The Association Renewal Blog

Is Your Bubble About to Burst?

Here are some more good ideas from Peter Senge’s talk from a few weeks ago (other posts are here and here).

One of his themes was “inner contradictions.” In any system, there will be inner contradictions, where we do things that ultimately don’t make sense. Where one of our interests (that we defend strongly) turns out to contradict another of our interests, but we don’t make the connection. Senge’s examples centered on the environment. No matter what side of the global warming argument you’re on, you’d probably agree that much of what we do on a daily basis has at least a “not so great” impact on the environment, but we need a functioning ecosystem to live. That’s a contradiction. We’re biting the hand that feeds us.

So capacity to confront and deal with inner contradictions is key for any system’s growth and success. Senge used the metaphor of the “bubble.” Any historical civilization that thrived and then suddenly declined or disappeared was in a bubble. The dot-com boom of the late 1990s was clearly a bubble. It gets bigger and bigger until it can’t sustain itself any more, and it crashes.

But if you can address inner contradictions early enough and deal with them, you let some air out of the bubble, and the membrane does not pop. Ignore those contradictions, and you’re headed for a crash.

The key technique for deflating that bubble is, quite simply, conversation. Bubbles are supported by an “internally consistent” reality. That is, people in the bubble talk ONLY to other people in the bubble, and they each reinforce their view of reality. If you want to avoid a crash, you need to have conversations with people OUTSIDE the bubble.

Jeff and I stress that in our strategy work with clients. When we help them to structure their strategic conversations we push hard for them to include voices who are not normally part of the conversations. That means staff as well as people outside the organization. This is a real struggle for associations. Opening up those conversations to “outsiders” feels threatening, but it’s the only way to keep the bubble from bursting.

Strategy and Leadership

I posted on my blog about a great definition of leadership that Peter Senge shared at a conference last week (a capacity in the human community to shape its future). One of my reactions when I heard that definition was “Hmmm. That sounds like strategy.” So I decided to look up the definition of strategy at dictionary.com. Here’s what I found:

the science or art of combining and employing the means of war in planning and directing large military movements and operations.

a plan, method, or series of maneuvers or stratagems for obtaining a specific goal or result:

Yuck. No wonder we’re so focused on the plan in strategic planning. Strategy is, by dictionary definition at least, a plan (and a command-and-control one at that). I suppose this makes sense: the word itself comes from a Greek word pertaining to “general.”

Interestingly, if you keep scrolling on dictionary.com you get to the medical dictionary definition of the word:

an adaptation or complex of adaptations (as of behavior, metabolism, or structure) that serves or appears to serve an important function in achieving evolutionary success

I like that one better. So here are some conclusions to think about.

First, strategy is a living thing. For organizations, it makes more sense to think about the medical definition of strategy than the military one.

Second, there is very little distinction between “leadership” and “strategy.” Both are capacities. Both are distributed throughout an organization. If you’re developing one (i.e., a strategic planning process, or a leadership development program) in isolation of the other, you’re wasting energy.

Third Move First: "Coevolutionary Gaming"

Expanding on the quote from Cares and Miskel, their brief article in the “forethought” section of HBR talks about using “coevolutionary gaming” to help organizations design more effective strategy. In traditional strategy making, they argue, you conduct an analysis of the market and what the “likely reactions” from competitors will be. With that information, you then develop your plan.

In coevolutionary gaming, you start with that, but then you have a team of people playing the role of the competitor and you have them actually react to your strategy. Then you react to their reactions, and within a few “turns” of this game, you start to see some real weaknesses in your original strategy. Or you start to see that the strategy has potential, but only after you make your “third” move, rather than just the first one by itself.

That’s why the title of the article is “take your third move first.” They argue that your strategic plan will now be better because you are “three or four steps ahead of the competition.”

I agree that we need more complex analyses of our strategic choices. The old-fashioned “I’ve scanned the environment and have chosen the correct path for the next three years” approach is gone. Their coevolutionary gaming is a process for more adequately exploring the complexity.

But they still end up with a surprisingly linear plan as the output. All this just to create a better strategic plan? They argue their process allows you to create better strategy BEFORE real resources are on the line during the actual competition. But I would think that the game would not provide you with all possible reactions either, so you’ll always have to react real time as well. I guess the game helps leaders develop that capacity as well, but they don’t get into that.