Communist Drivel

Yup, communist drivel. That is the latest comment I received on a professional message board, where we were discussing aspects of strategy and I posed an alternate view of a situation based on chaos & complexity theory. This post is not going to be a flame, so I'm not going to identify the thread, the board or the person, other than to say that the antagonist is supposedly a well-respected strategy consultant. Rather, I hope this post will clarify what the concept of emergent strategy is.

The comment was a reaction to my opposition of the machine model of business. You may recall from an earlier post that I refer to the machine model as "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."

The antagonist was adamant that leadership plays the primary and overriding role in setting strategy and therefore strategy is what leadership says it is. My view of strategy is completely different, in that, an organization's strategy is what it is, or what it emerges to be, sometimes despite or regardless of what a leader says it is. In another post of mine you may recall:

"In the machine model of business, strategy is set at the top of an organization and communicated to the rest of the firm. Actual strategy, on the other hand, emerges as a result of the myriad actions of the stakeholders of an organization as they perform their day-to-day tasks: who they call, who they sell to, who they buy from, which tasks they choose to perform, who they hire and so on. These daily tactical decisions are made based on internal processes, incentive programs, tactical resource allocations and other bits and pieces that make up organizational culture."

This does not mean that leadership has no input, or is unimportant, nor does it mean that there is no intelligence in the "head" of the organization. Adaptive leadership is critical to the success of an organization and can be an effective strange attractor, guiding the organization through the edge of chaos. The concept of emergent strategy, therefore, is not a result of a communist worldview threatening the all-knowing leader as the superhero of capitalism, but the result of a pragmatism that assumes that:

      a) Because organizations exist in a complex environment, you cannot reliably predict the future, and
      b) Strategy is what it is and not what you say it is.

Put another way, strategy is the result of a complex number of inputs into the organization, one of which is effective leadership. Furthermore, important parts of a strategy to cope with the unpredictability of the business environment include how your organization does business and who your organization actually is, right now, in the present.

Another area of contention seems to be the concept of a competitive landscape. From a complexity standpoint, when we talk about a competitive landscape, we are specifically including the interaction between the organization and its environment as the organization moves through its competitive landscape. It is not a static, predictable worldview, but a complex, dynamic one, where only possible outcomes during the briefest of timespans can be anticipated. This view of the competitive landscape also acknowledges that black swan events do occur, that "you never step in the same river twice," therefore previous experiences do not guarantee future comparable outcomes and that certain events and inputs can have a sensitive dependence on initial conditions with results that amplify way out of control.

The concept of emergent strategy categorically rejects the concept of linear economics and the predictability of Keynesian assumptions. Emergent strategy is a concept that acknowledges the complex unpredictability of market-based, Austrian School economics. Just because a strategy is said to be the result of or emergence of complex inputs to an organization does not make it a communist model anymore than strategy is what you say it is, just because an organizations' leader comes up with a plan.


Bruce Borup