Want, should, willsix days beforeWhile spelunking my network of assumptions, I often find it helpful to…Why will this be hard for us?

The nature of the challenge2021While working on a strategy this week, I realized that one of…What the heck is strategy work?2022We turn the mastermind toward frameworks. The key objective of this role…Being Strategic2022Being strategic means somehow finding a way to become aware of these…I was working on a strategy and helping review another this week, and found this framing helpful. Especially in mature organizations, the challenge tends to reside not in determining how to do something, but rather in finding what makes this “how” difficult for this organization.

Micro and macro jank2021If our team’s OODA loop runs just a tiny bit slower than…Organizational pathology2022The “Royalfield” case study, one of many in Rumelt’s book, particularly stood…Continuously Integrated Strategy2022Somehow, these amazing ideas don’t seem to extend to strategy. In the…The common symptom here is dust-covered stacks of past plans that look eerily familiar to what is being proposed. There’s a certain Groundhog Day quality to these. “Oh, we’re pitching this thing again? Okay, I guess it’s been a few years since we last tried it.” The “it” might range from product ideas to processes and practices. Having cross-functional communication issues? Let’s start an XFN working group. This time around, it’s sure to bear fruit, right?

Nudging Embodied Strategy2022The whole concept of the cone of embodied strategy is a bit…Gravity and water2023I have been lucky enough to be part of the process of…Embodied Strategy2022I was having a great conversation with a colleague about organizational learning…Putting our systems thinking hat on, we can see that well-established orgs are held together by forces that animate them. The dynamic equilibrium of these forces tends to also preserve the status quo: the plans that failed will likely fail again in similar ways, if tried once over. Think of it as a cousin of procrastination: just like with us humans, the actual challenge might not be the work itself, but rather the inner organizational tensions and conflicts that make doing that work next to impossible.

The third option2024The deeper insight here is that we are surrounded by polarities. Behind…A useful shift here might be to focus on why, given these animating forces, we are to expect a different outcome. What’s changed about the situation? How did forces change and in what way since our last attempt? The generative question that tends to help is “why will this be hard for this particular team or organization?”

Jankless2021As we Orient, examining our prediction error and updating our model of…Steady winds, doldrums, and hurricanes2023Similarly, organizations find themselves in turbulent waters. This typically happens on the…A crutch2022Thinking some more about organizational pathologies, I realized that there is another…Rock tumbler teamsthe day afterGrowing a well-used platform developer surface is exceptionally tricky work. I’ve heard…The structure of a principlelinks here, 2021Principles are a big thing in today’s organizations. Most want to have…Beyond pros and conslinks here, 2023If not, we move on to studying headwinds. What makes it hard…A word of caution: it’s easy to land on despair when looking into what animates an organization. Discerning and reflecting on team pathologies asks for heaps of patience and compassion. Perhaps this is why we often fall back just rolling the dice again.