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May 16, 2005

Making space for Strategy

The distinguishing feature of strategy is its key topic: "Where you're going to be, and why you're going to be there."

This topic's key idea is that strategy always seeks an advantageous position allowing some following action to accomplish an objective.

A strategy-in-progress might seek a group or succession of positions, allowing an accumulation of impacts that finally, pressing past the tipping point, realizes a singular higher-level goal.

But one essential difficulty of strategy is that it usually must be cultivated in an environment whose own dynamics tend to diverge from the positions of the strategy and are busy enough in some other way that (worst case) leaves little room for strategy. Just as farming or gardening creates a productive order by leveraging conditions driven by autonomous natural "forces", organizations must be induced to support progress towards the positions of the strategy.

The idea of cultivation gives a way to describe organizational requirements for enabling strategy. What are the levels of preparation that characterise the development of an organization's state of hospitality to strategy?

For example, an initial "groundwork" level is involved in the form of tending the quality of assets (like the fertility of the soil)... this creates one supporting "base" layer of readiness.

Strategic readiness can be built up progressively through various supporting layers, each layer logically contributing to the overall capacity to capture, leverage and resolve strategic positions. For example, the top to bottom order of layers might be identified and managed as follows:

- engagement (fit with environment)
- policy
- administration
- process
- assets

Strategic readiness is enhanced by increasing the coherence of each layer's capacity and by synchronizing the different capacities across the layers.

"Capacity", for any given layer, means the distinguishing volume and type of impacts generated on that layer's intrinsic terms. This might be most easily promoted through a management framework for each respective layer, ensuring the quality and availability of the output of the layer.

Coherence of the layers means that they "stick together" by virtue of the practical strength of their interrelationships (and interdependencies) -- both internally amongst their components, and externally across layers.

Synchronization means that the production "rhythms" of each layer are beneficially coincident across the layers.

The design, maintenance and interlinking of the layers creates the space for strategy...

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at May 16, 2005 10:54 PM

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