Five ways to tell if you’re REALLY doing strategy

Socratic humility as an ethical value

And like meritocracy Socratic humility is also a profound ethical value – worthy of all those in an organisation and the organisation itself. As Munger puts it "Acknowledging what you don't know is the dawning of wisdom." That's why in his book The Lean Start-up, Ivor Rees offers the metaphor of the start-up as a vehicle for learning – for moving beyond one's ignorance of the market by being in the market which enables one to experiment to see what works and why. As I will argue in the next section, there are some ways of providing some institutional support for Socratic humility.

Systematic

It's not my purpose here to specify some process which will embody the considerations set out above. Suffice it to say that if these principles are taken seriously, pretty much any strategic planning process could be adapted accordingly. But the steps of strategic planning within an organisation should normally be formalised. Ideas should come from all parts of the organisation and beyond it. Many important ideas and issues will originate from senior managers and board members. Ideas of apparently smaller significance may be relegated to discussion in business units, though the aim should always be to keep the organization's collective mind as aware as possible of small things that could have large significance, and/or help inform the context within which high level objectives will be agreed on. And the common themes between business units may portend some broader, and so strategic, significance.

As appropriate to any given issue that is surfaced, the strategic planning system may encourage some initial period of divergent thinking or 'brainstorming' followed by discussion, refinement, attempting to bring ideas that may have relevance to each other into that discussion before winnowing occurs to leave ideas that find their way into the the unitary intent of the organisation – its strategy. It is likely that much of this development and discussion should occur outside of meetings of large numbers of people, and given this, it seems appropriate not to impose timetables on it. However, as they reach a level of maturity, it may make sense for such discussions to be considered to flow as tributaries into a regular process of formal escalation up the line – perhaps corresponding to the cycle of relevant senior management and/or board meetings.

Socratic humility for an organisation: formalising self-subversion within the system

I've observed twice now how I see my aspirations for good practice being an expression of the ethical life. Fortunately in this regard, the system itself can provide some institutional support for Socratic humility and so debug some of the most damaging and ubiquitous pathologies of discussion and decision making within organisations. In this regard provision for self-directed time and like schemes are worth close attention. The best known program of its type – Google's 20 percent time – allows employees to take one day a week to work on a project of their choice. Its principal rationale is not, as it's so often taken to be, to encourage new ideas or validate the creativity and ingenuity of all those qualifying for the policy, though that is nevertheless understood to be valuable. Its central motivation is to introduce a modest interdiction of control from the top. Just as one of the strengths of markets is that they allow experiments by anyone within them, so, as two very senior Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg stress "It's not about time, it's about freedom":

Twenty percent time is a check and balance on imperial managers, a way to give people permission to work on stuff they aren't supposed to work on. It helps to bring to life the Steve Jobs maxim that "you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy".

20 percent time drives a counter-cultural intelligence – a wisdom of the crowd – throughout the organisation operating in parallel to the official, hierarchical system.

Coming up with an idea is pretty easy. Getting a few of your colleagues to join your project and add their 20 percent time to your 20 percent time is a lot harder. That is where the Darwinian process begins.

Some implications

Here are some practical implications of these principles:

• One common practice in large meetings and 'off-site' or 'away-days' is to break a large group into smaller groups which then consider some issue each then bringing summaries of their deliberations back to the larger group. Unless these groups have been meritocratically established and perhaps specialise in areas of special knowledge, this process will often be anti-meritocratic sifting out 'lowest common denominator' ideas, rather than ones that surprise, and perhaps even provoke unease, with their insight.
• Meetings will usually be preceded 'offline' by groups seeking to surface ideas and explore issues with larger meetings prepared for. Where there are credible differences, those differences might be explored in preparation so that research (including 'action research' like A/B testing) can be done to better understand the choices available, to explore for common ground and more clearly delineate irresolvable disagreement for further discussion in in a larger or more senior group.
• Where a 'traditional' approach will often involve large meetings of all people conceivably involved, the approach being proposed is more likely to work well involving only those who want to be involved, whether through enthusiasm or obligation given their responsibilities. However this will work best where work is transparent to others who wish to know about it, even if they do not participate. Note also that my discussion of strategy and strategic thinking has focused on the cognitive and the deliberative. Another important dimension in an organisation will be social. I am not seeking to ignore this fact in my discussion, only to clearly distinguish it out from the thinking and deliberative process. Once this has occurred, further steps to involve others and seek their buy-in and/or objections should be considered.
• Various online tools can be useful for encouraging and tracking ideas. It is now common for large firms to engineer to maximise and/or accelerate serendipitous connection and engagement. Employees are now often related to each other in the firm by way of a social network. Encouraging employees wishing to blog can also help this process. It can also accelerate self-selection for debate and discussion about ideas which can take place in each employee's time and outside of bandwidth sapping meetings. A frequently overlooked advantage of such activity is the way in which it can improve talent spotting horizontally and vertically within the organisation.
• An intriguing possibility is that online discussion and debate may offer a means of cultivating high quality discussion with analytic tools to detect and reward the most productive behaviour in that discussion.

Concluding thoughts on where to start

Amidst all these scruples about the difficulty of real strategic thinking, it's important to simply make a start. One way would be to identify and begin structuring deliberation on important decisions that will need to be made in the foreseeable future.Should we scale up a new product, build or scale down some physical or professional capability? Should we enter the European market? How should we react to some threat? There are worse ways to start as these questions must be answered in any event, and the dilemmas they invoke will draw in much of what must be considered in a coherent strategy. One could also extend this to particular passions for the organisation by those involved in it at any level, based on their experience. Some people in an organisation may want to argue for some realignment of the organisation or one of its important activities whether that realignment is a subtle reframing opening up important new perspectives or it amounts to a 'pivot' – a new beginning building on existing capabilities.

Note that in each case, there's nothing artificial about the questions being asked – in the way the initial search for an apex statement or objective so often is. Intrinsic interest in the context of the organisation's current situation drives the process. And as the discussion draws in the implications of different arguments and approaches, it may well uncover the need to resolve some larger question – at which time the stage is then set to determine whether or not that larger question needs to be definitively resolved, the potential costs and benefits of doing so and the steps that might be taken to understand how to answer it better. If some theoretical question like "What is it that we really do?" gets asked that will be because it came up 'on the merits' not because it met the faux commonsense of the latest management fad.