To The Moon, Alice!
One of my biggest pet peeves is setting strategy one tactic at a time. It drives me crazy to be surrounded by people and organizations that think if they just work hard enough and do more things that a strategic direction and destination will emerge. It seems that most of the world works this way. It is terribly inefficient. How many people and organizations do you know that pedal the bicycle like crazy but never seem to arrive anywhere. They just keep pedaling harder hoping that something will eventually stick. It is exhausting watching them. Why not determine a destination and work hard on those things that help you get there. It seems so simple. Setting a strategic direction provides a way to know which tactics are aligned and contribute to reaching the destination. The destination may change along the way requiring different tactics, and that is OK, but not having a destination at all is a ticket to nowhere.
When John F. Kennedy said, “We choose to go to the moon” in 1961, Americans rallied around the destination. We believed it was possible and the goal of setting foot on the moon rallied a country to advance its global science and technology leadership. It was cool to study math and science and clear that innovation was the economic engine that would drive American prosperity. When Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon eight years later and said, “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind”, we celebrated his achievement as if it was our own and knew at that moment that anything was possible. We have been trying to get that feeling back ever since. Today, we have no clear destination, in space or on earth.
I am still trying to process President Obama’s plan to cancel NASA’s Constellation program for manned space flight back to the moon. OK, I thought, maybe he has a bolder more imaginative space destination in mind or a better way to get back to the moon. It turns out that the announced strategy identifies no new destination at all and has been called a “flexible path” focusing on enabling technologies. The destination will be determined later. Please say it isn’t so. It is impossible to be inspired with out a destination and it is terribly inefficient to develop enabling technologies with out an end in mind.
My second thought upon hearing the new NASA strategy was that maybe President Obama wants to turn our attention and resources toward earth and create an inspiring space mission like focus on fixing health care, education, or climate change. We have no clear destination for any of these huge system challenges. We continue to play around the margins hoping that incremental changes will launch us toward systemic solutions. It isn’t working. We need to transform each of these systems and it will take “moon landing” like clarity and commitment to make it happen. So maybe the president plans to shift attention and resources away from space exploration toward transformation here on earth. No such luck.
It isn’t as if the NASA budget was cut freeing up resources for other priorities. The proposed budget actually increases NASA’s budget by 2% allocating $6B over 5 years to create a commercial taxi to the space station. The budget comes nowhere close to the $3B a year that the recent expert advisory panel suggested was needed to create a robust manned space program. So we appear to be lost in space and on earth. We will continue to invest in space technologies without a clear destination and we will continue to work around the margins of the important system challenges we face here on earth.
It is enough to make you scream. All I can think of is Ralph Kramden in the Honeymooners getting angry and red in the face, proclaiming, “To the moon, Alice”!
Saul-
I could not agree with you more. I touched on the same topic in a post a couple weeks ago. You might like it: http://www.projectidealism.com/2010/01/short-term-planning-does-not-mean-short.html
Your post here is great, and sums up a lot of my frustration with the current administration.
Saul,
I want to agree with you. And maybe what I say here isn’t at odds with your view at all. And then, of course (wink, wink), maybe I just want to advance my own agenda.
I’ve been doing a lot of noodling about strategy. As I have been trying to articulate what I see as a fundamental shift we need to make in strategic practice, I have been trying to steer a course between two cautions: Matt Milan’s contention that strategy (as we have known it) is dead (http://vimeo.com/8287664) AND Roger Martin’s long asserted view that strategy as a practice is about determining “where to play and how to win”(http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/01/why_most_ceos_are_bad_at_strat.html).
Matt attacks the waning paradigm of strategy that emerged from statistical and computational approaches developed during WWII. I call this dominant paradigm: “strategy as ballistics”. It is about targets, precision, force, yield, efficiency and efficacy. It is almost (if not entirely) about the question of HOW we reach an objective.
Roger’s approach, which I think is a harbinger of an emerging paradigm, is by contrast, about the WHY of strategy. Even though his twin questions focus on the WHERE to play and HOW to win that he considers to be the proper norms of strategic practice, it is essential to his view that these are norms, intended to guide action, rather than questions of fact. In order to answer such questions, at least implicitly, we must have a sense of the WHY we would answer either question one way or another. Without recourse to higher order values, in other words, Roger’s WHERE & HOW questions are useless.
So, if Matt’s right, that what I call strategy as ballistics is dead (which I think ought to be true but still has a strong element of wishful thinking), AND Roger is right that we cannot do strategy or act strategically without a sense of purpose, a conviction of WHY we act, then the question on my mind is WHAT DOES THIS PRACTICE LOOK LIKE? and as a secondary matter, WHAT SHOULD WE CALL IT?
Before I offer a hit & run suggestion about the answer to those questions, let me offer two empirical examples which I think pose real problems for your guiding ambition, North Star theory of strategy. One is the public global company, Google, and the other is the global public model of political society we call democracy.
First, Google. Now, I have started to wonder of late whether Google is even a business at all in the accepted sense of the word. Of course, it is a legal entity (probably a corporation) and it operates (at least partly) guided by a set of (fairly?) well understood financial goals. But what is the nature of GOOG? To test your theory here, what would you say that Google’s direction is? I find this almost impossible to answer, not only because the answer may be subject to change, but because I’m not sure that we have a very good understanding what the “object” named Google IS.
Second, in the case of democracy, (and let’s just take the narrow case of the United States), it is at the very heart of the design that the system not only allows for many directions too be pursued, but even allows that they may be contradictory. The thin area of normative agreement that keeps people from killing each other in the streets (mostly) is very hard to consider a direction, in your sense.
OK, so here’s my hypothesis, anything that is exposed to dynamics of complexity and the causality of scale systems no more has a direction than do quarks, OR they are just as helpful as the flavor or color theory of quarks: up, down, charm, strange, top, bottom. In other words, we need a more powerful theory of strategic practice that the one the idea of direction can provide.
Back to GOOG and democracy. Here are two assertions that I think are true about each: one that the constant state of the system is volatility rather than equilibrium; and, two, that there are enough strategic actors in such systems that I think we have to let go of the idea that strategy and leadership are strongly connected, or at least that this connection is not what we are used to thinking of.
I think we need a concept of strategy that allows for emergence as a core dynamic. This is not to say that we do not need goals. Here, I think I agree with you completely. But, of course, strategy focused on goals gets you right back to the dilemma of “setting strategy on tactic at a time”.
So, what is the name of the post-ballistic conception of strategy? I’ve been testing candidates for a while, and just last week, I think I finally lit on the one I am prepared to bet on. I am calling it strategy as FLOW. I’ll have more to say about it soon, but for now, thanks, for you’ve given me a lot more to think about.
[...] examples which I think pose real problems for a conception of strategy as direction, which here, Saul Kaplan offers up as a kind of North Star theory of strategy. One is the public global company, Google, and the other [...]