The goal: an adaptable, knowledgeable, rapid-response business model that can out-innovate the competition and out-adapt its ever-changing environment.
Here's a couple things that have to go: the world-view that has leaders quite literally as the head and the rest of the organization as the body. In this paradigm, it is thought that the only intelligence in an organization is at the head where the brain is and the rest of the organization serves to implement the instructions from the brain. Good communication, it stands to reason, is all we would need to improve the execution of strategy, just like the nervous system in a body. Good management, we hear, just requires "buy-in" so it can be "rolled-out."
We should have left this strategy framework in the last century. A better idea might be to stop trying to organize living systems as if they were children's building blocks. These ideas are remnants of the machine model where everything has identifiable causes and effects.
However, this model relies on the fallacy of predictable change. It requires the centralized all-seeing, all-knowing head to be able to react to infinite change at any pace. It is assumed that feedback loops can be bolted on to the "leaders as the head"model and everything will be fine, whereas the only advantage you get from this sort of strategic thinking is the ability to feel pain, without the associated ability to react more quickly.
There is intelligence throughout your organization. Orchestrate it. Nurture it. Connect it. Weave it together. Encourage it as it tends to take a direction you want it to take and discourage it when it tends to take a direction you don't want it to take. Use narratives to seed strategy throughout your living system and let it grow.
Above all, don't bolt this on. A machine model with a bolt-on is still a machine model.
Bruce Borup
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