It strikes me that narrative methods may do better on the former two points; scenarios on the latter.

Narrative work is not all elitist fine art; scenarios are hardly flimsy children's toys (nor is the opposite true)... and all analogies and superlatives are dangerous.  ;-)

What modular, interactive scenarios do (and paleo-scenarios do far less well) is to define discrete if somewhat arbitrary points in the vastness of strategy 'space' in order to facilitate dialogue and easy recombination. Managers and executives can converse and 'play' far more easily and efficiently with discrete events ("More iPods than TVs: 2010") than they can with abstract concepts. This is the essence of resilient strategy or 'strategy-on-the-fly' (it's always evolving, never 'done'). People can express opinions about discrete evets in terms that more clearly surface differences of opinion and facilitate cognitive map-making (e.g., 'likely'/'unlikely', 'necessary'/'irrelevant', etc.)

When we do scenarios, the modular piece-parts form the basis for a common strategy language that helps groups to converse and make sense of an otherwise unmanageable set of possibilities. Narrative (in its loosest sense--i.e., people talking in stories--and not to be confused with Dave's method in particular) is a great front-end to scenarios, helping to expand and add color, definition and boundaries to a pioneerable space that's otherwise just a raw block of wood.

Comments

[Dave Snowden]

You solved my problem (on waking up early in Singapore) on What should be the subject of today's Blog? Response here

[Art Hutchinson]

The following is a dupe of a comment I left on Dave's blog a few minutes ago. Apologies for the cross-post if anyone's already been there.

I'll respond here lest this balloon to something larger than is warranted by our respectively limited inside knowledge of one anothers' specific processes and practices.

Re. point one (reductionism): to the degree that that term is being used non-judgmentally, I happily plead guilty. One must be reductionist to some degree so long as time, money and collective cognitive bandwidth are at issue--and they always are.

An analogy: When I am trying to decide what to have for dinner, I consider the menus posted on my refrigerator, the food in it (and the pantry), the cookbooks I own and maybe an on-line search of Zagat and some cooking sites. Already, that is a vast universe of possibility. Its size is practically constrained by things such as my budget, my cooking skill, my hunger level and the time I have. Only in the rarest of cases would it be worthwhile to open up my dinner search to every possible foodstuff, cookbook, technique and restaurant on the planet.

Another, closer analogy: alphabets and languages are inherently reductionist of the human mind--limiting the range of thoughts that may be communicated--yet we find them essential as a basis for social organization.

Re. facilitator's role: agree. The first time I ran a group that preferred to converse in a language with no hooks to my own was a watershed experience.

Re. point three and your conclusion: see my analogies above. When one's time and resources are unconstrained, I would agree: the more open-ended the better. We have powerful brains. We should use them. No sense putting on blinders, parking brakes, rev-limiters or the like. Thus my thought that your processes are (among other things) better thought of as preceding scenarios rather than following them. (One boils the syrup at the beginning not the end of the candy-making process.)

Cognitive condensation of some kind must happen at some point between ideation and implementation. I think we are sparring over where and how that should take place and how transparent it needs to be and not whether it is essential. We can agree (I hope) that there is a case to be made for cognitive condensation happening with high transparency in a large-group meeting versus outside of it via other processes that involve individuals delegated to and specializing in such tasks (e.g., the consultant) to a greater or lesser degree.

One thing we haven't touched on is risk. Both over-condensation and under-condensation of the problem space each involve it. On a very long continuum between super-reductionist ("my way or the highway") tyranical thinking and totally fantastical and unconstrained ("all ideas are equally worthy, including colonies of pink elephants growing endive on Mars"), different organizations, faced by different types of problems and resource constraints will (and should) choose different flavors of risk and thus different approaches to condensing the range of possibility they need to consider.